I voted around 11:05am. I figured by not going first thing and before lunchtime I was likely to avoid the crowds (hey, being unemployed should occasionally be advantageous). It was not very crowded. I think there may have been more campaign signs on the walk up to the polling place than there were voters inside.

My polling place in Ward 3 seemed pretty well organized. They had divided the alphabet into 8 sections so the lines wouldn't be too long. There didn't seem to be any partisan poll watchers present, unless they were so low key as to be completely unnoticeable. The Board of Elections staffers and volunteers were all competent and friendly. I was in and out in around 7 minutes.

There were no ballot measures in the District, and the bottom of the ticket (school board and ANC) were uncontested. The only really interesting race from my perspective was for at-large council member. There are two positions, one of which must go to a non-Democrat. Longtime council member Carol Schwartz (R) was not on the ballot, having run a pretty crappy primary campaign against Patrick Mara for the Republican nomination. A lot of Dc Republicans and the Washington Post seemed to favor Patrick Mara in part due to a backlash against Carol Schwartz for having sponsored the paid sick leave legislation, which was seen as "bad for business." Personally, I'm in favor of businesses being required to provide paid sick leave (particularly since outside of govt., it's not as if employers are all that generous with the paid vacation). Also, Schwartz is basically a center-moderate, so I wrote her in on the ballot. I think her write-in campaign has a shot, esp. since the mayor is backing her and she always had significant support from non-republicans.

Personally, I hoe that not only does Obama win but that the democrats also get their filibuster proof majority. General consensus in my family of Rockefeller Republicans (a basically extinct species from NY) is that the Republicans need to lose big, not just at the national level but also at the state level so that the party will see the error of its ways and go back to the center where it belongs. Unfortunately, the damage may already have been irreparably done, since the Republicans drifted so far right they dragged the Democrats across the center line with them.