It may have taken possibly the closest and most pivotal presidential race of our time, but Election Day 2004 elicited the kind of response this campus usually reserves for home football games.
At 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, chief elections inspector Adam Young showed up at Gordon Commons to find a line of students waiting to vote. Even though it was still a half hour before polls opened, the line of eager voters snaked beyond the laundry vent at Ogg Hall.
At seven, Young said he heard a few snickers when he uttered the lines required by law-\Hear yea, hear yea! The polls are now open.""-but students were respectful despite a voting line that was at times more than two hours long.
In his 20 years observing polls, Young said he had never observed a turnout like that.
""I've heard people say all the time that their vote doesn't matter, but obviously that's not the case,"" Young said as he gazed around the basement crowded with young voters. ""People feel that their vote is obviously very important.""
On a day when even city busses commanded residents to vote, it was hard for students to stay on the sidelines and avoid the democratic process. All over campus, volunteers raised signs, hooted at passers-by and talked up their candidates like sports fans do for their favorite teams.
On top of that, clipboard-toting activists stormed student neighborhoods, and Library Mall was a virtual tent city of political groups informing students of where to vote.
UW-Madison junior Matt Healy said he was repeatedly stopped by friends and volunteers to ask if he had voted. He had, and although he called the campus-wide political outpouring exciting he said he questioned the effects of passionate electioneering.
""It's definitely treated kind of like a sporting event, which is good in a sense because it gets people concerned about voting, but doesn't necessarily influence informed voters as much as it could,"" he said. ""Getting people to vote is important, but not as much as getting them informed.""
Voter turnout was also high at Memorial Union, where election inspector John Walsh said 150 to 200 people were in line when polls opened. By 6 p.m. more than 1,200 people had voted in Tripp Commons, Walsh said, more than the amount who voted there in 2000 when a second ward also polled at that location.
At Memorial Union, lawyers volunteering for the Republican Party challenged proof of residency requirements for a number of voters Tuesday. But those charges failed when poll officials obtained certified residency lists from both the city and university, Walsh said.
""I have not seen a challenge today of any substance or merit at all,"" Walsh, also a Madison attorney, said.
Elsewhere in the Union, students gathered in the Ratshkeller to watch election returns and discuss the day's events.
""It only took me 25 minutes to vote, but I would've been in line for 12 hours,"" said UW-Madison senior Eric Heggelund.
