At 8 pm on Tuesday night, Benjamin Schroeter was standing outside the Westin Hotel with a sour look on his face. He said he’d waited for hours to cast his ballot at Union Station, only to finally give up amid sweltering heat inside and no where to sit. He said he was ready to sue the county for what he called an infringement of his right to vote and a lack of provisions for his disability. So what was up with those three-hour lines? We tried to wrest some answers from King County Communications Specialist Katie Gilliam.”There’s no doubt the lines were long,” Gilliam says, who also claims she visited the station at 10:30 p.m. and later heard that people were there until past midnight. “We like to think it created an election-night experience to remember.”Obviously she hadn’t met Schroeter.”It was miserable,” he’d said the night before. “There were thousands of people there, and a lot of them left and couldn’t vote. I plan on filing a lawsuit.”Gilliam says Schroeter was in the vast minority, and that the mood was mostly festive inside the building. She says that people “were smiling” and that “one woman came over and thanked me, personally.'”As for the heat, she says it was from the combination of a warm day and hundreds of people crammed in a small area.When told that Schroeter–who says he’s disabled and can’t stand for extended periods of time–was denied a place to sit, Gilliam sounded concerned.”We did try and get chairs to people,” she said. “I brought a woman a chair myself.”Gilliam says the county will do an evaluation of how the voting process worked (and didn’t) and that come next election, things will hopefully go smoother.”We know no one really relished the thought of standing in line for hours,” she says. “We’ll be looking at things like more staff and added locations for next election.”
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