Windy City abuzz on Election Day

It was 10 am Tuesday when Dion Manna emerged from the Oak Park Public Library, a site 15 kilometers from downtown Chicago that had been converted into a busy Election Day polling place.

"I just voted for (Barack) Obama again," Manna told China Daily. He said the incumbent president deserves four more years and that he disliked Republican Mitt Romney's position on issues.

Moments earlier, Barbara Furlong came out of the library pointing to her "I Voted Today" coat pin. She, too, had cast a ballot for Obama.

"There will be big trouble with Romney," the senior citizen said. "Health care is going to suffer, and I have three children working in the field."

Around noon in Chicago's Chinatown, Chen Caosi came out of a polling place inside John C Haines Elementary School. Chen, who emigrated from China 11 years ago, said he learned that the school wasn't his designated site and planned to head to the correct location later to vote for Obama.

Compared to the buzzing Oak Park library, the Chinatown site was sedate. One election precinct leader, who asked to be identified only as Marvin, said many locals had cast early ballots.

"It's so much easier," he said of Illinois rules that allowed early voting from Oct 22 through Nov 3.

At 4:30 pm at the Happy Village, a bar in Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood, the small, dimly lit counter was already occupied by a dozen young men and women drinking and chatting. But the bar's large back room was turned into a polling place where mostly young voters came, cast ballots and left in a hurry to the drizzle outside.

While most Chicago polling places are in schools, churches and libraries, small businesses also did double duty on Tuesday. Eddie's Food and Liquor, a grocery store on Cottage Grove, Delia's Beauty Salon on West 55th Street and Let Them East Chocolate, a lounge in Lincoln Square, were all turned into places to handle votes.

Though the intermittent rain may have dampened moods, Obama was clearly feeling upbeat on Election Day in his adopted hometown.

With formal campaigning over, the president visited a campaign office on the city's South Side, where he has a large home and once worked as a community organizer.

Keeping an Election Day tradition, Obama went to the Hope Athletic Center on the West Side in the early afternoon to play basketball with staff members and friends, including former Chicago Bulls stars Scottie Pippen and Randy Brown as well as Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former captain of Harvard University's basketball team.

Tuesday evening, Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden were scheduled to attend the campaign's official election-result watch party at McCormick Place, a convention center.

Unlike in 2008, when nearly a quarter-million people streamed into Grant Park along Lake Michigan to see the first black US president-elect make a historic speech, this year's decision to have an indoor celebration was based on concerns over security and the weather. Tuesday's rain proved a vindication for that move.

Only supporters who had volunteered for the campaign received tickets for the event, however. Several thousand people were expected to be on hand to hear Obama speak this time.

Neither city officials nor the Obama campaign announced other public gatherings on election night, but CNN organized an event in the plaza outside the James R Thompson Center downtown.

chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn