7:25 am: Angry white guy phones in about how his polling station has two tables, one for A-K and one for L-Z. The A-K laptop they are using to clear people to vote isn't working. The L-Z workers are inviting them up. L-Z voters are clogging the voting machines.
7:45 am: Rush Limbaugh's morning radio update, and he's not very chipper. Peeved about an "AP Obama" puff piece summarizing all the polls predicting by Democrat inroads.
8:15 am: Another angry white guy called the Hawk & Tom Show to complain about the A-K table but blames it on the two twenty-somethings running the table, not their computer. The "really old forty-somethings" at the other table are doing fine. He must be an L-Z voter.
8:32 am: In the checkout line at the grocery with the morning caffeine. The clerk says, "I think you're like me, I don't want leaders I can have a beer with. I want somebody way smarter than me to actually run the place!" He likes my vintage President Ford "Whip Inflation Now" button. I wear it election days because it's nonpartisan and somebody's gotta win, after all.
9.24 am: Slow patch at work. Checked over at BlognetNews.com's South Carolina page. Happy discovery- Waldo's the only SC political blog listed in the most influential conservative and liberal top ten this week. We'll probably be disowned by both sides for want of ideological rigor.
9:36 am: Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer and actress beloved of crossword puzzlers for decades, has died, age 86.
1:52 pm: Wondering how McCain and Obama supporters are feeling hour to hour? NYT has a real-time word cloud. Kinda cool.
3:00 pm: 538.com calls it for Obama, 349-189, +6.1% in the popular vote. Drudge reports a gallimaufrey of illegal polling activity (all D) and fear of riots. TPM talks up a gallimaufrey of illegal polling activity, too (but all R).
3:09 pm: Ben Smith at Politico reports, "The Obama aide who told me last night that he was 'cautiously nauseous, Tommy Vietor, has upgraded his Facebook status to 'optimistically nauseous.'
3:28 pm: Jonathan Martin cites a Republican PR op's cues for drinking games tonight:
Drink (a full drink) every time you hear the following terms on TV tonight:
-“electrifying”
-Awarding of the elusive “mandate” that somehow eluded Bush
-“political capital”
-GOP & “soul searching”
-GOP & must “move to middle”
-GOP & repudiation of Rove, “base politics”
-Getting beyond “red & blue” divisions
-Palin’s pick “backfired”
-Palin’s hard-core conservatism “turned off” swing voters
-Preemptive mocking of Palin’s supposed designs on 2012
-Tardy acknowledgement that McCain is a “patriot”
-Tardy acknowledgement that McCain “deserves credit” for not exploiting Rev. Wright
-Assessment that McCain “strayed” from maverick roots
-NO voter fraud or “disenfranchisement” when a Dem wins
-NO warning to the victor about “not overreaching”
3:30 pm: Off to vote!
4:30 pm: Home and dry. No long line at my polling place. Easy to understand touch voting system. Good time had by all.
A Wonkacious View of Your Vote-Processing Factory
posted by on NOVEMBER 4 at 1:05 PM
We’re down at King County Election Headquarters in Renton, where about 500 people are working feverishly to count your absentee votes. According to Bobbie Egan, the spokeswoman giving us a tour, King County receives the second most absentee ballots of any county in the nation (beat only by L.A. County).
This is your vote-processing factory. It’s a new building (opened Dec. 1, 2007)tricked out with 59 security cameras, a high-security inner area, and an outer perimeter loop where anyone can come and watch.
According to Egan, voter turnout is expected to be 85 percent today, up from 83 percent in 2004. In this building today, about 80,000 to 100,000 absentee ballots will be counted to be reported at 8:15 pm. That should count for about 39 percent of the total. The count is not expected to be 97 percent complete until next Tuesday.
Here’s how it works. The ballots come up from a big mailroom warehouse to be sliced (in the top machine) and sorted by Pitney Bowes postal machines (seen behind the crate).
The Pitney Bowes machine sorts the ballots by legislative district into batches of about 200. Each ballot stays with its batch its entire counting cycle. A cheerful man named Muhammadu Kora is one of the people who carries your ballot onward.
The Pitney Bowes machine also takes a digital picture of the signature on the outside of the ballot. Those pictures are sent to another team out in the main room, where workers trained in signature verification vet them against your voting record.
If there is a signature “miscompare,” you get one of these yellow letters in the mail.
If not, your ballot goes to the openers. They take the security envelope out, remove the ballot, and stack the security envelopes on a giant twist tie that goes through the center hole in each security envelope. This hole-in-the-middle design was created after the 2004 election, when in the recount workers discovered security envelopes that still had ballots in them, unremoved and uncounted. Here’s Mary Isabell doing her twist-tie thing.
The openers determine whether there’s been undervoting or overvoting. If there’s overvoting, the ballots have to be duplicated by hand by election workers(both the original and the copy are coded and saved for reference). Finally the ballots go to the tabulation room, where they’re fed into a little tabletop reading machine one batch at a time. Kathstacie Green is running a machine. If the machine detects trouble, it stops and Green checks the marks herself.
“The Cage,” where the ballots are stored, was designed in consultation with high-security casino experts. To get in you have to be on a list, swipe your card, andhave your fingerprint tested. (You can use either pointer finger; both are on record in case one is burned off or cut off.)
Three things:
1. The Whites. When we were there, one lonely family was walking the loop. Homeschoolers Joelle White of Des Moines and her husband brought their daughters, 11 and 8, to check it out. The older daughter said the loop is inconveniently shaped. The younger daughter wishes she could touch things, because, as her mother added, she is a kinesthetic learner.
2. The blacks. We realize we ended up with more pictures of black election workers than whites. This is not by accident. It seemed like were lots of black election workers.
3. Christmas music. The Renton Tully’s where we are filing this report is playing it.
6:04 pm: TPM has a vignette- "Late RNC robocall in Florida: Castro wants Obama to win."
6:15 pm: Liveblogging with an international team at Iain Dale's Diary.
11:03 pm: President-elect Obama.
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