sleepy5:45am
Indianapolis Public School 69
Precincts 23-001 and 23-002
By 5:30am, there already was a line to vote. The community is very lower middle class, overwhelmingly African American and entirely, totally, completely, distressingly flat like a pancake. Roads here don't bend, don't curve, don't climb hills and don't descend them. The people, however, are anything but flat: they're friendly as get all, and their accent lilts between Midwest and Bluegrass. There's a modicum of suspicion about a white boy with a laptop computer, but unlike in Pennsylvania where I needed to wear an Obama button to establish my bona fides, here it was enough for me to give a thumbs up when a voter played Obama's speech yesterday at the Indianapolis Convention Center on her iPhone. With me are about a half dozen Ward operatives and the Big Boss who's tending to a contested judicial election, and we're talking up a storm about everything and nothing -- which seems the thing to do at 5:30am.
I'm set up outside the neighborhood elementary school with school desks and chairs, and a bunch of pre-printed signs "VOTER RIGHTS INFORMATION," "TROUBLE VOTING? TALK TO ME!" Good thing, too: already voters are having some minor difficulties with Indiana's very restrictive ID requirement and the insane rule that prohibits them from voting if they moved more than 30 days ago and didn't re-register. Hopefully turnout will be high and problems few, but one tends to come with the other. At least I have coffee.
