Voting in NoVA
Today I voted for Barack Obama in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I cast an absentee ballot because I wont be able to make it to my polling place on Election Day. Due to expectations of an unprecedented turnout, Arlington County is encouraging people to vote early by absentee ballot. Today when I arrived, there was over an hour long line snaking back and forth down a hallway, to lines winding around a big entrance way, and back up the hallway where the line began, and eventually to the room with the voting booths.
All of the election workers were saying that every day there has been over an hour wait. Interest in this election is at an all time high in Northern VA, or “communist country” as some GOPers have called it.
When I got to the voting room, I was offered either a paper or electronic ballot. I voted electronically, and savored my first time voting for a Presidential candidate that I genuinely admire and believe in. After voting for Obama, for Mark Warner, Jim Moran and local officers, I wrote in a friends name for school board, and voted for some bonding initiatives. When I finished, there was a big red button saying “click here to submit ballot.” I stopped, smiled, and pushed on it with the fingertips of both hands.
I thought about working up close to Obama in the State Senate, and pondered the small civic miracle of voting and how overwhelming the odds were that a skinny guy with a funny name would grow up in Hawaii with a single mother, go to our best schools, then walk away from high paying corporate law jobs (like the one I sought out) to work as a community organizer, and go from the state house floor in Springfield in 2004 to overcome racism, bigoted scare tactics labeling him a closet-Muslim, to defeat the Hillary Clinton Industrial Complex by speaking truth to the people, then go on to weather storms and distractions of the right wing attack machine, all while staying true to himself and true to his message. Think of how long the odds were against Barack Obama being elected to the Presidency of the United States. Only in America.
Still smiling, I high fived the last election worker, took a sticker and walked home in the rain.
