D.C. voters line up for history

The wave of voter enthusiasm that has produced record lines at early balloting stations across the country is being felt even in the District, a jurisdiction where elections are so lopsided that the only real contests are fought in the Democratic primaries.

Residents who stood in line for up to two hours at polling places this week acknowledged that they were less concerned with making sure their favored candidate won than in taking part in what they saw as a moment to remember.

“This is a year in which we will either have a black president or a female vice president, and either one will be making history,” said D.C. resident Elizabeth Holmes.

Miss Holmes, who said she must tend to her elderly mother on Election Day, was among hundreds of people who waited in the cold outside the D.C. Board of Elections office Thursday to cast an absentee, in-person vote.

Ward 3 resident Stuart Stanmore said the election is “crucial even though [Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama] is bound win the D.C. vote.”

“I just want to make sure he gets the popular vote as well,” said Mr. Stanmore, who will work at a polling station on Tuesday.

Since in-person, absentee voting in the District started Oct. 20 at the election board’s Judiciary Square office, the average wait has been about 90 minutes during off-peak hours and has surpassed two hours during lunchtime and the evening.

“When I showed up to vote this morning the line was halfway to the corner,” said Edward O’Connell, of the District’s Petworth neighborhood, who returned to Judiciary Square at midday when the line had dwindled to a few dozen voters.

Such turnouts are surprising in the District, where 75 percent of voters are registered Democrats. Even without campaigning, Democratic candidate John Kerry won 90 percent of the D.C. vote in 2004.

But the crowds are part of a phenomenon being seen across the United States.

Early-voter turnout is on pace to break the 2004 record, with nearly 18 million votes already cast, according to statistics kept by Michael McDonald, a George Mason University associate professor.

Georgia and North Carolina already have surpassed their 2004 totals, and Florida and North Carolina have announced that they will extend the hours at early-voting sites to handle the flood.

The trend is expected to help Mr. Obama. In battleground states such as Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico, Democrats make up a higher percentage of voters than they did four years ago.

But the voting enthusiasm has been tempered by a rash of problems as untrained poll workers struggle to confirm newly registered voters in several states. In Virginia, where nearly 300,000 new voters have been registered, there are worries about voting machines failing on Election Day.

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