Did Usher Deserve Special Voting Treatment?
The wire services and social media are abuzz this morning because the manager of Usher's Atlanta-area polling place is taking some heat for allowing the R&B superstar/Bieber mentor to skip the line on Election Day.
Photo by Marco Torres Usher at Toyota Center, November 2010
Rewind:
Last Night: Usher at Toyota Center (November 23, 2010)
According to the Associated Press, Fulton County officials instructed poll manager Frank Padua to direct Usher to the ballot box "as quickly as possible." The "My Way" and "Confessions" singer then reportedly took a photo of himself voting and posted it on Twitter.
"I take the voting process very seriously, and I was just taken aback that this was allowed to happen," Usher's fellow voter Alan Christian told Atlanta's WSB-TV.
WSB's report added that while Christian had been waiting in line for 45 minutes, Usher, whose full name is Usher Raymond IV, was escorted in through a back door of the Bill Johnson Community Center in Roswell, north of Atlanta.
Somehow this did not sit well with Liz Hausmann, a Fulton County Commissioner who told the AP that she could think of a few other people who would like to be allowed to skip the line -- the elderly, those in wheelchairs and people with young children, for example. Padua's reasoning was that if he stood in line like everyone else, the singer could become a "distraction."
Usher, now 34, has not commented on the situation (his Twitter account is currently down), but it's understandable that he would want to do his civic duty without having to sign a bunch of autographs or otherwise get mobbed.
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