Elmer Smith: Ode to an election judge

SHE WOULD have left the house in the dark to take up her post at the polling place.

By 6:45 a.m., the minority inspector and majority inspector would be in place at the table. The binders would be ready, the machines would be humming.

The doors would open at 7 a.m. and our neighbors in the 6th Division of the 44th Ward would start trickling in to vote.

My mother, Laura Mitchell, would be on duty from just before sunrise to well after dark on Election Day. More than a routine, it was a ritual in our house.

From 1952 when our pastor, the late Rev. Marshall Lorenzo Shepard, ran for City Council on the Dilworth/Clark ticket until her last election in 2004, she was at the polls every Election Day. She died a year later or she would have been there yesterday, too.

"She was the judge of elections," Ronnie Wilson, the Democratic committeeman in the precinct, recalled yesterday. "She ran the show."

They used to pay her what amounted to about $4 an hour for running the show. Sometimes the check wouldn't arrive for weeks.

But I think she would have paid them to let her work yesterday. She would have turned 93 Monday. But Tuesday morning bright and early, she would have been at the polls.

My mother represented a generation who voted without fail even when the choices before them wouldn't make a difference in their day-to-day lives.

So, I can't even imagine what yesterday would have meant to her. I'm not sure she ever dreamed that she'd live to see the first black president or to see her 19-year-old great-granddaughter vote for the first time.

But I got a feeling for it this spring when I sat down with Viola Walker, who cast a ballot for Barack Obama a few weeks after her 103rd birthday.

"No! No!," she told me. "I never imagined I'd see something like this. This is what we prayed for all those years."

Lillian Smith, 98, cast her first vote in a presidential election for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. She had her second pacemaker installed 10 days ago. But she stepped into a voting booth yesterday, drew the curtain behind her and voted for Barack Obama.

"I watched him make that speech at the last convention," she told me last night. "One reporter said, 'This man could be your next president.'

"I still never believed I'd see it. I didn't dream that they'd let that happen."

But by last night as she sat in her apartment at the Booth House, at 55th and Arch, watching the results come in, she could see it clearly.

"I'm a positive person," she told me. "I'm going to stay up all night if I have to. I believe he is going to get the states he needs.

"My niece is here with me. She keeps saying I hope, I hope. I told her I trust God.

"I believe that this is the time for all these things to come forth. It's time for us to rise up and do things.

"These are such beautiful days. I see people turning their lives around. I see them learning to love one another and stop the hatefulness.

"Not just for us. I can envision this for the white man, too. I have friends in Haverford. You wouldn't believe how many Obama signs I saw out there."

A few blocks away, at the 6th Division of the 44th Ward, poll workers were reading the signs of change.

"We're way past 50 percent turnout," Mr. Wilson told me as after-work voters were just starting to stream in.

"We're up to about 340 or 350 already. We've got a lot of new registrations. We has about 400 but it's up over 600 now. Obama is bringing them out."

Laura Mitchell would have been pleased. *