Early Returns

I hopped on my bicycle this morning between 6:30 and 7:00 and rode around to three polling places in our neighborhood. There was no sign of lines anywhere, though all three sites did have voters in them.

This is St. Viator's School (bet you didn't know there was a St. Viator, did you?).



Another view of St. Viator, below. The cone you see on the right is one of two that mark a certain distance from the polling place, the area within which it is illegal to campaign. There were a couple of guys out there campaigning.



The fellow on the right ignored the cones, and came over to me while I was taking pictures to convince me to vote for a state constitutional convention. We had an unsatisfying conversation about that. The reason I should vote for it, he said, is because it is the only way to clean up that mess in Springfield. There's a hidden agenda in this constitutional convention campaign, but I haven't discovered what it is, yet. We'll find out soon enough if it passes.

And below is where Suellen and I will vote later today. It's a one-man shop, where an older gentleman creates mannequins. He opens it up to the neighborhood as a polling place every election day. Right inside the front door there's a mannequin butler, dressed in a tuxedo, that always spooks me when I catch sight of it out of the corner of my eye.



Update: We voted at 1 p.m. There were no lines, but the election officials told us that of the 350 registered voters in our precinct, 250 had voted so far. Not bad for 1 p.m.

Later Update: I talked to my next door neighbor earlier, and he said they had voted a few days ago, and waited 3 hours in line to do so. He was chagrined to hear he could have just waited. What was your voting experience?