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.”