Islanders lined up at the polls today to cast ballots in a presidential election that has riveted and divided the country.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Polling places are Aquinnah town offices, the Chilmark Community Center, the Edgartown town hall, the Oak Bluffs public library, the American Legion Hall in Vineyard Haven, and the West Tisbury public safety building.

Vineyard voters go to the polls Tuesday to cast ballots in the 2012 presidential election. And while the big draw is the race for president and large turnouts are expected here as elsewhere, Vineyard voters will also makes choices on a host of other state and local issues, from a close Massachetts Senate race to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to medical marijuana.

What was once a conservative enclave has given way to a reliable liberal stronghold. And the place where Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly earned the respect of Islanders (if not their votes) by caring more for his boat than he did for electioneering is now known as the summer vacation spot for presidents whose ice cream shop visits and golf games make headlines.

As around the country, the political landscape of Martha’s Vineyard is ever shifting.

School costs are driving budget increases across the Island, but in Chilmark, one expense forcing voters to dig into their wallets for education spending may come as a shock.

The Menemsha School, barely four years old, already needs $100,000 in repairs that include replacing moldy floors and rotten doors. Voters will be asked Monday night at annual town meeting to foot the bill. The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Chilmark Community Center.

The annual town election takes place Wednesday and will feature five override questions, but no contested races.

Sturdy brown envelopes, some of them mailed from as far away as the Netherlands, Italy and Russia, are stacked up tall on the desk of Wanda Williams, the town clerk in Edgartown.

Ask Ms. Williams or any of the Island's other five town clerks how things are going the week before Election Day, and you'll hear a deep sigh. They are swamped, not only with a surge of those brown envelopes containing absentee ballots but also with tallying up new voters.

The nation may be split down the middle after Tuesday's presidential election, but the Vineyard was anything but divided when it came to casting ballots for Democrats.

Voters on Martha's Vineyard came out in droves Tuesday, and by margins as wide as three to one, they threw their support behind Sen. John Kerry, the unsuccessful presidential contender, and sent incumbent Democrats back to the Massachusetts Legislature in the face of Republican challenges.

Vineyard voters in the state election this week overwhelmingly said
yes to a study of their county charter and swept two new members onto
the Dukes County commission, but expressing a measured mandate for
change, also returned two incumbents to the regional governing board.

The last day to register to vote in Massachusetts was Wednesday, and the deadline saw a flurry of activity in town halls across the Island.

“I’m working fast and furious,” reported Edgartown town clerk Wanda Williams yesterday morning. Ms. Williams said nearly 60 new voters registered in Edgartown on Wednesday. Because she is still entering figures, the town clerk was unable to report the new total number of registered voters in town at press time.

It jumps out at you. In paragraph thirteen of an article written by Mara Liasson in July 1976, then a Vineyard Gazette intern: “Right now in the up-Island swamps the bushes are covered with heavy clusters of cream-colored flowers and purple berries.”

Of course, by the time an elderberry bush bears berries, its flowers tend to be long gone.

After the polling irregularities in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, which saw George W. Bush come to office, David Earnhart did nothing. But when it was repeated in 2004, he could not let it pass again.

“A lot of people were angry in 2004,” Mr. Earnhart said this week from his office in Nashville. “But where most everybody else moved on, I didn’t.”