Just wanted to drop this as a follow-up to my last post, which concerned Video The Vote. For me, the day began at 6am, when I walked to my polling place in Roanoke and stood in a 40 minute line to vote. The line was the result of an electronic voting machine that didn't work and some poll workers who were getting on the job training about how to use the machines. Needless to say, it wasn't reassuring. I had a Flip video camera and took some very rough footage from my spot in line of the problematic machine. Needless to say, this was an inauspicious start to the day.
Thankfully, things did improve. The lines to that polling place shrunk by 8am, and I remained "on call" for Video The Vote for most of the day. I did drive out to Cloverdale, Virginia to document a woman whose voter registration address change had been lost; she had to vote provisionally.
The real story of the day, though, was in Blacksburg, where students from Virginia Tech were having to wait for several hours at one polling place. I heard about this late in the day, and a few minutes after reading the story (oddly, on Huffington Post instead of via The Roanoke Times website or from friends), Video The Vote called me from NYC, asking me to document the situation. Ashley was already in Blacksburg, so she went to capture footage. She got some great stuff with her Flip camera (videos 1, 2, 3).
NOTE: My name, not Ashley's, is on the footage because I was the one that registered for Video the Vote.
When Ashley returned home, we spent the evening uploading her footage. Video The Vote's website was SLAMMED, so uploads took forever. The fact that we were hitting the "refresh" button on our browsers to see election results wasn't helping.
Pennsylvania was called for Obama around the time that we were close to done uploading all of our videos from the day. We knew what was coming, so we headed over to an Election Day party.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Literally.