My Zoom class concluded several minutes before its scheduled 2PM end. In late October, the day's weather allowed comfort with a long sleeved shirt but no jacket. It seemed like the right time to vote, exactly one week in advance of the formal Election Day.
My state permits early voting up to ten days in advance. Each county has at least one location. Mine has several, though a pittance of the number of polling sites that the state will monitor on Election Day. Each early voting site must agree to remain open all ten days except Sunday at all specified hours. Very few communal agencies can make that commitment. As a result, lines become long. The day before, I had driven past the site. Parking in the center's lot was unrealistic. No spaces appeared open along the sidewalks of the street on which the location stood, though I didn't sample the cross streets. An elementary school sits next door, one that would be letting its students out while I waited my turn. I opted to return later in the week. This time I anticipated that I would have to park a block or two away, finding a side residential street with its own median and legal parking in front of a modest suburban house.
After locking my car, I crossed the street at an intersection with crosswalks but no traffic lights or stop sign. Gaps in traffic and inability to drive very fast along a road that a lot of motorists occupied as they sought their chance to vote assured my safety.
No ambiguity to where this site was or what it was for. Campaign signs for every candidate on the ballot enticed the undecided. I was not undecided. The community center has a small frontage. Beyond it stands a handsome brick school, now vacant but with its sign still legible in cursive over its front door. To the left facing that door, visitors could read the cornerstone: MCMXXIV. The building's centenary. It had one fluorescent light visible in an upper-floor window. Several windows had air conditioning units protruding to the outside. Its purpose or its occupancy was not readily deduced by the many voters who entered the queue, which extended to the side of the building opposite the cornerstone. It appeared about the same length as the one I had driven past the day before. But parking space established and no competing obligations the rest of the afternoon, I affirmed that I would not be deterred from expressing my electoral preferences by any hint of impatience.
I latched myself onto the line's rear, behind a lady who kept to herself the whole time. Two couples, likely contemporaries of mine, entered the line behind me. Our conversations, which would last the entire time it took to reach the voting booth, began with me trying to set my smartwatch's stopwatch. Its black screen reflected the afternoon's direct sunshine. I could not see it, though I knew how to enter clock mode blindly. I could not enter stopwatch mode. Instead, I noted the time: 2:17 PM. While I had to stroll the width of the abandoned school with other voters filling that distance, I took little assessment of who the other voters were. I know the catchment area of that center. Mostly suburbanites like myself and the other two couples. The district has its demographic diversity. The Center itself offers community based programs to a population less well-off than me. Wage earners in retail, security, civil service, healthcare. People of African, Hispanic, and Asian ancestry live nearby, while those with advanced university degrees who work as professionals in large corporations live a few miles away, mostly to the west. The two couples behind me fit that description. We quipped about kids, schools, and other places we had lived. They were each business people who sold or merged with larger entities. One handed over the keys to a private equity firm after having built the business over decades from start-up to 400 employees. Not different from my tale of finding solo medical practice unable to compete with larger institutions, forcing me to seek and accept employment at one. They wanted to be near their kids. I wanted to be a healthy distance from mine, just as I preferred settling in a place where it was easier for me to visit my parents and in-laws than for them to visit me.
The line plodded forward. Periodically, an official from the state Elections Department would venture along the line, asking us if anyone needed to sit down due to frailty. None of us took her up on the offer. Slowly we got close enough to read the carved concrete above the front door with the center's name, then onto a small front concrete patio leading to the glass front doors with benches for those who needed rest on the side. Not long after, our turns arrived. The identity station had three workers for four polling booths. The usher pointed me to a most personable official in the middle. She took my drivers license, had me sign an electronic form on a screen, then announced my name as the next voter, as she handed me a paper with a list of contested offices that I would need to insert into a window once at the voting screen. The booth monitor held the black privacy curtain at booth #3, which I entered. Paper inserted, error response, re-inserted, followed by a screen with each candidate for each office. Democrats listed vertically in the left column, Republican list just to the right of that. All offices but one were contested. And farther to the right of the screen appeared isolated names of independent candidates or fringe parties. Irrespective of their worthiness, their placement on the election screen disadvantaged them. This time I voted straight party. Touch each name in the column, watching the box with my candidates' names transform from white to traffic light green. It questioned me a few times if I wanted to review my selections. Confident that I voted for the best people from President at the top to County Council President at the bottom, I asked the machine to give me the confirm vote option. Another electronic box to touch, this in a somewhat lighter shade of green. I pressed that box with my index finger, so at least one list of hopefuls could rest assured that each of them at least appealed to somebody.
As I exited the curtain, I encountered a table with I Voted stickers. I peeled one off, adhered it to my forehead, confirmed my watch time as 3:25PM. The line took about an hour and ten minutes. And my new acquaintances told me about an attractive restaurant right near my home that I had never visited. Checked out their web site when I arrived home. As expected, school would be letting out just as I exited the voting location. Having parked about two blocks away, I strolled to the intersection where the school crossing guard with neon yellow vest stopped the traffic to allow me to the other side of the street. While I did not really know the way home from that side street, I drove along its length. It intersected with a main road. From there I knew the best route to my house.
The designated Election Day will arrive. My house sits about a twenty-minute walk or three-minute drive from the border with a swing state. Media, particularly TV, originates in the megacity on that side of the border, putting me in the unwelcome advertising cross-fire. My old HS friends reacquainted on FB some fifteen years ago. In the end, we vote the same way, though their postings of their preferences always make me wonder whether we derived the same level of analytical skills from the classes we shared. I've minimized my time there as a result. And that's before we even get to paid candidate advertising, most highly dependent on innuendo of some type. And I no longer even sign on to Twitter, as much as I have made an effort to follow mostly reputable journalists. With my ballot submitted, I become immune to external influences. Not the ads. Not the signs stuck into the lawn sod outside the polling place I just visited. I'm done. Polls with posted results showing who you favor always ahead on YouTube. No bandwagon for me to jump aboard. Just tune in again when the real public preferences counted and reported.
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