Vienna At The Polls: Slow Super Tuesday

Update 6:56 p.m: Just 266 of Wolftrap's 3,425 active voters had cast their ballots around 6 p.m.

Resident Deb Maddrell said she wasn't optimistic about Mitt Romney or Ron Paul securing the GOP nomination for the presidential race.

"But you have to vote anyways," she said.

Maddrell said the local candidates seeking Republican nominations is really what made Super Tuesday interesting.

"[A two-candidate ballot didn't surprise me] because the Governor endorsed Romney. It makes sense," she said.

Original: Poll workers at several Vienna precincts said Super Tuesday was off to a slow start -- and they didn't expect it to get much better.

Just after 8 a.m., only 18 voters had cast ballots at Madison High School, which houses both the Vienna No. 6 precinct and the recently-drawn Precinct 204, Madison.

Seven of those voters were for Precinct 204.

"To get 50 [voters in 204] would be a shock," a poll worker from that precinct said.

"My guy is on the ballot," said resident Jon Borrowman as he left the polling place. "I was excited to pull the lever."

At , which had one of the highest turnouts in the area in the 2008 Republican presidential primary, 41 voters had showed up by about 8:30 a.m. In the 2008 primary, the precinct saw 440 voters. A poll worker said Tuesday he thought they'd get about 200 this year.

While poll workers thought , a two-candidate ballot didn't deter Tim Walsh, an Army veteran, from voting in Tuesday's primary. For one, he said, it was a civic duty -- "otherwise if we're unsatisfied, we only have ourselves to blame," Walsh said.

Walsh said he doesn't vote along Republican or Democrat lines but instead has cast votes for candidates from both parties over the last several years, put Mitt Romney's name on Tuesday's ballot. He was optimistic about the former Massachusetts governor's odds of getting the party nod. Whether he'd go on to defeat President Barack Obama wasn't as certain, but Walsh is hoping there's a new president in the White House come 2013.

"Obama is the singular most unqualified candidate to ever be elected president," he said. "I hope to get him out."

Flint Hill poll workers estimated they were getting about one voter every few minutes, but it would slow down before picking up around noon and just before the polls closed.

Check Patch for poll updates throughout the day; join us live tonight as resultes come in.