Surprises...

I had a few surprises last night.

As I pulled up to the bowling alley for my weekly league game, I noticed some unfamiliar faces hanging outside the building.  I also noticed they were milling around an part of the building I never really paid much attention to before.  As I checked out the scene, I noticed a sign on a door that identified it as a polling location. This door is not the main entrance to the bowling alley, as there is an extra room in building that I never noticed was there.  If I did notice it in the past, I just figured it was storage room of some sort, and never gave it a second thought. I talked with a few other people at the lanes, and found out that the owner has been renting out that room for polling

Look out Speed!
There's an election ahead

for quite some time.  I never considered that a polling place would be located in a bowling alley, let alone adjacent a bar. Now the room isn't located in the bar, and the people casting their votes did not have to go through the alley or lounge to get to the polls, so I guess that's why it's OK. I was just surprised, that as long as I have been bowling there, I never noticed that it was used for the elections.

My second surprise, and slight disappointment was that I was expecting the election results to be on the TV screens at the bowling alley, but they were not.  There was quite a bit of discussion about the elections, and I even had a lively discussion with a man with whom I disagree with politically.

The polls closed at 8PM EST in my area, so I figured by 8:30 some of the early results and even some commentary from exit polls should be available.  Since I could not get this information from the news on the TV, I did the next best thing. I opened up the cell phone's internet browser, did a quick Google search for a good election results site, and started looking for the best site to watch for the next hour or so.

I was curious about the results in the entire country, but I figured for the short time while I was bowling that I would just focus on the races in my state. I found a site from my state's state department, that had up to the minute results.  My first view of the site showed only 0.26% of the vote had been submitted, and at this early point the difference between the candidates was significant: 70% to 30% range.  My first thought was of immediate dread thinking that if most of the polling locations turn in similar results it would be a landslide, and not for the choices I made. 

I used up most of my battery for the remaining hour of bowling by hitting the refresh on this website, and by the time I left at 9:30 nearly 50% of the vote had been submitted, and the difference between the candidates was not as severe, but my choices were still not leading.  I was starting to loose hope.

After bowling I stopped at the entrance door of the polling place at the bowling alley, and they had posted the results from this location, and I noticed that all of my candidates had squeaked out a win.  I stopped at the place where I cast my vote earlier that morning, and noticed my candidates fared much better and won overwhelmingly there. When I got home, I brought up the election results website on my laptop bolstered by the local results I had seen, and by 11PM as the vote submission was nearing 90%, many of the races the gap closed significantly and in others the tide had completely turned.  With the trends, and the little information I gathered by looking at a results at few local polling places, I went to bed thinking that most of my choices had either won, or would most likely win.

When I got up this morning I got another small surprise. A few candidates I thought had won last night had in fact lost but by only a few percentage points. The results are still unofficial, and some of the close races will probably have a recount, but it looks like not all of my choices won last night.

It was a significant election last night, and the Republicans made a historic change in the number of seats in the House of Representatives. The question that has to be on everyone's mind, including mine, has to be whether or not within the next two years, if these newly elected people are the same as those that just lost? Or will we be pleasantly surprised to find out that they are in fact different, and willing to hold their own, and will in fact make real positive change in our economy and our country?