At Temple polling place, long lines … and a quick resolution

Hundreds of Temple University students stayed in line for over an hour at the polling station at Bright Hope Baptist Church as afternoon turned to evening Tuesday, before additional resources were provided to end the delay and get the line moving.

Marina Hamal and Angela Bouch, two freshman students at Temple, waited an hour and a half for their first opportunity to vote. Neither of them were frustrated, though. 

“They have a lot of events,” Hamal said, referring to activities to keep people occupied. “Like they have the booths set up to take pictures in, and they have a lot of people that are just there to sit around and talk to, and pizza.” 

Volunteers from various organizations offered free snacks and drinks. A DJ played on the lawn in front of the line. Actor Paul Rudd, who also visited the polling station at Villanova University, thanking students for voting.

Peter Jerdee, a volunteer with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, came over from Bergen County, New Jersey, to assist with the Harris-Walz “Triple the Vote” campaign. He’d been at a location in South Philly before coming to Temple.

“It’s a very different vibe, much younger crowd here,” he said. “There were no lines there. Here, it’s been a line pretty much around the block.”

Jerdee’s role at the Bright Hope Baptist Church was to let non-student residents like Reese Godwin know they could go directly to the front of the line, ahead of the students. 

Godwin, who was voter No. 264 at the station, said that once he was ushered into the polling station, the process was “smooth” and “wonderful.”

According to Philadelphia City Commissioner Vice Chair Lisa Deeley, the long lines came to the city’s attention in the afternoon, at which point two additional voting systems and four electronic poll books were brought in to speed up the process.

By 6:45 p.m., the line was down to about 20 people outside the front door.

Delays were reportedly a common issue at poll sites near universities, perhaps a function of heavy college student participation.

“One thing we learned in the pandemic in 2020 and in ’16 in the presidential election, these young people are resilient and they want to vote,” Deeley said. “So we’re doing everything we can to make sure they can get it done as quickly as possible.”

“I’m 61 years old and we didn’t always have these rights,” Godwin said. “So to see young people who are excited, who are standing in line to go cast their ballots, it just touches my heart.”

Robert Stafford, a Temple junior, said he waited for around an hour and 45 minutes to vote for the first time in his life. Despite the delay, he described it as a good experience.

“I’m not really a big politics guy, but I follow from here to there,” he said, adding of his decision, “Looking back at it, it was a very easy choice for me.”

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