Early Voting in Indiana

First of all, we went to the Obama rally at the American Legion Mall in downtown Indianapolis yesterday. It was fantastic. The IndyStar reports 35,000 people being there, and I can believe that. It was noticeably more well attended than the rally we attended at the same venue before the primary. There is an FFA convention in town this week, so it was fun to see all of the future farmers with their navy jackets declaring what state they are from. I saw two form Puerto Rico!

Included to the right is a picture from the event that Heather posted on their blog taken from here. We actually are in the picture; Elizabeth went to the trouble of circling us. She's rubbing her eye and I'm wearing shades and my white Obama hat.

After the rally I was fired up enough that I decided to go vote. Today is the first day you can vote at the satellite voting locations, so I went to the J. Everett Light Career Center.

The parking lot was packed and the line was long, stretching out the building and partway down the sidewalk. It wasn't quite as long as as some of them you see on the news, but it was encouraging none-the-less. I'd say that about 20% of the people there were African-American. The two kids in front of me were in high school, had been at the Obama rally, and were going to the Gwar show later that evening. I'm also pretty sure I saw a middle-aged lesbian couple. I feel safe in jumping to the conclusion that these were all likely Obama voters.

Now for the bad news: none of these people actually got to vote, at least not while I was there. They were having a computer problem. They were (paraphrasing here) unable to upload to downtown. Someone was coming to fix it, but it might be two hours before they were able to vote anybody. I had to pick up Paul at the airport, so I couldn't hang around that long.

But I did wait a little longer because there were three or four local politicians there greasing palms and making their pitch to voters as they waited in line (See Campo in the picture to the right). The first one I talked to was Michael W. Rodman, Democrat for Treasurer. He seemed pretty cool, goofy, just trying to seem like a nice guy while wearing an Obama button. He did not feel it neccessary to point out (as previously noted here) that he has a Graduate Degree in business vs. his opponent who has an undergrad theology degree.

Then there was Gabrielle Campo, who I didn't really want to talk to. She's the Republican that was slammed onto the ticket after Jon Elrod chickened out in his race agains Andre Carson. I will say this for Campo; she's much hotter than Sarah Palin. She also seems significantly more liberal than Palin, but not enough so that I (or the majority of the 7th district) would take her over Carson.

Finally, there was Steve Keltner. He's running for Indiana Senater. The incumbant repbulican is being challenged by a democrat who is in the hospital with a serious illness. So Keltner's pitch seemed to be, 'I'm not a Reblublican, and I'm not almost dead. Why not vote for me?' He was very personable and convincing with his pitch. The problem is that since I didn't vote, I came home and researched him a little. The "issues" section of his website seemed to not quite say anything substantial about anything I cared about. I'll have to do some more digging before I figure out if I'm going to float him my vote. He seems to be trying to obscure the fact that he's a Libertarian.

So that was my Politico Thursday...I'll have to try to vote early again sometime soon, hopefully with more success.