Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Election Day in St. Louis


Election Day
6:30 am
Assigned Polling Location: Benton Park, St. Louis City






The lines were long, went out of the building, through the parking lot and out on the side walk around the front of the building. But they did move along fast. The whole thing only took about 45 minutes. There were plenty of poll workers so things went smoothly. Inside, where people voted, there were over a dozen voting stations for paper ballots and 5 or 6 machines.




6:45 am, a little more sunlight.

I was thinking...Why do we vote on Tuesday? And lo, Yahoo provides the answer. Why we vote on Tuesday... and other election fun facts.



And if you're still unsure of who or what to vote for, check out People, Policy, Planet's latest entry: VOTE for Science!

And look who was on hand to make sure everything was kosher...They were checking on people and making sure everyone brought what they needed before standing in line for naught.

And he granted me a quick video interview talking about the lines.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1mSKc8y5Cg

(I'm having some embed problems, so please click on the above link. Thanks. Also, I've submitted the video to "Video Your Vote"promoted by Tavis Smiley and created by PBS and YouTube.

UPDATE
11:40 am
The lines were gone, only campaign workers were outside. My guy from above told me the line disappeared at 7:30 am and was gone every since. So mid-day is the time to go vote.
5:40 pm
I drove by and there were no lines. No picture but the scene was just like the afternoon shot, except dark. Hopefully the votes from this polling place should have no delays for tonight's count.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I just voted! I walked right in and straight to the table to check in...I only waited a little bit for the automated voting machine. It was easy as pie! :D

Simon Owens said...

The Video Your Vote project is pretty cool, I heard that some of the videos are going to be played on PBS shows.

I've been working on an election project that utilizes Twitter: Freshly Squeezed Tweets. It aggregates tweets like Twitter Vote Report, but it creates a more abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. The site will pull a continuous stream of tweets mentioning Obama and McCain, representing the most-used terms as a series of bubbles. The bigger the "bubble" the more frequently the term is being used. You can hover over each word to see a graphical breakdown of each word's use.