voting on Bryant Street
Feb 05 2008
Last weekend I went north to visit my family for my mother’s birthday. Sitting around the table eating club sandwiches, we started talking about the upcoming election, today’s election, that had us all so excited. My brother, an early-rising teacher, told us that at recent election, he’d been the first to arrive at his polling place. They welcomed him in, gave him his papers, and he voted. Then they ceremoniously led him to the ballot box, which had not yet been sealed, asked him to witness that the box was empty and, to top it off, gave him a little device with which he himself sealed the ballot box.
When I woke up this morning at 7:28, two minutes before the alarm, I sprang into action, the force of that story pushing me forward. My resolve to get up at 7 had weakened in the 11th hour, but now I regretted it as I pulled on my bright yellow hoodie that says “Salisbury Rugby” on the front and “Insane” on the back. In five minutes, I was out the door.
Still, I thought as I locked the door behind me, maybe I’ll be first anyway. Who gets up before 7 to vote? This is San Francisco, after all, and I live in the Mission, a neighborhood of late-sleeping hipsters. Everyone’s disillusioned after 2004 and nobody will be at the polling place, I thought. I walked to the corner of my residential street and, as I approached Bryant St., I heard the bustle of traffic and people. Oh, right, school’s in session, and people who need to be to work by 8 are driving to work along Bryant. But turning onto Bryant proper, the street was crawling with people and cars, including two couples who passed me on the single block of Bryant. One couple had a kid, and I heard the mom explaining, “This is where we vote!”
As I approached the polling place another couple with kid had just entered before me. There was a line. I started to feel the excitement of taking a final exam, in miniature. The poll worker with the list was unfailingly polite, presenting the list to sign and then musically calling out the ballot color to the goggle-eyed teen at the end of the table. The man who went before me was a decline-to-state voter, and he opted for a Democratic ballot.
Once the goggle-eyed teen had slipped my paper ballot (including the pre-detached ballot stub) into its blue secrecy folder and handed me the special pen, I turned to one of the two vacant carrels and spread out my goodies. The ballot was one page, and I saw Obama’s name before I saw anything else. I excitedly uncapped the pen and completed the arrow pointing to his name:
After I was done, I irrationally wanted more names to mark. I consulted my mental short list of “yes” votes (always fewer than “no” votes) and marked the measures as well. Then I reinserted my ballot to its secrecy folder and walked over to the ballot processing machine, a large version of the airline boarding pass eater. I inserted my ballot (number 22) as the older male pollworker with the black eye watched tiredly. He was tearing round red “I voted!” stickers off a roll, and I eagerly indicated that I wanted one. “You want a sticker? There’s one right there,” pointing to the single torn-off sticker I’d overlooked on top of the machine.
“Everybody wants a sticker,” he said wearily.
