"I'll keep doing it as long as I can" - Munford 2:15 p.m.

Eighty-nine-year-old Belle Swinford (she'll be 90 in February) has been a poll worker for more than 34 years-she can't remember exactly when she started working on election days, but she knows it was "since before 1974." And if she has her way, she will keep doing it for many more years to come.

"I'm a permanent fixture," she says and notes that "it's a lot of fun." She loves it, she says, and she has only missed one election in all those years, when she broke her hip last year. The best part about election day is "seeing the folks you don't see often," she says.

Belle is manning the post by the ballot counting machine on this rainy election day in Munford. The polling place is a garage next to the water district that houses apparatus for the volunteer fire department. By 12 noon, Belle had already put 420 ballots through the machine, "a pretty good turnout," she remarks.

More voters will probably show up this afternoon she notes, especially when the Honda plant has its shift change. But so far, "they've been coming in steady. The rain didn't slow them down," she says.

Voters kept up a steady trickle while I was there.

In about a half an hour the total had climbed to 435 people who had marked their ballots and run them through the machine.

After each person votes Belle gives them an "I voted today" sticker with a great big smile to go with it. Most of the voters seem to know Belle well. They greet her with hugs, smiles, and easy familiartiy. Her great-grandaughter stops by to offer a hug on her way out. Election day is still a grand social occasion in Munford, it seems, an opportunity to visit with folks you haven't seen in a while, to chit chat and catch up on news, as well as exercise the right to vote.

"I've always enjoyed it," Belle says of election day. "I always have. I'll keep doing it as long as I can."