At 7:12 p.m. Tuesday night, Yolanda Guerrero ran up to the door of the Clark County Election Department and found that it was locked. Inside the glass, she could see some 20 voters still standing in line to cast their vote on the single machine in the office. "I left my kid with the baby sitter to come and vote," she said. "I called. I was told I had time, I still had time," said Guerrero, who had just gotten off work as a cocktail waitress at the Barbary Coast. "I thought I had till nine." She stood outside the doors and called the department on her cell again; the polls had closed at 7, and her vote—which would have been for Kerry, she said—never made it.
Inside the election warehouse on the other side of the building, poll workers in matching T-shirts began systematically unloading cartridges from voting machines around the county. Media had set up in its corral on the side; TV lights shining for periodic updates. Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax wandered around wearing a red ball cap—a man simultaneously weathered from months of suspicions that his county would be the Broward of 2004, insulted by the GOP's last-ditch legal effort to monitor his poll workers after 7 p.m. on this night, and, finally, relieved: The voting problems in Clark County appeared to be small, "nitpicky things," he called them.
Secretary of State Dean Heller milled around in a slick suit, periodically checking a laptop, standing to watch CNN on a corner TV—smiling, telling reporters that the process went well.
Did it? Lomax said that by the next go around, there would need to be a rule limiting the number of poll watchers—"14 poll watchers in one place is too many," he said. "I had one of my poll workers call me in tears because of the way a poll watcher was talking to her. It's going to be extremely difficult to recruit workers if they have to stand the pressure of these attorneys."
Similarly, Heller said a late-in-the-day court ruling in Washoe that allowed some people to vote with only the torn-off bottom portion of their registration as proof that they'd registered would have to be challenged—"I think the judge didn't understand [that receipts don't ensure on-time registration]... Had that happened earlier, it would have caused a mess." Heller estimated only about a dozen voters were allowed to vote with only the registration receipt.
At polling sites around Vegas, tempers were generally mild—except for County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, who ran off a Republican poll watcher from a North Las Vegas elementary school whom she said was intimidating voters and frivolously questioning poll-watchers' attire— "How dare you try to come out here and intimidate voters in my neighborhood?!" she yelled. The white GOP representative allegedly left in a white Jaguar, a detail that wasn't lost on the crowd of working-class African-Americans rallying with Atkinson Gates.
So did it work? Did the re-election of President Bush by a divided nation, the highly doubted election process nationwide, Nevada's touted touch-screen voting machines, Clark County's overwhelmed registrar with his record number of new voters, a slew of out-of-state poll watchers standing in Las Vegas elementary schools and churches, tears, tempers, last-minute state District Court filings, hundreds of poll workers lined up in the warehouse for grilled sandwiches and sodas late Tuesday night by a sign that read, "Congratulations on a job well done, enjoy your meal but leave some for those who come later"—did the process work?
It's early Wednesday, November 3, and Kerry is about to concede. And offices are open. And schools are in session. And people are back in their routines. And one has to be amazed, whether mourning the outcome or not, with the extraordinary—extraordinarily rickety, extraordinarily sturdy—process.