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The lines were even longer in parts of Miami, as Governor Rick Scott continued to reject calls to extend the early-voting deadline to Sunday morning.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — On Saturday, the last day of Florida's truncated early-voting period, as has been the case since early voting began on October 27, the lines were long enough at the library on Sistrunk Boulevard here that the people running the polling station opened the auditorium and started showing a movie. (Today's feature was The Help, which many of the people in the auditorium found completely hilarious.) The folks running the polls would take a group of people out of the line, take them into the auditorium, and let them enjoy the movie in the air-conditioning for a spell until it was time for their group to go back out into the lobby and vote. "We've been doing it all along," said Desmond Hannibal, a smiling gent from the islands who seems to know everybody in the joint by their first names. "That first day, we had people waiting out there an hour-and-a-half, two hours, right at the beginning of the day. We let them come in, cool off, watch the movie for a while, and then, when it was their turn, we took them out. People liked it, so we kept doing it.

"It has been very crowded here, even today," Hannibal says. "But there hasn't been any real trouble. There's a lot of people who wonder why we won't be open tomorrow, though."

The reason, of course, is that Florida's Republican governor Rick Scott and his pet legislature barbered the early-voting period. They barbered it again and again, rejecting calls as late as this week from the League of Women Voters and the state Democratic Party, and ignoring them as late as Saturday morning from Senator Bill Nelson. They barbered that early-voting period so that it ended on the Saturday prior to the election, instead of on the Sunday, which ordinarily would have been the day when churches in the African-American communities around the state would have mobilized their congregations to go and vote — the famous "souls to the polls" strategy. That was blunted, quite deliberately, in Florida this year, despite what may be record turnout here.

That did not hold Imogene Bell down. Oh, no, lord, it did not. She was working the whole line, from the people coming out of voting, on whom she called down the blessings of the Lord for what they had done, and she went up and down the long queue, telling the people how proud she was of what they were about to do. Some of them laughed at Imogene, in her straw fedora with the president's name done up in rhinestones along one side of it, but she just laughed back at them. She knew what was going on, she did.

"It's been beautiful," Bell said. "I'll tell you, sweetheart, it's no joke. I'm so proud to see the peoples come up and put they vote in, stand on their word, go in and pick out the one that they like, and put him in there. I'm so proud. But most of all, I'm proud of them because they know what they're doing.

"See? When peoples go to Christ, they know who they dealing with. We're dealing with the black horse. The black horse? Obama is the black horse. And he's there to balance things out. He's not going anywhere until God says it's time for him to go, and I don't care, you can quote me on this. It's in your Bible, the 21st Psalm. He's the black horse. I seen the crippled, the blind, the deaf, the mute, come out here and vote. And that's the most beautiful thing to see, to see our peoples come out and vote."

Imogene Bell also knew what was happening with the people who were making it harder to vote.

"See, they ain't going by that stuff no more. They're standing up for themselves. Nobody have to stop them because they're going to do it. It's in them. It's coming out of them. Because it's time. Obama going to be doing four more years. If he don't do four more years, it's because my father, my Jesus Christ, tells him it's time for him to come up out of there. All they have to do, the people here, is continue to walk upright. I've been encouraging them. Let them know I'm proud of them. Because that's what you got to do to keep the people knowing that they're doing the right thing. Because sometimes, people can talk and run their mouth, and that's all right. You here to do the right thing."

If, of course, you can. There has been no little amount of finagling already down here in the home office of modern political finagling. There was the truncated early-voting schedule, and there is the ballot, which is four pages long and looks like a geodetic survey map of Mongolia. Throw all of that together, mix in the usual amount of purely political electioneering and all the simple human error that is inherent in a system that depends on overwhelmed volunteer labor, and you are bound and determined to end up with glitches.

On Saturday afternoon, Brian Reynolds was a glitch. He was standing in the parking lot outside the library, talking to a woman named Jo Brooks. Brooks had come to Florida from California to work with the president's campaign at the polls, answering questions from voters who were increasingly baffled by the increasingly baffling election procedures that have been foisted on the electorate in the wake of that electorate's having had the audacity to elect a black Democrat to be president of the United States in 2008. Reynolds told Brooks what had happened to him.





UPDATE (Sunday Night): Florida Early-Voting Madness — Why Is This Still So Hard?

UPDATE (Sunday Morning): Florida Democrats Sue to Extend Early Voting... Overnight

UPDATE (Saturday Night): Bomb Scare at Florida Polls — Not Even as Ugly as It Gets

MORE FROM SATURDAY IN FLORIDA: The Corner Where Romney and the Tea Party Crash


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