The Only People with the Right to Vote in Ohio Are People Who Can Afford to Take the Entire Day Off

[queerbychoice]

"Longest lines in the nation, last night, right here. Two voting machines, over a thousand people.

The emails sent to us early yesterday were saying two hours in line. The news is now saying, vaguely, 'more than four hours in line.' I am here to tell you: most people I knew waited seven or more.

Me, I stood ten hours in line."

That is a quote from this entry by gamesiplay, a student at Kenyon College in OHIO.

TEN HOURS IN LINE TO VOTE IN OHIO.

THAT'S WORSE THAN IN AFGHANISTAN.

This is a MAJOR NEWS STORY AND THEY ARE NOT COVERING IT ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH.

I want this posted all over LiveJournal in ten minutes flat.

Comments

[luinied.livejournal.com]

The lines in Ohio were mentioned a decent amount on local stations around here, although more in an "aww, look at democracy at work!" way, as opposed to pointing out that this shows some obvious flaws in the voting process.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I agree-- it was criminal. I'm lucky that I could make the gesture, as a college student who can afford to miss classes for one day (which I actually didn't anyway, because I went at 2:30, after my last class), but I'm afraid a lot of people couldn't afford to miss work, or leave their children unattended, or whatever. Nobody I know who got in that line left; but I bet a lot of people came by, heard the rumors of the ever-increasing wait, and didn't even join the line. I know my English professor didn't. He came early in the morning, heard about what was then only a two-hour wait, and left to go cancel his next seminar. When he got back, the wait was up to six hours, and he couldn't afford to stay that long. He had classes to prepare for today.

There was a couple ahead of me in line, too, with two young children. Couldn't find/afford a babysitter. They stuck it out until probably about nine p.m., when the kids started falling apart. Finally, they managed to get the wife a spot at the front of the line so that she could vote and take the kids home, but I wonder how many parents didn't vote because they had nothing to do with their children for ten hours.

There were people standing out in the rain until past dark, many elderly, many without umbrellas, when officials finally started realizing it was a problem and opened up more rooms inside the community center to contain the line. Volunteers from Kenyon came by with umbrellas and water and fruit (because people were actually having trouble with dehydration and low blood sugar earlier in the day, I think), but until late at night, no outside officials were doing anything for us.

We put in calls to the local board of elections and so on. They wouldn't send us another machine. After hours and hours, they sent us paper ballots, as I said, but we (rightly, as it turned out) didn't trust them.

I'd like more people to know what happened, too. That was part of the reason I made the entry public: most of the news stories that mention us have us as a vague footnote. We did not wait "about five hours" or whatever the media is saying. My roommate waited seven and a half. I waited ten. Many of my friends waited ten and a half. I was there from 2:30 p.m., as early as I could get there without missing class, until well past midnight. I know people who were still there at three or four in the morning.

[interjections.livejournal.com]

Done.

[deadinmotion.livejournal.com]

I think there should actually be a National holiday for Federal voting. There was a three day holiday in South Africa the first time they had voting. It took my friend Karin 12 hours to vote in that election.

Here's the thing:
Why declare a national holiday for a nation that doesn't really see large numbers of people at polling stations?

And we go in circles.

Voting in a nation that cares about politics is not going to be expedient, especially after years of apathy. I don't know how this is shocking.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Oh, also -- Kenyon College, actually, though it doesn't really matter.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't happen to know jillian_kenyon, would you? It's a small school..

I'm concerned that this happened disproportionately in college towns. Do you feel that might be true? My polling place in the city had only two machines and there were no lines to speak of, possibly because there were just fewer people per polling district (cities like Philadelphia have polling places every few blocks). In a college town it might be easy to fudge the numbers of expected voters by ignoring the fact that a huge number of new voters crop up every year. If it's mainly in college towns that's building in a lot of conservative bias - I'm sure that in really rural areas the lines were not so long at all, again because there were probably fewer people per polling place.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I don't, but then again I'm just a freshman, and an introverted one at that. I went by her journal, though, and I wish I knew her. She spent time in a room with Stephen Bogardus. AHHH. And we're from the same state.

I've only talked to a few friends from college towns so far, and it seems to depend on the area. For example, Oberlin (a very similar small, liberal school, also in Ohio) had some problems. I hear some people waited three to five hours. On the other hand, I've talked to people at Vassar in New York, St. Mary's in Maryland, Smith in Massachusetts, and a couple of such schools on the West Coast, and they had no problems. So I do wonder about the geography of that; I wonder if it was disproportionately a problem in swing states. It is very easy to fudge the numbers in this situation. We had an all-time high number of registered voters here -- they knew the turnout was likely to be high -- and yet no provisions were made.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard of any problems from PA college voters, either, speaking as a Swarthmore grad. This might just be an Ohio thing. I'd do some asking around to see if non-college, non-urban areas of Ohio had similar problems. That would probably help to know.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

and yes jillian is cool. i've known her since we were 3!