Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Election Day



Late last year, I put out a wish for more freelance work and money on this very blog, and magically a new client appeared who has been keeping me very, very busy...



...so this Tuesday's election I resigned from my precinct "inspector" post, and felt guilty about abandoning the sweet poll workers, even though the 18-hour gig is grueling and requires a couple of days to recover.



Instead, I went to the precinct and filled out a ballot, voting similarly to my fellow San Franciscans but not my fellow Californians, which is nothing new (click here for San Francisco's Department of Election website).



At around 9:30 on Tuesday evening I headed over to City Hall to see if there were any election results being reported...



... while passing a small army of sheriff's deputies and parking control officers in charge of delivering the physical evidence of the voters.



To my surprise, there was hardly anyone in City Hall, with only two political junkies sitting in front of a large-screen TV in the North Light Court.



Who knows what was actually happening to the ballots in the basement below? In Willie Brown, Jr.'s mayoral days, they tended to end up in the bay if there was an inconvenient result, but during this election cycle, everything seemed to go as the powers that be planned, meaning such drastic measures were simply not necessary.

3 comments:

momo said...

So you were not swarmed as we were here in MN where the DFL voter turnout was over 200,000 instead of the 70,000 predicted! Our caucuses were mobbed all over the state, lines, traffic jams, no room, voting on Post-it notes. We're all a little giddy.

Civic Center said...

Congrats, momo. There was a giddiness in the air in San Francisco (where Obama incidentally won over Clinton) but not the flat-out craziness other places were experiencing.

janinsanfran said...

That's amazing to see an empty city hall on election night. I've been in some mighty scrums on those occasions. Perhaps we only get those over local candidacies.