Irregularities

February 05, 2008

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

Swellville is one of only four towns in our entire crazy-liberal state that consistently votes Republican (gotta to protect those capital gains, don’t you know).

The first time T and I voted here we were a little taken aback by the setup. The polling place (really it’s the elementary school cafeteria, complete with lingering smells of rubber hot dogs) is staffed and run entirely by volunteers over the age of 90. Seriously, we’re talking superannuated Old Ones.

After you check in (no ID required, ever), you’re handed a pencil sharpened to a deadly point for voting day by the Ladies Octogenarian Pencil Sharpening Guild, which may or may not serve sherry at their weekly meetings.

You vote by coloring in the bubbles next to the candidate of your choice. It’s a little like taking the SATs again, only you can turn the page back at any time without having to raise your hand. There is no privacy—the voting “booth” is a hard plastic contraption, like a box without a top, that looks like a slightly bigger version of a Battleship game board.

When your ballot is properly be-bubbled, you file to the end of the row, where an Oldster with shaking liver-spotted hands helps you feed the ballot into a box that looks like a cross between a compost bin and a very large paper shredder. “Wow, they’re actually trashing our ballots in front of our faces,” I whispered to T that first election, convinced our Old One had seen we were new Democrats in town and had taken appropriate action.

It’s true, we’ve had some bitter elections in Swellville. The state forgets we all aren’t rich and won’t give us any money, so the only way to pay for the schools is to raise taxes, which puts a serious squeeze on the Septuagenarian Set.

Those elections, the Oldsters glare at the moms with their toddlers clinging to their knees like the walking, talking bottom-line expense that they are, and the moms give a glare back that says, your kids had a chance, why not mine? Then there’s a bad feeling in the room, and everyone goes home feeling like crap about the government and their fellow citizens.

But national elections? The Ancients are positively giddy. They joke with the cop on paid detail, there to sniff out any funny stuff from Swellville’s legion of lawbreakers, they pat the toddlers on the head, they pass out cheery oval stickers that say “I voted!” with abandon. “Take two,” they say, pushing the roll in your direction. Then you feel proud to be a voter and happy the system, at least in tiny sheltered Swellville, works as the founding fathers would have wished.

It was the Old Ones I was thinking of this morning when I woke up at 5:30. Up till that moment, I’d been an undecided voter, a situation I’ve truly never been in before. It’d been weighing on me these past days, but suddenly I felt better. I thought of our Seniors, doing their duty every election, year after year, watching the harried, bitchy parents squeal up in their SUVs. Always so busy! To what end?

These ladies and gentlemen have seen a lot of elections. They’ve lived through wars worse that this one, recessions that hit closer to home, presidents worse than the one we have….okay, forget that last part.

The point is, the changiest Change Agent on the ballot can’t fix Swellville’s budget problems, not if he or she were elected tomorrow morning, ended the war a week from Tuesday, and started funding Special Ed mandates before Valentine’s Day. 

With that realization—it doesn’t really matter—I’m feeling a little giddy myself. Forget platforms, electability be damned, I’m off to vote like an idealistic 20-year-old.

I’m hoping for two stickers and a pencil.

Update: Wow. They changed to markers. Like, Flair pens. What’s next, Swellville? Actual voting booths with little curtains? Hanging chads? (Gasp) e-voting? Off we crawl, inch by inch, into the 21st century.

I did get a sticker, though. Life is good.