Safe to say that Galicia Malone was more committed to voting today than most. The 21-year-old Illinois woman was so determined to vote in her first presidential election that, when she went into labor at 3am, she insisted on waiting until she could get to her polling place before going to the hospital. “I never voted before so this made a major difference in my life,” Malone explains. “And I wanted this to be a stepping-stone for my daughter.”
By the time she was completing her ballot, she was also having contractions every five minutes, CBS Chicago reports. “I was just trying to read and breathe, read and breathe,” she says. She drove herself to the hospital afterward, and got some praise from the Cook County Clerk. “If only all voters showed such determination to vote,” he says in a statement. “My hat goes off to Galicia for not letting anything get in the way of voting. What a terrific example she is showing for the next generation." (More Election 2012 stories.)