America Votes

With my sausage McMuffin and coffee in hand, I made my early morning trudge to the my local polling place and cast my final vote in the longest and arguably most important presidential election in which I have participated. It is an unseasonably mild early November morning here in New York, but the thing that stands out is the unprecedented turnout.

WNYC reported long lines at polling places in the East Village, Inwood and other neighborhoods across the five boroughs before I left my apartment around 7:30. The British Broadcasting Corporation just reported an estimated 135 million people will vote today and I read an e-mail from someone on a list serve of which I am a member that he expected to wait more than two hours to vote in Alexandria, Virginia. I didn't expect a long line in Bushwick, but a bustling but largely efficient scene greeted me at my polling place. I waited a couple of minutes before I entered the booth to vote. I finished and nearly a dozen people (mostly white 20-somethings who had probably just moved to Bushwick) were waiting on line. This queue is the first I have seen in my neighborhood. It moved rather quickly, but this scene is almost certainly indicative of a myriad of others across the country.