Rain, votes and art in Montgomery

Scenes from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, where I voted around 8:30 a.m. this morning:

• Reese McKinney, Montgomery County's Republican probate judge, drives away from me as I step out of my car. It's a black SUV with a campaign sign on the sides. Nothing unusual about that. What catches my eye in the half-full parking lot is the American flag, rising perpendicularly from the rear bumper and flying in the wet breeze. It looks big enough to drape the roof of the vehicle. It's debatable whether that makes McKinney more qualified to issue boat licenses than his opponent, but it's a colorful sight on a dreary morning.
• Voting in a museum feels both exalted and juvenile. Exalted because the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is a very impressive building, filled with light, hardwood floors and great art. You get to the polling station after walking through a maze of corridors, each turn marked by a guard wearing a suit and an earpiece. It's almost like the Secret Service has cleared the building so you, the voter, can make your crucial decision for democracy and set the nation and the state on its next path.
  That feeling holds right until you walk into the voting room and see a caterpillar on the wall, cardboard dividers with construction-paper colors and relatively small chairs. Humility returns with lightning speed.
• There's a sink behind me in the voting room; as I finish filling out my ballot and get up to hand it to a poll worker, I pass a sign saying "FOR HANDWASHING ONLY."
• I'm voter 133 at 8:30 a.m. There are two rooms for voters to fill out their ballots, so I guess this one has gotten -- let's see, 133 divided by 90 (the polls opened at 7 a.m.) is roughly 1.5 voters a minute. So if that pace holds (and it will probably vary throughout the day), that's 1,080 voters going through that room before 7 p.m. (Feel free to correct my math -- if journalists were good with numbers, we'd be accountants.)
• To my surprise, there's just one person campaigning outside the Museum of Fine Arts -- Emily Head, the 23-year-old niece of Tim Head, a Montgomery City Councilman running against McKinney for the probate judge office. She's skipping classes at Auburn University today to campaign for her uncle and has already hit her second location this morning. Her feelings on Election Day? "There's going to be a little tension, but we have given ourselves to the Lord," she says, and they'll be happy with His decision. Head has relatively high heels on, which seems heroic for someone planning to be out all day. She says she thought about that, but decided flip-flops would leave her feet cold.
• Mary Ivey, a retired factory worker (and no relation to state Treasurer Kay Ivey), waits with her daughter for her son-in-law to pick them up. She won't say who she voted for, but she's more than willing to share her feelings about the campaign. "I thought it was ridiculous," she says. "I thought it was bad." And her reason for voting is equally direct. "I'm an American, I love America, and I like our freedom," she says.