Use any machine. Insert each sheet separately.
It was five in the morning on Tuesday when I arrived at Public School 198. (New York is known for many things, but whimsical school nomenclature is not among them.) The trip was not terrible — about a block’s walk uphill from my apartment. 96th Street, which is given to racket for much of the day, is uncharacteristically quiet at 4:55 a.m. It takes a lot to drag me out of bed at that hour, so perhaps it is only in my imagination that the silence of the street in the early morning always seems to portend the coming of some great excitement — an early flight perhaps, or some dynastic change.
On Tuesday morning — Election Day — the latter was in order. Among other things on the ballot were races for the mayor, City Council, and other high-ranking municipal positions alongside five proposed amendments to the New York State Constitution. The mayoral race (to which the rest of the country had been exposed against their wills by New York-based national media) seemed to be going up in flames, as late-stage mayoral races are wont to do. The heir apparent to the throne was caught driving on the sidewalk in a stakeout of his alleged Brooklyn home. Not to be outdone, his competitor was hit by a taxicab in the final days of the campaign and waited to seek medical attention until after a radio interview.
This was of little consequence an hour before the polls opened on Tuesday, particularly to the forty or so other people who joined me in the cafeteria of PS 198, a room with very low sinks and posters extolling the benefits of the concept of breakfast. We were the poll workers — people who had ticked a box on our voter registration forms expressing an interest in the role and were now hastily running through 32-point checklists with people to whom we had not yet found time to introduce ourselves.
This year is the seventh anniversary of my first election as a poll worker, which was also the very first time that I could vote. I am a third-generation poll worker and, on my eighteenth birthday, I strutted into Holland City Hall with a voter registration form and a poll worker application at the same time. On my first election day, Michigan elected Senator Gary Peters, a man for whom I would work as an intern several years later. On the infamous election day in 2016, I was sequestered on the second floor of City Hall, blissfully cut off from the world and eating taxpayer-funded sandwiches as I fed absentee ballots into a tabulator.
Election Day as a poll worker is the best day of the year. Back in Holland, it always felt to me like a sort of bureaucratic church potluck, and — what with bureaucracies and church potlucks being the situations in which I thrive — it seemed only natural that I should remain a poll worker after I moved to New York.
The checklist through which I found myself working with a total stranger at a very early hour was contained in the Basic Poll Worker Manual. Much more fearsome than the Ottawa County packet of instructions, the Basic Poll Worker Manual is a bound book of 120 pages which I received on a Thursday afternoon in late September at a training on 127th Street attended mostly by Harlem retirees. The Board of Elections, we are told, trains many tens of thousands of poll workers every year, a number which easily exceeds the entire population of Holland, Michigan. I spent my four-hour training learning how to properly seal a ballot scanner and look up voters on an iPad. At the end, I took a scantron test to determine whether I was worthy of being trusted with New York’s democracy. Not to brag, but I aced it.
It was not a moment before six on Tuesday morning when, with the school cafeteria transformed and election machinery booted up, we were able to finally introduce ourselves to one another. I was with a woman about my age who worked in tech and was an election worker for the first time and another woman who was retired and had worked elections in New York for most of her life. Both lived in the neighborhood within just a few blocks of me. Together, we spent the next fifteen hours telling two thousand of our neighbors to “Use any machine you like. Insert one page of your ballot at a time.”
Election workers on the job are politically agnostic but unreservedly enthusiastic about the concept of democracy as an act. While our party affiliation is printed right on name tags, speaking about politics, page six of the Basic Poll Worker Manual tells us, is forbidden. The effect of this is a sort of strange and wonderful denial. The candidates are referred to only as “this one” and “that one.” Nobody acknowledges how anybody voted. When ballots are inadvertently removed from privacy sleeves, everyone makes a show of trying not to look.
And yet, when the question arises of whether the windows should be opened to let in fresh air, how else is the question to be resolved than with a vote? When somebody who recently became a citizen comes in to vote for the first time, everyone seems to get emotional. Naturally, everyone hands out “I voted!” stickers with great enthusiasm, which is surpassed only by the enthusiasm with which “I’m a future voter!” stickers are given to children and the occasional service animal.
There is no better people-watching than a New York polling location, and there is perhaps no better polling location than PS 198. PS 198 is located at the intersection of three neighborhoods: Carnegie Hill, where people wear wool suits when walking their dogs and carry the conspicuously pink Financial Times with them when they go to vote; East Harlem, which has one of the highest concentrations of public housing in the country and food which is very much better than the limited offerings of Carnegie Hill; and Yorkville, my home, which sits somewhere in the vast cultural middle between the other two.
I was doubtful that the church potluck mood would survive in a polling place outside of West Michigan, and I am very pleased to report that it exists as much in New York as it does in Holland. The area covered by PS 198 is as small as it is diverse. Everyone was a neighbor. I met people in my building. We all gossiped about the Rite Aid no longer being 24 hours and the best times to go to the post office and which bodega is best. All of the poll workers signed a card for a man who usually works at the same polling location but was out sick. I have never met the man, but they saved a spot for my signature on the card. New York, through the magic of neighbors crammed in a school cafeteria (and through statutory limitations on cell phone use and political discussion), shrank into a neighborly village for one wonderful day.
At the end of the sixteenth hour, there comes a period of total upheaval. As soon as the last voter leaves, a process begins which is perhaps the closest to a nuclear launch checklist that most people will ever experience. Books are opened to long lists of instructions. Documents are signed and countersigned. Equipment is sealed. Reports are initialed. Results are transmitted to the outside world. Long tapes of ballot counts are printed and pinned to the wall for people who are interested in that sort of thing on account of their not having arisen at four in the morning. All of it is in a mad dash to get out of a school cafeteria in time to have a reasonable night’s sleep.
The great tragedy of this is that, as quickly as the little community appears, it must vanish again. “Take the rest of the pretzels! I can’t have them in my house!” I insisted to an inspector who lives four blocks north of me.
“Maybe I’ll see you around the neighborhood,” I told the woman I had set up a scanner with more than seventeen hours ago and had worked alongside for the entire day as we went opposite directions leaving at night. I hope we do see each other around the neighborhood. It is a big city, though, and it was sad to see everyone vanish into the night.
To numb the pain, I walked down to the McDonald’s at the end of my block for some late-night ice cream. The woman in front of me looked familiar.
“Did you do my September training in Harlem?” I asked, gesturing to my Board of Elections name tag.
“Well?” she asked, “Did it work?
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
The 1938 CBS broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
I am the Halloween Grinch and have been ever since I discovered that a bag of candy costs less than a costume. I hate to look at the world through the cold, cold lens of economics, but what can you do? So far as I am concerned, the act of wearing a costume in public constitutes Unacceptable Behavior and I am not interested in being even peripherally involved.
I have exactly one Halloween tradition outside of complaining, and that is to listen to the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a radio play based on the H. G. Welles book of the same title. The broadcast, which took place on the night before Halloween, was realistic enough in its dramatization of an alien invasion that it caused a considerable stir in parts of the country. It can still take on any podcast and win.
“America Has Lost the Plot on COVID” by Sarah Zhang in the Atlantic.
“On the ground, the U.S. is now running an uncontrolled experiment with every strategy all at once. COVID-19 policies differ wildly by state, county, university, workplace, and school district… But the level of COVID-19 risk we can live with is also not an entirely scientific question. It is a social and political one that involves balancing both the costs and benefits of restrictions and grappling with genuine pandemic fatigue among the public.”