I Voted - Like Everyone Else

We just got back from voting. It took us 45 minutes from the time we got there to the time we submitted our ballots. A woman working at the polls said that this morning at 7 a.m. the line was out the door and down the street.

There was actually a neat trick to get around the long lines: don't register. In Minnesota, we have same-day registration so technically you don't have to worry about registration until you go to vote. However, this usually results in a longer wait. Not this time. The line for registered people stretched from the main entry of the building (a nursing home) down three separate hallways until you actually reached the voting booths. We started noticing that the people who came in and hadn't registered were coming in after us and leaving shortly thereafter. I heard the woman at the same-day registration table talking about how she does this every election and she's never seen this happen before: nearly everyone was already registered and ready to vote this time.

This doesn't surprise me: it was really hard work this election cycle not to register to vote. Over the past two months we've recieved phone calls as well as knocks on our door from real, live people from ACT, the DFL, the Clean Water Action Alliance of Minnesota and more that I'm probably forgetting. We also got some mail from the RNC the last week of the election - they were a bit too late for us though.

While walking to our voting location (about 5 blocks) we saw three separate groups of people going door-to-door to remind people to vote (one group was with ACT, another with MoveOn). The group that came to our door gave us a nice "We Voted" sign to put on our door so we won't get bugged all day long.

My point? This election is different. Everybody traces the beginning of the conservative movement in this country back to 1964 when Goldwater lost. It was this election that spurred conservatives to start to build the institutional groundwork necessary for political success and they've reaped the benefits of this effort over the last 24 years. Hopefully, whatever the result of today's election, I think people will look back at 2004 as the year that progressives realized that they needed to build the same type of institutions and the same type of movement. The fact that it was practically impossible to not register to vote this year, in my neighborhood at least, is just one sign that may just be happening.

Now, the long wait for the results...