Ben Smith at Politico.com posts a story from an Evansville, Ind., medical student:
I squeaked in just before the 7pm deadline to find two very frustrated poll workers and a line of a couple dozen people, due to problems with the computerized voting system not accepting people’s driver’s licenses. It was taking about 7-10 minutes per person just to get the computer to accept them as valid and to print out their ballot, causing very long delays.
For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn’t in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president. Anyone who doesn’t think that African-American turnout will absolutely SHATTER every existing record is in for a very rude surprise.
There were about 20 people in front of me but remarkably not a single person left the room without voting over the 2 hours it took to get through the line.
I’m so involved in the political “inside baseball” of polls and “narrative” and electoral college votes that I sometimes lose sight of the fact that electing Sen. Obama really means something. I personally recall seeing signs saying “colored” over one water fountain while next to it was a nicer water cooler for whites only. I personally recall the sit ins and demonstrations of the mid 1960s, including one at Bishop’s restaurant in Oklahoma City. I have a personal recollection of a race riot in Jackson, MS, my mother and sisters and I drove through on our way to my mother’s home town one summer. I recall being a reporter here in Oklahoma City when a fight at an amusement park became a race riot near NE 36th and Springlake Drive. The fact that television was black and white at the time makes the film of fire hoses and German Shepherds at the Selma, Alabama, bridge seem quaint and antique now, but it didn’t seem so at the time.
I don’t think we’ll have fully realized Dr. King’s dream this November if Sen. Obama is elected, but I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t choruses of “We Shall Overcome” in some homes in two weeks’ time.
I may sing it myself.
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