Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote!

What are you reading this for? Go vote!!

I feel good. I'm feeling confident that Pennsylvania is going for Kerry.

Andy was at the polling place at 6.55 this morning. He called at 7:02 complaining that the doors were not opened and there was a long line and should he call the news media? I said, "But my clock says it's 7:02. Give 'em a minute."

"Oh. The city hall's clock says it's fifteen after. It must be wrong. There's a lot of angry people in line who feel silly now." I assume Andy was one of them.

I passed by three seperate people holding signs that said "Honk for Kerry." And I honked. Only saw one "Honk for Bush" on the way home...and no one was honking.

Got to work. Miss Montero ran me down in her scooter and demanded that I vote before I could enter the building. "I already voted," I said, shins against the shinny chrome of her front bumper.

"Go right on in, honey." She's really very sweet but she will run you down in that scooter. Devil woman.

There a problem with the voting machines in Germantown, though. And Germantown is a poor, largely black, urban neighborhood. Mark, who lives in Germantown, said that people were calling the radio and WHYY, the local NPR station, was there covering the apparent voter disenfranchisement. Mark said they had waited an hour for the machine to work but once the news van pulled up, it was amazing how fast those machines got fixed.

The problem was apparently that the fancy new computerized voting machines were "beeping". Beeping. The story goes, the power went off during the night and the machines needed to be reset. Took over an hour to reset the machines, huh?

All our pulses were racing with election day excitement and the dispensing of social justice. Mostly, I'm impressed with the way the people who were told the machine were not working, took matter in hand and called the news media. That's amazing. The people, who thought they might be denied their vote, protested instead of sucking it up and being unhappy, and the machines were fixed. That's a great story.

I called up my clients, asking if they had voted. Most everyone had. People that needed a ride, I gave a ride. No problem.

Not that I asked (or could legally), but every single person I spoke to today said they voted for Kerry. Granted, I work with a very specific population and the Democratic Party serves their best interests, but every single one voted for Kerry. That's something.