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I voted this morning at 8:15 after waiting on line for 45 minutes in the humid, bustling gymnasium at the elementary school near my house. Now it’s 11:00 AM and I have nothing to do except think about how our country (and, indeed, the world) will change over the next four years, wait on the returns, and hope I get to pop the cork on the bottle of Prosecco currently chilling in my fridge.
Work is slow and I’m antsy as hell (what’s left to do now but wait?) so I thought I’d post some of the most thoughtful and/or inspiring writing from around the internet. 
Also, please share your voting stories! Make One City your election ’08 headquarters! Even though we don’t have any actual election coverage at all!
George Packer speaks to my voting experience in Brooklyn: 

My wife and I went out to vote in Brooklyn early this morning. The whole process, including waiting in a line that stretched around the corner from the local elementary school and down the block, took an hour and a half—at least an hour longer than it’s ever taken me to vote in my adult life. Quiet excitement in the school gym; also a certain amount of controlled chaos. I heard no one complain—politeness was breaking out all around, with that cheerfulness between strangers that is generally reserved for religious occasions and sports events.
Everyone seemed to be aware that this is a historic day, and even in a state where the results are a foregone conclusion the people in the gym wanted their vote counted, believed their iota of the overall tally matters, which is the absurd and sublime essence of democracy. Lots of children had been brought out to witness the occasion. Our one-year-old was uncharacteristically still.

Andrew Sullivan will be posting View from Your Election all day. This one was unexpectedly stirring:

A reader writes:
Those who are wondering if the youth will turn out ought to see what I saw this morning.
One well-known government professor here told me that she has never seen so many students vote in the first hour of voting as she saw this morning. And I’ve never seen so many students up and alert at this hour. They’re normally stumbling out of bed to make it to their 10 a.m. courses. Today, the campus has been buzzing for hours this morning. It appears that many of them decided to go to the polls as groups of twos, threes, fours and more when the polls opened at 7 a.m. The number of students I saw by 8 a.m. walking around with “I voted” stickers on is astonishing.
At breakfast, I sat next to a table of four black students, all of whom had voted. The three men were wearing ties. I asked them why. The answer: It was their first election, and they wanted to mark the occasion.

Marc Ambinder makes a funny:

A Memo I’m Half-Expecting To See

03 Nov 2008 04:48 pm

From the McCain campaign: “Final  Vote Tally Will Overstate Obama’s Support.”

Obama seems a bit grave to me these days. The death of his grandmother has edged his public mood with sadness, but this heaviness preceded it. Compare the closing-days portraits of the two candidates in the Times: I’d rather spend the final stretch in the company of the Republican. McCain is ironic, gregarious, plucky; Obama is fully hidden away within himself. He is, we already knew, an aloof, perhaps unknowable man—you feel it even after hearing his life story told in his own remarkable voice over the several hundred pages of “Dreams from My Father.” But his manner before crowds and his face in photographs seem even farther out of reach than usual.
The reason came to me when I was reading the galleys of H. W. Brands’s new biography of F.D.R., “Traitor to His Class.” On the night of his landslide victory over Hoover, in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt had an intimate conversation with his son James:
“You know, Jimmy,” Franklin said, “all my life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire. Tonight I think I’m afraid of something else.”
“Afraid of what, Pa?”
“I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job.” He paused reflectively. “After you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I am going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that he will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope that you will pray for me, too, Jimmy.”

The man is human and, unlike the current incumbent, understands human emotions like doubt, fear, and humility. This, to me, is cause for hope.
Update: 
Hendrick Hertzberger takes communion in New York and perfectly captures the pleasure of “ka-chunk”-ing our antiquated voting machines:

It’s especially satisfying in New York on account of our ancient voting machines. No punch cards or touchscreens or spindly little aluminum-and-plastic booths that look like they’d tip over at the slightest push. Our machines weigh eight hundred pounds. They’re tall, the size and shape of a confessional. You go behind a calf-length curtain and pull a big three-foot-long lever from left to right, like a gondolier’s oar. It goes Chunk! The candidates are laid out before you in neat columns, with an inch-long black teardrop-shaped lever next to each name. You snap the levers down. Chunk chunk chunk! You survey your work. You pull the oar back from right to left. Chunk!
Most satisfying. I let my son pull the little black levers, as I did in 2000, when he was two, and 2004, when he was six. This time he was tall enough to reach the Obama lever on tiptoes, without a boost. Next time he’ll be too big to come into the booth with me. But the time after that he’ll be able to go in alone.

And I know this isn’t writing persay, but most analysts say Democrats need at least 500,000 votes in Philadelphia to carry the state and make McCain’s eleventh hour push exactly what it is: the last gasp of a dinosaur. Turnout in Philly is expected to be as high as 750,000. Still, a line of 1000 students at Penn State at 7 AM (7 AM, people) is encouraging:

Update:
Seriously, go read some Andrew Sully:

A reader writes:
I live in Lincoln, Nebraska, the heart of one of the reddest states in the country.  I have voted in the same polling location for the last 8 years.  Every election, my wife and I are the first two people at the poll when it opens (we like to vote immediately).  Today, when we arrived a half-hour before the polling place opened, there were already fourteen people in line.  The poll workers were astonished, my wife and I were shocked – and the line kept growing.  When we left, after voting, the line was longer than it was when we got there.  This has never happened before.
Ahead of us in line was three-generations of an African American family.  It was the first time voting for all three of them.  The youngest, who graduated high school last year, was calling his friends and getting them out of bed while we waited in line.  He was describing the polling place and giving directions for getting there. After he voted, he had probably the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.

My grin has been flaring up all day. I should get that checked out by a medical professional.
And Noam Scheiber recalls a conversation with Obama from 2003:

About midway through the interview, I asked the following: “In making the decision to run for this seat, how closely did you look at the [Carol] Moseley Braun race, at previous examples of African-Americans running statewide?” It was my fourth or fifth question in a row on the issue of race. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed at how preoccupied I was with the subject. Here I was talking to the most compelling political character of my lifetime, and I could only see him as an abstraction. 
Finally, Obama set me straight:
“Well, you know. Let me tell you this. I know that it’s going to be tempting writing this article, to write it as a “black” piece. I mean, I assume if I was a white guy who had won by 30 points, you wouldn’t be here. So I don’t want to begrudge that angle. But, you know, I looked at this race from the perspective of somebody who felt that I could deliver the strongest message for the Democrats in winning this seat back. And my–what I probably was more focused on was the fact that Illinois is a state that’s been trending strongly Democratic. Even when [former Illinois Senator Peter] Fitzgerald was in, my belief was that he was out of step with the politics of this state. And if I was in a position to–if I could  generate the resources to get on television, to speak directly to voters about what I believed the Democratic Party should represent, not only did I feel like people would feel good about having me as a spokesperson, I felt that the Democratic message would be victorious in November.”
I began frantically paging through my notebook to see what else I had.
What’s remarkable, of course, is that Obama turned out to be right. In fact, if you replace “Illinois” with “United States,” “state” with “country,” and “Fitzgerald” with “Bush,” his comment stands as a pretty good explanation for what’s likely to happen today. Most voters didn’t see him as the “black guy” running for president. They saw him as an effective spokesman for what they believed at a time when the other side had been discredited.

His message has been remarkably consistent. If you dig up some of those Chicago public access TV interviews he did in the early 2000s, you see pretty much the same Obama who’s a few hours away from (possibly maybe hopefully) the Presidency.
Final Update:
Nate Silver puts together a comprehensive guide to election coverage tonight. Beer up, get some friends, and plop your red state/blue state bottom on the couch and watch history in the making!