Our house is less than a quarter of a mile, but probably about 300 yards, from our polling place, the local elementary school. Cars were parked on the street in front of us this morning; I imagine they were people who had driven to the polls and thought that was as close as they were going to be able to park.
I left the house a couple of minutes before 8 and walked down to the school. Phew, I thought as I got there, there isn’t a line out the front door. I walked in and was relieved to see that there wasn’t a line all the way down the corridor into the lobby — just the PTA bake sale in front of the office, as usual for an election.
The corridor past the library going down to the gym was divided lengthwise by a line of masking tape on the floor. A sign said, “students to the right, voters to the left.” It’s just that the door to the library was on the right — honest. Even though this is Massachusetts.
The line from the checkin table did extend out of the gym into the corridor, but there were only four or five people in front of me. The checkin table has two people working there, divided by your street name, streets starting with A to I in one book, J to Z in another. Fran from down the street was working at the J-Z side, and there was no line in front of her. She kept calling out, “If your street with J to Z, come right up here.” That’s how the system has always worked, even in primaries where there’s never a line. If you vote all the time you should expect it. If you’ve ever voted here before you might expect it. There must have been a lot of people who have never voted before, or at least never voted at this polling place before, because there were a lot of voters who didn’t seem to know the system.
The tables where you mark your ballots — Newton uses paper ballots where you fill in a balloon with a black felt-tip marker to be read by an electronic optical gizmo — were mostly occupied. I didn’t have to wait for a table, but I did have to look around and move quickly to get one without waiting.
There was a slightly longer line at the table to check out than at the checkin. It was probably just that the people checking voters in were more efficient at finding the right page on the voter lists than those at the checkout table.
After you check out you feed your ballot into a ballot box that has an electronic counter showing how many ballots it contains. I was voter 316 at my polling place today at just a little after 8 AM.
My summary is, voting is going smoothly but just about at capacity in ward 6, precinct 6.