Election Day

Hey, I’m home from working the polls today. I got in there at 6:20 (after driving around in the COLD and the DARK and the RAIN) and just got home twenty minutes ago. I am stupidly tired and dehydrated. I am just so tired.

The precinct in which I worked usually gets around a hundred and fifty voters, total, and we closed out with over eight hundred and fifty. I met tons of people, of all different sorts: young punks voting for the first time and old die-hards and moms with kids and new citizens and people in headscarves and people in cute knee-high boots and people who were confused and people who were righteous and people who were giddy and people who were sad because we didn’t have I Voted stickers and Cupcake Royale was giving away free cupcakes if you could prove you voted. (I wrote some personalized receipts). I started and finished a hat and started on a scarf. I had fifty minutes to rush to my own precinct and vote and get lunch.

I sat between a very nice woman and a very mean woman and I made a lot of mistakes and felt stupid a lot because it was my first time working the polls and I didn’t know what I was doing. I said “Thank you for voting “ to every single person who came to my line. I wrote out a lot of provisonal ballot envelopes for people, which were rather confusing. I think I maybe saw an instance of voter disenfranchisement and I feel bad that I didn’t do more to stop it. There were about eight poll watchers in the room at all times, including a legal services person. Someone brought us donuts at one point. One little girl, waiting for her mom to fill out the provisional ballot envelope, told me she was voting for Princess Fiona. It was sort of nice to be away from the internet all day, if only because it allowed me to hold on to hope a little longer. I’m home now with wireless internet and I am feeling drunk on tiredness and anger and fear for the next four years, if what I think is going to happen really does happen.

This is the first election cycle in which I have ever been involved in any way other than just voting. This time I gave money and volunteered and became more informed and started getting passionate about politics. I am deeply afraid that I won’t be able to continue that if Bush wins, that I will just go into a coma if that happens. I KNOW that is the wrong thing to do. I know that this is just the beginning and we may not even know tomorrow who the next President will be. But right now I’m freaked out in a whole new way, as well as being incredibly exhausted and wishing, for once, that I actually did drink so that I could get heroically inebrieated just to sort of dull the pain.

Maybe I’ll be a little more coherent tomorrow and be able to put all of this into context and understand it better. I have a whole day of internet to catch up on and NPR to listen to. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with, no lie, terrible nightmares about the elections. What am I going to wake up to tomorrow?


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