Election Day

We performed our civic duty today. With a new place to live, a new polling location: Waltham Ward 5, Precinct 1, inside the gymnasium of the Jonathan Bright Elementary School. Turns out most voting precincts in Waltham feel the same.

Andres and Celia are very much aware that an election is occurring, though their analysis is suitably juvenile. For weeks Celia has been running around the house, pigtails hopping up and down on her head, shouting "obamarommmey! obamarommmey!" whenever she hears either of the candidates' names on TV. She may be the only one sad to see the campaign ads leave the airwaves tomorrow. And though Andres knows that Obama is president (though he sometimes says "Ohana," the Hawaiian word for "family" that he picked up from watching Lilo & Stitch), the rest of the election is a mystery to him. I must have confused him when I said that people would be voting at his school; I think he interpreted this to mean that the entire national electorate was comprised of 1st and 2nd graders at Horace Mann. He'll probably have more of this figured out by the time the 2016 election rolls around (when he will be nine years old).

So given that the two older kids had some notion that something important in American politics was happening in front of their eyes, Natalia and I decided to take them to the voting booth today. What better way to show them the power and the glory of democracy? We headed over after lunch.

Our precinct was quiet at 1:30 PM. There was no line to get in, though most of the polling booths were full. Celia watched as I voted--that is, as I colored in SAT-type bubbles next to candidates' names. (Actually, she couldn't really watch. I had to put her on the ground since it is nearly impossible to hold a child in one arm while simultaneously holding down and marking a ballot with the other arm. Thinking about this more deeply now, I guess I could have squatted down to her level and marked the ballot so she could see what I was doing...but not sure why I'm obsessing over this, since she is not yet 3.) And that was it; I handed in the ballot and we were done. No more than 5 minutes. I'm sure Celia was wondering why we insisted on taking her.

I think I was looking for a bit more drama on this important day. I was at least looking for a photo op, a chance to capture some picture of either Andres or Celia waiting in line amongst much taller people, or looking earnestly at a ballot, or collecting an "I Voted" sticker, something to mark this experience down the road. (Or, selfishly, as an adornment for this blog.) But none presented itself, and I was left clutching a camera with an empty memory card on the way out the door. It occurred to me that I had built up this moment too much.

Four years ago, Natalia and I went to vote during the morning rush and had a much different experience--we actually had to wait in line, and when we arrived inside the polling place, channel 7 was filming an update. Janet Wu even told us that 1.5 year old Andres was "very cute" (sadly, this compliment did not make it into any filmed segment). It was fun. Voting felt like a communal process, a common right, a minimal inconvenience, even if the results from Massachusetts were never in serious doubt. I was looking forward to waiting in line again today, if only for the opportunity to tell my kids that this was a good line to be a part of, since we would be doing something important at the end of it.

But there was no drama today. No film crews, no line, no glitches. Heck, we didn't even get a sticker commemorating our participation. Everything went smoothly; everything was perfectly mundane. There were no opportunities for any great civics lessons among the masses. We arrived, we voted, we left. And then Andres and Celia started fighting in the car, and I realized that while today was unlike any other day we have had in the past four years, in many ways it was exactly the same.