Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Desperate to Vote

At our precinct, voting was standing-room only. Or, more accurately, sitting-room only. Turnout was so much higher than expected that people were sitting on chairs (as I did) and on the floor to vote, because there weren't enough booths. People sure were desperate to vote yesterday:

READING, Pa. - Anna Urban has been voting since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and wasn't about to miss an election.

When the 95-year-old Reading resident didn't have a ride to the polls Tuesday, she didn't hesitate. She dialed 911.

Dispatchers forwarded the call to the Berks County Election Services office, where it was considered a compliment.

"To call 911 and ask for help to vote really says a lot," said Deborah M. Olivieri, election services director. "It meant a lot to everyone in this office; it made us feel what we do is worthwhile."

County Commissioner Judith L. Schwank immediately picked up Urban, and Urban walked to the voting booth at Millmont Elementary School on her arm.

"All my life I voted," said Urban, a Democrat, who cast her first ballot in the 1930s. "You need to vote to be a good citizen."
-Philadelphia Inquirer

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well it was a similaur story out here (King County, Washington state) on election day, with the added "bonus" of having to deal with the effects of the rising flood waters that you out-of-stater's my or may not have heard about already in the news!

We had some Polling Places declared offically unusable on Election morning (kinda hard to vote if your Polling Place is litteraly underwater) so there was some last minute shuffeling. As a Trouble Shooter (a person so well versed on Election equipment, etc that I got to drive around and help out at several Polling Places all day) I can say it kept the day...interesting!

On a "Happy Note", I wanted to say a big THANKYOU to everyone across the nation that took the time to vote November 7th! Now, if only we could get that kind og turnout for a School Levy Election......

Also, just to let you all know that not ALL States are subject to voting fraud, I just saw the inter-departmental email regarding the results of a "random accuracy" test that was preformed on some (randomly choosen) Accu-Vote machines (the ones that read-the-bubbles on a Paper Ballot) out here in King County.

The result?

100% accuracy!

Woohoo!

-ZW

Anonymous said...

ZW, thank YOU for volunteering your time to help our elections run as smoothly as possible. Why is it we kept hearing reports about voting machine errors around the country before the election, but not the day of? Were those tests? I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't been testing so strenuously this time?

And why doesn't the rest of the country use the same machines you used?

Anonymous said...

Zirconia, what do you think of all the problems in Florida? Their machines seem to be the only ones that caused trouble this time, with something like 15,000 votes for Congressman not being counted in one district.