Voting With Our Feet, For The Last Time
We exercised our franchise at midmorning, almost certainly for the last time walking over to the Good Shepherd Center (a former Catholic home for “wayward girls” now owned by the City) and down to the basement, where the voting booths have been for decades in the Wallingford Senior Center. Although we live in a large city, this electoral experience resolves the compound equations of society into their elemental x’s and y’s, and there’s an unmistakable small-town feel to the activity. (click any photo to enlarge).
The polling place has generally also been manned by seniors, often the same folks keeping the book for the same precinct year after year.
We’re one of the last counties in the state to still have polling places to go to. Next year, unless there’s a glitch, we’ll most likely be voting 100% by mail. I’ll miss the Shirley Jackson-esque ritual of walking to the GSC with a cheat-sheet in hand and the serendipity of running into neighbors I haven’t seen in months, neighbors who, despite whatever they’ve got into their houses or their driveways, are brandishing that same single vote in their pockets that I am, a precious coin granted by parents and grandparents and legions of forbears who’ve made that same quotidian trek to the voting booth. Looks like others feel the same way.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been receiving an absentee ballot anyway, because I’m so often out of town, but, when I can, I carry it over to the polling place on election day instead of mailing it, just for the feeling of physical participation.
Results are starting to roll across the country towards us in an inexorable wave, and I’ll try not to stay up past midnight waiting for just one more state to fall.
It is small towny, isn’t it? I usually vote absentee, being a hater of traffic in a land of insufficient parking. But that thing about singing your name on a paper list proffered to you by the same grumpy lady year after year? Seems more real than bubbling in my choices at my desk at home.
I dropped my absentee ballot off in person yesterday too. What a thrilling feeling to take put “I voted” sticker on my collar and hike back home on such a historic day!
Great photos Phil … isn’t autumn such a gorgeous time? Oh, and the voting pics are good too!
we voted early at the county building. it did seem not quite right. aah progress.
KathyR - yeah, there are certain situations or places in our garguatuan cities that serve as social levelers. Just so it’s not FEMA.
Carroll - did you get your free Starbuck’s coffee? Here in Seattle, you could also get a free sex toy from local entrepreneurs.
Sue - I hate losing summer with those long hours of daylight, but when you encounter those tree colors, it’s cool.
Roger - welcome to the future. We’re early adopters of all things digital, you and I, but I’ll miss this little autumn pageant.
This was a great post, Phil, and made me remember the “old days” when we had paper ballots. I miss them and, in my geezerly approach to life, don’t trust the touchscreen versions we used in my neighborhood. There’s something incredibly energizing about standing in line, waiting to vote, that isn’t matched by anything else I’ve ever done.
I’m a little late in catching up with the interwebs post-election. What a beautiful post. I vote absentee and this year I filled it in on the floor of a huge dirty room at around midnight while 30 or so other folks and I were trying to get the right poll location stickers on the right door knockers for canvassing the next day (targeted at voters who are dems but had missed one or two of the last presidential elections in kingco). My first time at a voting booth, I could easily peek under the curtain while mom punched all those holes up above. It was a quiet and serious affair and I knew it was very important from mom’s attitude. I don’t know if she took us with her because she had to or if she was consciously trying to ingrain a process in our heads but it worked - I missed the booth but the irony of the booth is that the people who always vote find it easy to get there…the people whose door knockers I was labeling were the non-votes that can screw us all in the end. If they had a mail-in ballot would we skip their door next campaign? It was still quite ceremonial for me when I filled in those circles. Even more so when we won so much of we should have.
Thanks, John. We never got converted to the touchscreen here. I think they tried one in our precinct in 2006, but I boycotted it.
Amy, welcome back to normal life, and thanks for putting all that energy into the campaign, and inviting us to the Goreacle.