Fred Gonzalez, an 18-year-old North High School graduate who works at Wal-Mart, said he understood this election was too important to miss. When he arrived at Skinner Middle School to cast his ballot, his virgin voting status caused poll workers to erupt in applause. Then they told him that he was in the wrong place and that he hadn’t registered properly.
They sent him to another polling spot, a nursing home, where workers deduced that that was the wrong place too and that his information was incomplete.
They allowed him to vote with a provisional ballot. Gonzalez went into a booth and, for nearly 45 minutes, read each amendment and issue. He exited, proudly wearing a voting sticker.
“I was nervous and scared,” he said afterward, with his parents and brother waiting outside in a van. “I’m shaking because I wanted to make the best decision and choose the right person.”
Family reunion at polls
In tiny Platteville in Weld County, the Scales family decided to have a family reunion at the voting booth.
“It’s a family-bonding moment,” said Alan Scales, whose 21-year-old daughter, Yvonne, voted for the first time Tuesday.
Also voting was Scales’ son, Andrew, 22. He voted absentee in 2004 because he was serving in the military overseas. Also on hand was mom Teresa Scales.
Help from strangers
Part of the vaunted Obama ground game was in action at New Hope Baptist Church on Colorado Boulevard in Denver when 23-year-old Deantay Connors tried to drop off his mail-in ballot at the polling place. Connors had accompanied a cousin who was voting at the church, but poll officials couldn’t accept Connors’ ballot because it was from Adams County.
In stepped the Obama “flying squad.”
When the frustrated Connors found he couldn’t drop his ballot, he started to leave, but the Rev. Patrick Demmer, pastor of Graham Memorial Church of God in Christ, urged him to wait, while San Francisco lawyer Philip Feldman checked on his cellphone with election-law specialists. Feldman, who had come to Colorado “because I knew it was a swing state,” learned the law permits someone to drop off as many as five mail-in ballots for others, so Connors handed off the sealed envelope and the pastor-lawyer flying squad headed to Commerce City to deliver the vote.
Curbside persuasion
Will Watts had more action at the curb on South Holly Street than many polling places had inside their doors. Watts, 20, took a break between college courses to stand curbside and wave a McCain-Palin sign at oncoming traffic. He spent an hour coaxing happy honks and angry thumbs- downs from motorists and planned to return in the evening.
The wait is piece of cake
Volunteers from the Colorado Campaign for Change said they were not taking any chances on losing voters to long lines at the Glenarm Recreation Center in Five Points.
Stacey Green, Isaam Shamsid- Deen and Nathaniel Pach waited outside the polls with yogurt, apples and water.
“We brought chairs for people who can’t stand up for very long,” Shamsid-Deen said. Government by people
When Tom Amundson, 18, finished voting, he stopped by a volunteer’s desk at Douglas County High School and asked whether she could write him a note saying he had cast his ballot.
“My professor said if we’d vote, we’d get extra credit,” said the student at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
But it was more than a bump in his freshman writing class that motivated him.
“Government,” said Amundson, who studied a sample ballot for an hour the night before, “is not something you can stand by and watch happen.”
Both sides now
Brandon Sellers, 31, arrived at the corner of Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue in Greeley at 8 a.m. and saw a couple of Obama supporters in front of the Ice Haus voting center. “I thought, ‘That’s not cool. We need somebody on our side.’ So I grabbed this flag out of my car and I’ve been here all morning,” said Sellers, who was wearing a red T-shirt that read “I am Joe College Student.” Going to amazing lengths
Some Coloradans like Thomas Richardson, 19, went to greater lengths — about 1,600 miles greater than most — to vote.
Richardson, a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C., waited for weeks for his mail-in ballot to arrive. So Saturday evening, Richardson decided he could wait no longer. With help from an aunt who works for an airline, he flew home to Denver just to cast his vote for Sen. Barack Obama.
“It’s my first time voting, and I didn’t want to miss it for anything,” Richardson said.
