Angie & Jim

All-Night Victory Party…by Angie

I spent from 4pm to 7:30pm on election day traveling back and forth between three different polling locations as a “poll watcher” (which means I checked off names of people who had already voted from a list of people who had told us they were going to vote yes, then called the names in to the phone bank).  My friend Joleen spent from 6pm to 7:30pm at the phone bank calling people who hadn’t voted yet to remind them to get out a vote before the polls closed.

I was confident from the start that Prop 8 would pass.  I don’t know if it was Pollyanna-ism or just plain stubbornness, but I was convinced enough that we had planned a victory party with Joleen’s family for that evening.  At 8pm, when there was nothing more we could do but wait, Jim and I took a big batch of cider and drove over to the Mills’ house, where Joleen had doughnuts of all shapes and sizes.  Her husband, Kelly, and two of their kids, Brennan & Amber (and some friends), were all there as well.  We sat around the table with our cider and doughnuts and were positively exasperated with the presidential election news because we wanted them to just get to the point and announce the result for Prop 8!  Unfortunately, the counting was miserably slow.  Eventually, friends had to go home; later, Amber had to go to bed.  Finally, Brennan headed to bed as well, leaving the four of us watching and waiting.  Kelly brought his laptop downstairs so we could get minute-by-minute updates, because the news stations only touched on the proposition results intermittently.

When we had seen the same news highlights several times because the stations had run out of new things to say (and the precincts were still only about 40% reported), Joleen and Kelly played a recorded episode of LOST, explaining things as it went since Jim and I had never seen any of it before.  When that was through, it was well past midnight.  We stayed for a little while longer, but we were all tired and frustrated and we finally decided to call it a night.

Home we went, with the leftover cider, intending to crash in bed when we got there… but I just couldn’t bring myself to go to sleep without knowing!  Instead, we put our pjs on and watched an absolutely hilarious documentary called, “The Natural History of the Chicken.”  Ok, maybe it was hilarious because it was 2am, but I laughed so hard I cried a couple of times!  We finally went to bed near 4am, when the polls indicated that Yes was up 52% to 48% with 86% of precincts reported.

Despite the anti-climactic lack of a particular “We WON!” moment, I was very pleased, relieved, and grateful.