Well, I voted. I went up to the precinct polling place — Orange Hunt Elementary School in Springfield VA at 9:55 am. In Fairfax County, the schools have “teacher work days” the day before and the day of a national election so the county can use the schools as polling places.

I have been voting in the same precinct since 1980. On a typical election, voting in mid moring or mid afternoon, you have the polling place to yourself. Well this election IS going to be different. The turnout is very large. At the Orange Hunt precinct, the voters are divided into three lines based on the first letter of your last name: A-G, H-0 and P-Z. I don’t know what happens if your last name starts with a number or a special character.

But I digress. The lines at the 3 registration tables were about equal length—about 10 deep waiting to register. The waiting line to actually vote was about 50 voters long and wound around in snake-like fashion for the opportunity to vote.

There were a dozen laptop computer voting machines. We have used them or ones like them in an earlier election, so if you had voted recently, you were not surprised. Fairfax County has been using electronic voting machines for over a decade. These machines are VERY EASY to operate. And the screen images are so large that even the nearly blind can see and read them. You can mark your choices, back up and change your choices, and are given a summary of your choices before you actually press the “VOTE” button sending your to the record system. Even after reviewing the summary of your selections, you still can back up and change your vote. But, once you press “VOTE” you are done. It’s like dropping a paper ballot into a ballot lock box. Too late to change after that. [There is a poll attendant at each machine to assist the folks who can’t figure out or follow even the most elementary, common sense set of instructions. I actually don’t understand why these machines aren’t used everywhere, but I suppose that would make it too difficult to inject fraud if the voting process was too easy.]

Getting back to the voters, as your registration is verified, another poll monitor marks off a count sheet. I was number 402 to come this morning at my H-O table. As I waited in the voting lines I was able to see the count sheets at the other two tables. The P-Z was marked at 451 while the A-G was 432. It took 25 minutes to vote. In that time the voting lines remained a constant length. When I left at 10:20, there were more cars in the parking lot than when I arrived as I originally couldn’t find a parking spot, so I parked in the “Kiss and drop” lane the school has for moms dropping off kids on school days. When I left, that lane was full also.

Maybe 80-90 percent will be an good projection after all.