Paul Joseph, a voter in Dupont Circle, figured there’d be a line at his polling place, so he brought a book. When he entered the queue for Precinct 15 at Foundry United Methodist Church at 16th and P streets NW, Joseph was on page 156 of You Never Give Me Your Money, Peter Doggett’s biography of The Beatles after the band’s 1970 breakup.
Forty minutes later, Joseph had reached the church driveway, within eyesight of the stairway leading to the basement voting booths, but still a few minutes away. He was on page 170.
“I knew the lines would be long, but I didn’t expect this long,” he said. “But it’s moving.”
As of 9 a.m., some 500 people had already voted at the busy Ward 2 precinct, a D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics employee manning the station told DCist. The line stretched a full city block from the basement door to the CVS store at the corner of 17th and P streets NW. Hundreds of voters, bundled up on the coldest day of the season so far, trudged toward the door. En route, they passed by volunteers for D.C. Council candidates, hopeful advisory neighborhood commission candidates and even a few employees of the church itself.
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president, was also supposed to visit at 8:45 a.m. By 9:30, the former New Mexico governor, who is somewhat oddly making D.C. a centerpiece of his third-party campaign, was a no-show.
Instead, anxious voters were approached by the likes of the Rev. Theresa Thames, a pastor at Foundry United Methodist. Wearing a cheerful smile and carrying a large blue tote bag, she patrolled the far reaches of the line handing out granola bars wrapped in a copy of “The Noise of Politics,” a “non-partisan prayer” by the theologian Walter Brueggemann.
“We wanted to offer hospitality,” Thames said, before telling the frosty voters that coffee was on its way next.
Kishan Dutta, who is hoping to win seat on ANC 2B, handed out cookies with his fliers, as he sought to build support for his bike-friendly candidate, even though enticing voters with tasty treats could be construed as incentivizing people to support his bid.
“That lane on 15th Street is getting very bumpy,” Dutta said, campaigning in front of his light-blue Jamis street-cruiser. “I’m already working with DDOT.”
The queue continued to shuffle forward, sometimes in great lurches when a poll worker asked people whose last names begin with certain segments of the alphabet to move forward. But for the most part, the wait to vote was a significant time commitment.
It wasn’t any faster one precinct over. The line erupting out of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Parish stretched all the way down Church Street NW, hooked on to 18th Street and snaked all the way down to P. No one was stepping out of line in frustration.
