It was a bit lonely at the Barnum Rec Center polling station, at 360 Hooker Street in Five Points. In the couple of hours after polls opened at 7 a.m., roughly 85 people meandered in to vote, and around 9:20 a.m., most of the polling booths in the facility’s gym stood empty. In fact, for much of the morning, the majority of the folks hanging around weren’t voters at all, but Obama volunteers. Six of them are assigned to the rec center, meaning they usually outnumbered the voters there. Is it like this everywhere? Has Obama volunteerism taken over the state like a virus, leading to more Obama staff than statewide voters? One Obama worker at Barnum wasn't sure, but posited that "it may be a one-to-one match."
So what’s a bored, unoccupied Obama worker to do? Not much, it turns out. Stacey Green and Isaam Shamsid-Deen, who’ve been standing outside Barnum since 6.m. and will continue to do so until after 7 p.m. tonight, brought nothing but munchies to keep them going. They have an endearingly liberal smorgasbord of yogurt, granola, bananas – though as a blatant gesture to the meat-eating moderates, Green notes that she also has a ham sandwich.
Inside, Obama legal observer Nat Bach is better prepared. Sitting in a folding camp chair, he’s nose deep in a book entitled A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing.
Even though he’s optimistic his candidate will take this election and make everything right, it looks like he’s not taking any chances. – Joel Warner
