Friday, November 12, 2004
Cleveland Post-Mortem V: The Vote, and the Real Work
It’s been a long week, and I must admit I’m feeling pretty tapped out of Cleveland stories. What’s left are moments, anecdotes, grousings about the Las Vegas airport and the general shape of the planet… it puts me in mind of the fact that my major task while volunteering was to clean the volunteer headquarters and haul their garbage to the loading dock.
I’d hung around looking for something constructive to do for most of the day; I was expecting to have to defend democracy actively, to insert myself into the fray as poll watchers and poll workers and disenfranchised patriots struggled with their circumstances - I was there to correct the problems, to clarify rights and to cleanse the process like an exterminator cleans silverfish out of a rectory. Well that’s not exactly the kind of cleanup they wound up needing me to do. When I arrived at my first monitoring station, the republican poll watcher told me frankly that he intended to lodge no complaints whatsoever - he just wanted to keep his eyes on the ballot box to make sure nothing untoward happened to it. At my second assignment, the pollwatchers chatted with me about how smoothly it was all going, considering the number of voters, first time voters, and voters there with kids - all of which seemed, to me, to be a ringing endorsement of the process. Bring those voters out of the woodwork! Help them when they don’t know where the door is, what to do there, how to make their voices heard! The newer they are to the process, the easier I’d like it to go for them!
And that was especially true when I saw two, three, even four generations coming to vote together - grandma with her walker, leaning on her grandson, while the middle generation is carrying a toddler over the puddles, the child too young to belong to anyone but the grandson.... and all of them are peering curiously at the political signs, at their neighbors greeting them in the rain as well as the strangers backing them up; they’re checking out the democratic slate and they’re very interested in the occasional bag of chips or cookies we distributed to people who might be waiting in line for a while… even when the voter was a tough young thug with capped teeth and a streetwise grimace on a grizzled chin, when I stepped up and asked if everything went alright inside, he’d give me a curt nod and a minimal twinkle, an eye-to-eye exchange that none of the others could have seen that told me, “yeah, it was weird but it was cool and now its done so later on holmes;” and in each of these cases I’d done nothing - the system had become self-executing, they were all doing fine without me. I’d learned all about HAVA and provisional ballots and rules for enfranchised felons and for people who’d moved between precincts versus between counties versus between addresses within a precinct… my stalwart timbuktu bag sat on a concrete tire-stop, shedding rain like a champ, full of legal references and the tools of advocacy. I stood beside it on the blacktop, soaking up the rain and basking in the process that was unfolding before me. The cameraderie of those who stood there with me was a pleasure, to be sure, but an ancillary one - the real pleasure was in seeing the people just walk up and vote and then walk away again, smiling, assuring me that they had exercised their franchises freely and without undue interference. And I got to stand there and watch them do it, watch the mechanism operate before my delighted eyes.
Eventually I was instructed to stay at my assigned station until the polls closed, to make sure no one was left out; I hustled the last few stragglers through the door with minutes to spare and the polls closed without closing anybody off. I was then asked to stick around to see the ballot box removed to be taken to the Board of Elections, but instead the BOE van arrived in our parking lot. A fellow volunteer learned from her that 24 other polling places were going to bring their ballot boxes here, and they’d all be taken downtown together - a process that could take hours. We phoned this information to the volunteer headquarters and they told us to come on back.
By the time we got to the bullpen where the main effort had been coordinated and conducted, the command-and-control center, if you will, it was crammed with volunteers who were randomly shucking off waterlogged paperwork, cellphones, sacks of snack food, umbrellas, clipboards, any number of campaign items, and the floor was a warren of soggy cardboard boxes and piles of tshirts.... the main job was obviously controlling this tsunami of garbage and laundry. A few sharp folk were working on the problem; I asked how I could help them and got some marching orders. I broke down ruined boxes and stuffed garbage bags with recycling and actual garbage and I got a dolly and used it to haul garbage out of the offices and over to the loading docks. I probably stuffed and hauled 25 big bags of refuse and waste. Once we were done the place looked well-used, but not like a typhoon had hit it, which was how it had looked when I’d arrived there earlier in the evening. The work was done, all that I had been able to do.
There’s a Korean priest of the 14th century named Naong, who wrote: “Live like the wind and the clouds, and then die.” The election is over, Cleveland is behind me, and each morning brings a new set of challenges. Next monday: ten unfunny words that make me giggle. For now, it’s time to get on with life. Or whatever we’re calling it these days.
