SlowpokeBlog

I sat at the Dem booth outside our polling place this afternoon. Weather-wise, the day has been absolutely dismal. I was worried this might dampen turnout, though I heard 50% of registered voters had shown up from our precinct, which is more than in 2004. On the other hand, there's a gay marriage amendment on the ballot, and our precinct is not exactly a bastion of progressivism like Charlottesville proper (we're a little outside the city). Most people didn't seem too interested in taking sample ballots from us or from the Republicans; they just wanted to get out of the rain.

Not long after I arrived, I noticed there was an Allen/Goode sign directly behind us, which made us look like the Republican camp. I pulled it up and politely asked the Republicans if they wanted it near them since it was confusing in its current location. This caused one of the Republicans -- a tall, older gentleman in a trenchcoat and one of those hats that's halfway between a fedora and an Indiana Jones hat -- to go ballistic. He accused me of trying to take down his sign, said the sign was there before the Dems set up this morning, and that he'd heard reports of Dems knocking down signs all over Virginia. I insisted I was just trying to make things clear to the voters, and he was welcome to put the sign anywhere except behind our table, but he kept blathering about the evil Democrats. A prim older lady echoed his infantile argument that the sign was there first, nyah-nyah (nyah-nyahs added here for emphasis). Finally he posted the sign nearby, which was perfectly acceptable to me, and all I was really asking him to do in the first place. A sad glimpse into the mind of the opposition. I should also note that there were almost exactly twice as many Republican candidate signs on the property as Democratic ones.