Long lines were the name of the game at polling places yesterday, but many seemed to take it in stride.
“Isn’t this great?” said David Roeder, chief election officer at Fort Hunt Elementary School. “The turnout was very heavy, very early. Everybody is very cooperative though.”
Over at Belle View Elementary School, Chief Election Officer Stephen Snell said, “I’ve never in my life seen so many people. I’ve never seen anything like this. There were hundreds of people here at 6 a.m.”
Snell estimated that the morning’s wait was about an hour, but said that they had plenty of workers.
“This is the first time we’ve had 100 percent participation,” he said.
Volunteers did everything from checking voters in to making sure that they got in the right line.
“We’re all trading jobs,” said Nancy Briggs, who was outside at Belle View directing voters.
The lines at Belle View were so long that it was hard to determine which of the two check-in lines voters should be in — A-K or L-Z. An enterprising volunteer wrote up two signs and distributed them to the last person in line with instructions to pass onto the next person. To help avoid voters waiting a long time only to find out that they were at the wrong polling place, Sidoux Mitchell and Pat Veatch, election chiefs at Waynewood, had their volunteers go to the end of the line with the electronic poll book. If anyone had doubts if they were in the right place, they could feed their social security number into this device and get a printout of where they are supposed to be. Christine Rexroat used the device to get the information about her correct polling place.
AND THERE WAS PLENTY of help from other sources. Brownies from the Waynewood troop gave out free doughnuts to voters, while Girl Scouts from Troop 1838 passed out free homemade treats at Belle View.
In some places, like Fort Hunt, the A-K line moved quickly, while at Walt Whitman Middle School, it was the L-Z line that was quicker.
“We’ve had lines clear back to the end of the hallway,” said Mary Jo Tandy, assistant election chief at Walt Whitman. “The only complaint people have is that we don’t have more machines, but they’re very expensive and we don’t usually need that many.”
Mitchell said that most of their voters came early; as of noon, 900 of their 1300 voters had already voted.
“People lined up at 5:45 a.m. We had a line out of the building. It took about an hour to vote and so far, none of our machines have malfunctioned,” Mitchell said.
She predicted that it would probably be pretty close to empty near the end of the day. Driving by the parking lots of both Waynewood and Belle View around 6 p.m., that prediction seemed to hold true. That was also the case at Fort Hunt Elementary School, where Al Duncker, election officer, said, “It was hardly a trickle and a voter got to the voting booth in nothing flat. In future elections, I urge those voters with a choice to avoid the morning [6 a.m. to noon] time period. The difference [unless you are on line at 6 a.m.] is at least 30 minutes. We try to look out for those who are frail and move them to the front of the voting line. But those we miss are usually too proud or self-effacing to ask for special treatment. Moreover, we usually don't see them in the first line waiting to be cleared [ID and name in the polling book] which alone can take 20 minutes.”