Long Lines and Intense Feelings

In the end, there seemed to be just one place to escape the din -- just one place to get away from the blaring television ads, the robo-phone calls, the shouting television personalities and the chanting street-corner campaigners.

America found a refuge Tuesday at the polls. In record numbers -- projected late Tuesday to reach at least 120 million -- voters turned up at churches, school multipurpose rooms, shopping centers and even funeral parlors to set about choosing a president.

So many people voted from Jacksonville, Fla., to Cleveland to Los Angeles that lines extended long into the night. In Allegheny County, Pa., polls had to be kept open 90 extra minutes to accommodate all those who arrived before the planned closing hour. In Cleveland, a federal judge ordered that ballots be given to all those waiting in line after hours.

The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate said that at least 60% of voting-age Americans had cast ballots and that the figure could approach the 61.9% turnout in 1968, when civil rights protests and the divisive Vietnam War loomed large. The most experienced election officers said Tuesday they couldn’t remember anything quite like it.

“I’ve been doing this a lot of years,” said Thomas Hudson, a 67-year-old poll worker and retired baker in Jacksonville, “and I’ve never seen this kind of turnout.”

Either thrilled or appalled by a divisive presidency, torn by a war with no certain end, and confounded by a halting economy, few voters said they considered sitting on the sidelines this year. If their interest in voting faltered for a moment, they probably were confronted Tuesday by voter mobilization campaigns that set records for their size and reach.

“There is an energy in the air in a way I have never seen before,” said novelist Tom Wolfe, after voting Tuesday afternoon at a public school on New York’s Upper East Side. “People are not asking if you are voting but when you are voting. There is something vital going on.”

The vitriolic sentiments of the campaign remained in evidence through much of the day, as supporters of President Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry jousted over poll hours and voter challenges. But many of the squads of lawyers and precinct watchers said the expected voting problems were a nonevent, akin to the predicted “Y2K” computer chaos that was to have accompanied the arrival of the year 2000.

“It’s rhetoric,” Florida poll watcher Harry Miles, 60, said of the predicted trouble. “As of now, none of that rhetoric has surfaced. Everyone I’ve seen so far has walked out of those polls with smiles on their faces.”

A long day of voter mobilization began even before dawn, as armies of paid- and volunteer-campaign workers girded for their long day.

Tony Charles awoke at 4:45 a.m., after two hours of sleep, to begin the day at America Coming Together, a liberal voter-outreach organization. He arrived at the group’s Cleveland headquarters 30 minutes later to meet with a caterer who would deliver 1,500 sack lunches to ACT canvassers in predominantly African American neighborhoods.

By 7:30 a.m., with reports that the initial turnout was larger than ever before, Charles, 48, was already smiling. “We’re going to have some fun today,” he said.

In Albuquerque, two University of New Mexico students woke at 6:45 so they could hang their spray-painted “Bush Is Bad” banner over a busy freeway and vote.

Jeremy Kassan, 19, said that it was “way earlier than I’ve been up in, like, two years,” then left the overpass with a friend to vote before classes started. “We’re going to go save democracy,” he said.

In Lebanon, Wis., a small town between Madison and Milwaukee, Wayne and Carole Vawter took a more personal, and conservative, approach. They got out the directory for their church, Calvary Baptist, and began dialing.

The “strong” Bush supporters said they didn’t have to be too specific with fellow congregants.

“We just decided we want the people we know, the people that have the same values we do, we want them to vote,” Wayne Vawter said. The couple did not mention Bush by name and they did not stop until they had made 130 calls. After one particularly long stint on the phone, Carole said, “my ear got hot, and I’d make Wayne do it.”

Election day penetrated the consciousness in many ways.

In Cincinnati, sound trucks roared with a pro-Kerry message. A disc jockey for African American oriented WZAK-FM in Cleveland cooed at listeners to ignore a persistent rain and “sacrifice your perm to change history.” Cuban American radio hosts in Miami urged their heavily Republican audience to get out for Bush, while Dr. D. James Kennedy of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Coral Ridge Ministries, broadcast an ad that told voters it was a sin not to vote.

All the sound and fury was not lost on Americans, even as they said they had tired of it.

The lines were so long at one Miami precinct that Elnora Solomon, 76, went home, but came back at noon and cast her ballot for Kerry in just minutes.

Solomon reported that Democratic workers would not have let her forget.

“It was easy,” she said, noting that Democratic supporters were diligent in contacting her before the election. “They came to my house every day for a month.”

On a day of high passion, there were the exceptions -- those who struggled to make their presidential choice.

Abbie Stiles, 23, bit her lip as her two children ran circles around the voting booths at her polling place at a high school in central Albuquerque.

“When I woke up, my stomach hurt from trying to decide,” said Stiles, a bartender and a Republican.

She finally found a website via Google “that asks you questions and tells you who to vote for.” Her answers produced a close score: 50 points for Kerry, 48 for Bush.

As her children knocked over a garbage can and sent trash sprawling, Stiles pushed the button for Kerry. Still, she had not found peace of mind. “One vote won’t make that big a difference,” she asked. “Right?”

But ambivalence was the exception Tuesday.

In Milwaukee, 34-year-old engineer Nicole Burns was determined to vote. To ease a wait of more than an hour, she toted an extra-large coffee and cracked open a copy of the latest self-help bestseller, “He’s Just Not That Into You.”

In Columbus, Ohio, Daryll and Michelle Judge waited in the rain for more than four hours -- until 9:50 p.m. and long enough to discuss renewing their 6-year-old wedding vows -- before they finally cast their ballots.

“I didn’t see anyone, not one person, leave. They just stuck it out. It wouldn’t have made a difference if it was snowing. I wasn’t going anywhere,” said Daryll Judge, 44, a satellite technician.

The stakes were evident as the polls closed at 7 p.m. in Jacksonville. Outside election headquarters downtown, Bush-Cheney supporters and about 200 African American voters engaged in a tense standoff as election officials closed the line to any more potential voters.

Several Bush supporters with bullhorns moved toward the front of the building -- from a corner where they had spent most of the day hailing passing traffic -- and began to chant, “Bush Won Florida!”

The voters would not be discouraged by the premature reports. Remaining in line, they began to chant and then broke into hymns, including “We Shall Overcome.”

Police closed off the street, and one observer compared the raw emotions to those that emerge every year for the Florida-Georgia football game, “only without the alcohol and without the football.”

But Reginald Garmen wanted it known that not all African Americans were voting for Kerry, or being pestered by Republicans.

Wearing a Statue of Liberty tie and a red shirt,, the 47-year-old fragrance designer absorbed the heckling of many other blacks as he carried a Bush-Cheney sign.

“I’ve taken a lot of abuse from blacks in this city today, but that’s OK,” he said. “This is what we fought the civil rights battle for, so I could express my political views.”

French immigrant Audrey Mack, a Christian minister and Bush supporter, could not have agreed more. She saw her U.S. citizenship papers arrive one week too late to register to vote in Florida but went out to talk to voters Tuesday anyway.

“I woke up this morning and I cried because I could not vote in this election,” Mack said. “Voting is a God-given privilege.”

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Glionna reported from Jacksonville, Fla., Rainey from Los Angeles. Contributing to this report were David Zucchino in Philadelphia, Peter Wallsten in Miami, Robin Abcarian in Los Angeles, Kathleen Hennessey in Milwaukee, Charles Duhigg in Albuquerque, Elizabeth Shogren in Cleveland and Sam Howe Verhovek in Columbus, Ohio.