Voting is Like Going to the Post Office Except You Get a Sticker and a New President
Polling Station: 1045 Capp St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Time: 7:55 am
For me, voting was the exact opposite of pimping – it was easy. (However, like pimping, it is necessary.) At my polling station in the Mission in San Francisco, there was a quick-moving line of professionals scrolling through emails on iPhones and Blackberrys, Latino mothers with kids, and young hipsters wiping the hangover out of their eyes.
Incidents were few. A woman behind me had just moved to the neighborhood and wasn’t registered for that particular polling station. She got a provisional ballot. Problem solved. The ballot machine started to jam up on a guy’s ballot, and the machine spit out a receipt reading Defective Ballot. I got a little excited. Stolen election! To the barricades! Instead the poll worker took the ballot out, smoothed it down, and ran it through again. Easy.
One of the genius moves on the part of the polling stations was plunking a big table in the middle of the room for those who didn’t care about using the privacy booths. It allowed a lot more people to vote at once, and was one of the main reasons the line move so quickly. It did mean that everyone saw me using a San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association voter’s guide as a crib sheet for the staggering amount of city and state measures, which felt a bit like cheating. There were like 30 of them – there’s no way I would be able to come up with a coherent position “regarding budget set-asides and identification of replacement funds.” (I support it, apparently.)
I got a sticker and a sheaf of ballot receipts to prove that I had indeed participated in the democratic process. After an election cycle that seems to have been going on for two years, it was an oddly bloodless and anti-climatic event, more like a visit to the Post Office than the biggest political decision my generation has faced. I hopped on my bike to see if I could catch the express train to work. As I hustled down to the train car, one of the CalTrain employees saw my “I Voted” sticker. We exchanged a terrorist fist jab and I climbed on the train.
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