04 November 2008

Oh, the voting.

We got to our polling place 10-15 minutes before it opened, and there was a line of 20-25 people in front of us (depending on how you count; there were several children in the line, so while they were in front of us they weren't going to be voting, unless ACORN got to them). By the time the polls opened I'd estimate 75 or so people were in line (based on the the segment behind us looking about twice as long as the segment in front of us).

For whatever reason, about 90 percent of the people in front of us lived in the other precinct (our ward is split into two precincts, both of which vote in the same place). This made our trip to the booth much quicker than expected, and we were out of there by 7:10 at the latest. We were the fifth and eighth voters for our precinct. Go us!

No problems with electioneering out front of the location, with only the write-in candidate for state rep out there when we arrived (turns out the wife and I both wrote him in). The whole thing went very smooth, with the exception of the bake sale not being set up in time for us to make a purchase. The women running it can be excused, given how the city put the kibosh on bake sales in 2006. But they better be ready to go in 2010.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My mom made a special trip up to Boston to get Ted from daycare so that I could vote without having to take him with me after work and thus avoid being in a long line with a 4-month-old. Got to the polling place at about 5:40 and I *was* the line. I was home by 6 and that's because I stopped to buy a tasty chocolate toffee meringue cookie at the bake sale.

Though apparently the problem of long lines at the polls is avoided in West Roxbury by having 12 different polling locations for 20 precincts. West Roxbury just doesn't seem big enough to merit that many sites.

Mark said...

I imagine the large number of sites is some sort of city machine politics thing, where city workers go from ward to ward voting as dead people.

It also sounds like you get better baked goods. Our bake sale tends to be mostly muffins and breads, with store-bought cookies and cupcakes scattered in. Then again, we always vote in the morning, so maybe the better cookies show up later.

For want of anything better to post, here's a breakdown of if I've been to the most populous 100 cities in the US, and if so for how...