Presidential Rivals in Tight Race for Virginia

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Area Voters Flood Polls Early

Local voters wait patiently through long lines to cast their ballots on Election Day.

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As the polling place at Rocky Hill Middle School in Clarksburg opened this morning, a line of voters stretched out of the school, through the parking lot and all the way to a stop sign on the nearby street. But by early afternoon, voters were able to cast their ballots in mere minutes.

It took Peter Samuel 45 minutes to drive to the polling place from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he is studying financial economics. The 20-year-old missed the deadline to file for an absentee ballot and didn't want to miss his first opportunity to vote in a presidential race.

Although both of his parents are life-long Democrats, Samuel thinks the country needs a more centralized government and voted for McCain. Luckily, his political science professor canceled class today, so Samuel had time to make the trek home to vote.

"Even knowing that Maryland is very Democratic and my vote probably won't change things, I still felt like I had to go out there and vote," he said. "You can't complain when everything's done if you didn't vote."

Michael Castro, 19, make a similar journey from the University of Maryland in College Park to vote for McCain, whom he thinks will help balance out the Democratic Congress. This is Castro's first time voting in a presidential election.

"I've seen the voting places all my life. I wanted to be part of that line," he said. "I'm not sure how much my vote is going to count but at least I put it in."

Lines were also short this afternoon at Seneca Valley High School in Germantown.

The only race on that ballot that Anas Paiz, 47, cared about was the presidential race and she voted for Obama. Her 20-year-old daughter, Evelin Serpas, went to the polls with her mother and voted for the first time. The two women said it took just minutes for them to cast their ballots and didn't have to wait in line at all.

"It's a big election and we wanted to make sure we voted," said Serpas. "We've had Obama in mind for quite some time."

Longtime Democrat Pat Ryan, 53, has known for months which candidates she would vote for, but she had a hard time deciding how to vote on the slots referendum. Even as she stepped into the booth she was weighing the pros and cons of adding slot machines to state race tracks and other venues.

"I have really mixed feelings about that," she said. "On one hand, the people who gamble can't afford to do so. But some people say, they are going to spend that money anyway, it might as well stay in the state.

I went back and forth, and I finally just voted for it. Now I just want to make sure the money from does get to the schools."

At Kettering Baptist Church in Upper Marlboro, Mildred Benning, 79, wiped away a few tears after voting for Democratic candidate Barack Obama, who is vying to become the first African American elected president. Benning, who is black, lived through the civil rights struggle in North Carolina, an experience that shattered her faith in the goodness of American people -- for a while.

"Who among us ever thought we would live to see this day?" Hoover asked. "I've never been so proud of my country."

In the District, Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) said she felt voting was going smoothly in the District, especially given some precincts had more than 50 percent turnout by midday.

"It's phenomenal," she said.

Cheh, a constitutional law professor who chairs a special committee investigating what caused the initial release of erroneous results in September's primary, said a few paper ballot scanners, known as optical scan machines, broke down at several precincts but ballots were recorded on other machines working properly and voting was not interrupted.

She said the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics has put in place several new procedures to prevent the release of incorrect results, which occurred several hours after polls closed in September. The tally sheets included thousands of phantom write-in votes that inflated vote totals in many contests and cast doubt on the results.

Cheh said that the elections board has decided to release results in smaller increments throughout the night. Elections officials indicated that the move would help them catch any type of glitch as they double-checked results.

"I think that makes sense," Cheh said.

As well, the cartridges from the optical scan and touch screen machines will be fed into two different servers, so the results can be compared and matched. And precinct captains at every polling place will be asked to do a written tally of ballots cast. That number will be compared to the electronic data on the cartridges.

Cheh said she will be at the board tonight to monitor the vote counting process.

Staff writers Jeff Baron, Jennifer Buske, Sarah Cohen, Petula Dvorak, Megan Greenwell, Steve Hendrix, Chris Jenkins, Susan Kinzie, Theola Labbé-DeBose, Jonathan Mummolo, Howard Schneider, Brigid Schulte, Avis Thomas-Lester, Josh White and Ovetta Wiggins and Brian Krebs of washingtonpost.com contributed to this report.

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