I had a minor problem at my polling station this morning. This year after the precinct locations were revamped, I double checked to make sure that my location did not change. It didn't. It is still at the Emanuel Community Center at 1308 Race Street.
So Knowing where I going, I walked in the same entrance I've gone to since I moved to OTR in 2007. I went down the ramp in front of the building, went around to the back door and found that it was locked.
I was perplexed. I was pondering what was going on. Why would the doors to a polling place locked at about 10 AM. There must be some kind of mistake, so I went in the front door and asked and found that a different room was being used in the building and was pointed quickly to the room not far from the main door and voted without a problem.
No big deal. Things change and I just didn't pay enough attention.
After I got back to blogging and was researching another report of problems at my precinct, where it reportedly was not opened for voting until 7:15 AM, I checked the polling location search on the BOE's website (www.votehamiltoncounty.org) and I found a problem. They still list the building entrance as "FRONT RAMP ENTRANCE" as can be seen below:
I hope that no one gave up when trying to find the entrance. I would have hopped that the BOE would have the website more updated, unless this was a last minute change, which has other implications. I also hope that building has a third entrance that is wheel chair accessible, because the main entrance did not appear to be.
Terry had a similar issue: he was going to vote at 6:30 as it was his only opportunity to do so today, as he's a teacher and had parent conferences until 8:30. He got turned away. He now has to zip from school to vote, and then back before conferences started. Not good.
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