BRISTOL — Residents of Bristol and neighboring towns celebrated the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president, respectively, with music and dancing on Saturday evening.
The Count Every Vote Bristol organizing group had originally planned to host a rally as they had for the previous three days emphasizing that every vote cast for the Nov. 3 election should be counted.
“Earlier in the week we were concerned that the election process wasn’t going to go through fairly,” local organizer Sarah Stott said. “On Friday we saw that most of the states were tallying their ballots with little upset, so we changed our messaging to ‘The System is working,’ and we put green check marks on the signs showing that votes seemed to be counted fair and square.”
Around 80 people came to the Count Every Vote rally on Wednesday, then 30 showed up on Thursday and again on Friday.
“Then on Saturday afternoon we realized that we could clearly just celebrate that our electoral process had worked,” Stott continued, in a press release. “After the news came that the election had been called, we changed our sign messages for the 4 p.m. rally to say, ‘This is What Democracy Looks like.’”
An estimated 100 people end up at the Bristol Green on Saturday.
A special moment occurred when the Bristol postman drove past in his delivery truck, and the crowd erupted in spontaneous applause in gratitude to the U.S. Postal Service.
Around 5 p.m. on Saturday, the rally was joined by Biden/Harris supporters who brought music and a party started. More than 100 kids, teenagers and adults danced to popular upbeat music until about 6 p.m. As Stott said, “as a Biden supporter, I’m thrilled that Biden won, but I’m also just so relieved that the election process seems to be going through a legal and fair process.”
A final highlight of the night was watching teenagers dancing in the intersection in front of Holley Hall during the four-way stop walk light.
Mary Adams-Smith, co-chair of the event, summed up the involvement of many Addison County residents:
“So many of us worked so hard throughout the summer and fall trying to get out the vote by encouraging voters through letters, postcards, texts and phone calls to make a plan for voting,” she said. “Because of the pandemic none of us knew just how the process was really going to work. I can’t even imagine the pressure that those working the polls, counting the ballots and delivering the mail have experienced, and I think a lot of us expected the counting to go on much longer than it did before a president-elect was declared. When I heard the race called at 11:25 Saturday morning, I felt I could finally exhale after a very long time. Spontaneously celebrating with others on the Bristol Green Saturday night was just the icing on the cake.”