ballot
\ˈba-lət\
\ˈba-lət\
Week before last, I took a couple of days off from the Bluefish Editorial desk to conduct our regular civic ritual of running the polls. In many ways this Election Day was much like others I’ve written about before: there was the usual run-up of trainings, supply inventories, garage cleaning, booth assembly, and ballot preparation.
This last was a little more complicated this year: because of the vicissitudes of California’s not-completely-open primary, instead of our usual four stacks of paper ballots we had nineteen. And even this did not fully account for the range of possible party affiliations and languages in the precinct, which is politically purple as well as pronouncedly polyglot. All day, our touchscreen clerk kept hoping for a Filipino-speaking member of the Green party to arrive, so he could leap in and save the day.
Alas for the frustrated clerk, no such voter appeared, but we did see many of our regulars. There was the sweet-faced elderly man who likes to show off his wallet plastered with several years’ worth of I Voted! stickers while his wife chats up the Vietnamese-speaking poll worker in her ongoing quest for suitable young men to fix up with her granddaughter.
There was the leathery man from around the corner who usually does his yard work in a Speedo but who mercifully honors the occasion of going to the polls by donning street clothes, which he wears with the over-starched awkwardness of the habitual nudist. There was the guy from over the back fence who likes to play guitar and sing Portuguese love songs, followed by his next-door neighbor who favors slightly out-of-tune karaoke.
There was the extraordinarily beautiful fifty-something Asian woman with her much older white husband—every year he is more frail, and every year she is more tenderly solicitous. And then the scrappy couple that always insists on sharing the same voting booth, where they argue loudly in Vietnamese about the measures and candidates.
And there were the newbies, young and old. New arrivals to the neighborhood, with kids and dogs in tow. A pair of 40-something white men, first-time voters, who were super amped to be voting for Trump. A recently naturalized mother and daughter from India who asked me to snap a photo of them in front of our flag. And a whole crop of shiny new eighteen-year-olds, including several who went to elementary school with our kids. (Few things make me feel quite as old as handing a ballot to someone I’ve seen stick crayons up their nose.)
This last was a little more complicated this year: because of the vicissitudes of California’s not-completely-open primary, instead of our usual four stacks of paper ballots we had nineteen. And even this did not fully account for the range of possible party affiliations and languages in the precinct, which is politically purple as well as pronouncedly polyglot. All day, our touchscreen clerk kept hoping for a Filipino-speaking member of the Green party to arrive, so he could leap in and save the day.
Alas for the frustrated clerk, no such voter appeared, but we did see many of our regulars. There was the sweet-faced elderly man who likes to show off his wallet plastered with several years’ worth of I Voted! stickers while his wife chats up the Vietnamese-speaking poll worker in her ongoing quest for suitable young men to fix up with her granddaughter.
There was the leathery man from around the corner who usually does his yard work in a Speedo but who mercifully honors the occasion of going to the polls by donning street clothes, which he wears with the over-starched awkwardness of the habitual nudist. There was the guy from over the back fence who likes to play guitar and sing Portuguese love songs, followed by his next-door neighbor who favors slightly out-of-tune karaoke.
There was the extraordinarily beautiful fifty-something Asian woman with her much older white husband—every year he is more frail, and every year she is more tenderly solicitous. And then the scrappy couple that always insists on sharing the same voting booth, where they argue loudly in Vietnamese about the measures and candidates.
And there were the newbies, young and old. New arrivals to the neighborhood, with kids and dogs in tow. A pair of 40-something white men, first-time voters, who were super amped to be voting for Trump. A recently naturalized mother and daughter from India who asked me to snap a photo of them in front of our flag. And a whole crop of shiny new eighteen-year-olds, including several who went to elementary school with our kids. (Few things make me feel quite as old as handing a ballot to someone I’ve seen stick crayons up their nose.)
In the lulls, I contemplated the notion of the ballot. In the Venetian Republic, voting was sometimes accomplished by dropping a little colored ball into a container. Our word ballot is borrowed from that practice, coming from the Italian ballotta, or small ball (a diminutive of balla). It conjures up a rather stately procession, with all the Venetian electors lined up in their silken robes and plumed hats, dropping polished marble balls into a golden urn.
The interior of the Sala Maggior Consiglio, The Doge's Palace, Venice, with patricians voting for the election of new magistrates. By Joseph Heintz der Jüngere (1600-1678), via Wikimedia Commons
Of course this vision of gleaming order has probably never actually existed, then or now. More often than the cool click of marble spheres, our precious ritual seems like a crowded playcenter ball pit. There are hordes of kids shrieking and lunging around, slinging balls at each other with stinging force, thumping and climbing on each other or sinking inexorably into the sticky sub-layer of lost socks, old band-aids, and pocket grit. Someone ends up with a bloody nose, another with a wicked case of norovirus; others are dragged home fractious and wailing.
By יעקב (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons
But on the ground, in our no-frills garage, the procession had a certain motley sweetness to it. Trumpites and nudists, earnest immigrants and baffled teenagers, former refugees and frazzled parents, lovers tender and quarrelsome, they came to cast their votes. The footing may have been uncertain underfoot, the balls sticky with cake and spilled punch, but there we all were, doing the best we could, in our flawed, human, limited, glorious way.
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