Even when it’s simple: casting a rural ballot

Good Morning America,

I JUST VOTED down in New Paltz on this cool and foggy morning, where I registered when I first touched down in the states in August 2007.

I first had to find my polling location, because between when my card was issued and today, they had been shuffled around. I tried one of those “find your location” things on the Internet and got two wrong answers (street address and PO box, one of which sent me to a different town). So on the way to my studio yesterday, I stopped at the Board of Elections office, down the street (an advantage of living in the county seat). They printed out my voting record, which still existed (clearly, this was because I had registered Republican, following in Abe Lincoln’s footsteps), and said I had to vote in a place called Deyo Hall.

The absolutely very last place I wanted to go today was the dioxin-dusted SUNY New Paltz campus; that was the only other Deyo Hall I knew about. At around 2 am I called campus police, and Lieutenant So-and-so said that there was another Deyo Hall in the French Huguenot historic district — New Paltz has one of the oldest standing colonial era streets in the United States. Voting on a historic day had the aura of actual history.

It reminded me of voting in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, only it was 6:30 am, not midnight. Waiting on line, which did not take eight hours in the pouring down rain or bleaching Sun, I realized that I was supposed to cast a write-in ballot for somebody running for Town Board, per request of my comrade and fellow Planet Waves blogger Steve Bergstein (Esq.). But in the overwhelming excitement of a Joe Biden candidacy, I forgot who I was supposed to vote for, so I called him.

“Who is it, and how do I do a write-in when I’m voting in a machine?”

“You idiot! Didn’t you watch the video I sent?” This is Steve’s idea of humor. “I guess you didn’t. This is why the Write-In Movement will never take off in the United States. You pull a little switch next to Row 10 and a window opens up and you write it in with a pencil or pen, then when you pull the lever the vote is cast along with the rest of them. Oh, and it’s Brittany Turner.”

However, the voting booth jammed right before me so I was handed an emergency ballot, on paper. The young lady smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to count it personally. I’ll be here till 2 am.” Voter anxiety is, so far, the biggest story of 2008. Let’s hope it stays that way — just the anxiety part. Maybe worrying will do some good for a change.

I did the math later — that would be an approximately 21 hour work day for her. Anyway, I filled in my emergency ballot, voting for my favorite candidates off of both the Republican or Democratic lines when possible. Currently New York has the Working Families line, so I voted here when I could. I was hung up on one thing — State Assembly. The only real choice was a guy who did his part to screw up, slow down and besmirch my PCB and dioxin coverage at SUNY New Paltz, a Mr. Kevin Cahill. I voted for him with a silent vow to journalistically torture him if he got re-elected, and handed my ballot back to the lady who promised she would count it personally.

Overall, a more or less eventless experience of voting for the first time since Bill Clinton. I’ll talk about my rather long civil disobedience of voting abstinence some other time. Today is a day for a different approach to the electoral system.

Yours & truly,