by Brett Warner
It’s 9:45am at the Westfield community center in Trenton, Michigan. Despite a full parking lot and a cluster of cheerful, warmly dressed, sign-holding volunteers proclaiming their district judicial candidates of choice in bright blues and greens – I’m one of only about fifteen people here to vote in the 2010 midterm election.
Expecting a decent line, I’ve come iPod toting and cell phone armed, but neither sees the light of day during what proves to be the most painless fifteen minutes in recent memory. Months of predictions and promises, declarations and defamations have come down to this: a handful of middle-aged suburban moms sitting behind a foldable party table that’s seen its fair share of wedding receptions and graduation parties over the years. Hand-knit scarves, bifocal glasses, and white Styrofoam cups filled with dollar store coffee – this is what democracy boils down to. With all the newspapers, magazines, blogs, rallies, road signs, emails, tweets, television commercials, and cable news shows overloading our neural nets for months now, it’s easy to forget about the small town, every day, working class people I’m standing in line with. You know, the ones that actually vote in the damn thing.
The town I grew up in was settled in the early 1800s by a former militia man named Abram Caleb Truax soon after Detroit fell to the British during the War of 1812. Halfway between Detroit and Monroe, Michigan, Trenton is your pretty standard upper middle class, white bread suburban town of about twenty thousand people. (A ghastly ninety-six percent of whom are white, according to the last census.) Notable former residents include comedienne Mary Lynn Rajskub, pro-wrestler Kevin Nash, and singer Jim Leedy from the psychobilly band Elvis Hitler. The good old folks of Trenton (emphasis on the word “old”) enjoy their high school hockey and buying stuff at Wal-Mart, predominantly. Finally finding a parking spot (the Westfield Center shares a lot with the Veterans Memorial Library where I worked part-time through high school), it strikes me how eerily this election day “atmosphere” resembles any other local community event: very low-key, very friendly, just another one of those things we do every other year.
I’m no stranger to the Westfield Center – after all, my short-lived high school band played a Christmas party here, and I’m almost certain my younger brother and I both had confirmation parties inside these movable walls. Voters from District 03 are lead into a large, whitewashed room that houses ten separate voting “stations,” most of which consist of folded up poster board to give us registered voters our not-so-sorely-needed privacy. A bald gentleman – who may or may not have subbed at my high school – zaps the back of my driver’s license with a handheld scanner and then hands me a very large, awkwardly shaped ballot.
“Be sure to flip it over, there are extra questions on the back,” he informs me.
There are only three sets of us waiting for an available booth: a Poindexter-ish man in red flannel, myself, and a mother with one whining kid in each hand. I claim a low to the ground, salmon colored plastic chair previously occupied by a white-haired old lady who’s slow to put it behind her. Meticulously, I read each line of the idiot-proof instructions – not out of necessity, but rather respect for the gravity of the occasion. This is VOTING after all. Not something to be taken lightly. Though that doesn’t seem to occur to anyone else: I’m interrupted halfway by two good-natured, laughing women who are wearing almost matching jackets and are hugging and asking about each other’s families in that only-halfway-interested sort of way. At the table across from me, the woman from earlier is trying to instill some understanding of civil responsibility to her bratty brood. The older kid keeps asking where they’ll be going out for lunch later in the day.
I complete the ballot quickly and decisively – at first. Who knew you could vote for Wayne State University’s president? I chuckle to myself, relishing my new sense of power as I fill another tiny oval with black ink. Proposal blah blah… in favor of increasing… blah blah… sure, yeah, that sounds okay. Finishing, I join my responsible brethren at the big grey ballot-eating robot machine, where a snaggle-toothed, pudgy lady is telling each person how to feed our long slips of paper into its gaping, hungry mouth. The woman in line ahead of me – sporting a garish turquoise sweater with what looks like butterflies on the front – offers the hungry monster her ballot, which it swiftly rejects. Snaggle Tooth looks concerned.
“Try again, hon,” she offers encouragingly.
No such look. Turqoise Lady’s vote, in fact, does not seem to count.
“Hmm. Hold on just a moment, I’ll go find Corky.”
The undertrained, good-natured volunteer goes off to find Corky and Turquoise Lady follows close behind like an abandoned puppy. The temptation to sigh heavily is great, though again, the gravity of the situation quickly squelches such ordinarily easily-dispensed behavior. This is Election Day. We’re all here to do a very important job – for some of us, our only job at the moment. (This is Michigan, mind you.) So we wait patiently.
Snaggle Tooth returns sans-Corky, regretfully informing Turquoise Lady that she may have to fill out another ballot.
“I wrote an X for each of the ovals,” this woman confesses, the tone of her voice suggesting that this new information, in some way, is supposed to excuse her from all blame in the matter, “I– I X’d each one of them.”
The dentally-challenged volunteer kindly explains that no, the instructions made clear that each oval is to be filled solidly with the provided black ink pen. Turquoise Lady will have start all over again.
As I’m feeding my own ballot into the grey box without incident, it strikes me how intrinsically frightening democracy can be. This woman couldn’t even follow the simple instructions required, and yet her vote carries the same weight as those hard-working men and women outside who’ve spent the last several months sharing pamphlets, making phone calls, and generally giving an educated shit about the future of the country. Of course, I could be completely wrong about Turquoise Lady, but I’m willing to bet that her second ballot gets filled out differently than the first.
Proudly wearing my “I Voted” sticker, I step back out into the icy Midwest air, dodging the sign-wavers and fumbling a set of car keys from my pocket. The ride home is filled with warm feelings of civic pride, but also pangs of embarrassment for us as a society. Most of my friends won’t even bother to hit the polls, so instead the eventual fate of our health care, financial reform, unemployment benefits, and general social welfare lies in the hands of a fifty-something year old woman who may or may not enjoy butterflies and has trouble processing even the most basic forms of information.
The pundits have been quick to alternately blame Presidents Obama and Bush for the current state of the economy and the steep slope this country seems to be sliding down, but personally I choose to blame Turquoise Lady. I blame myself, for not knowing that Wayne State’s president was up for re-election. And I blame those two kids, who will eat their Happy Meals without a polled care or concern in the world.
