It was 6:10 a.m., cold and dark on a dimly lit street. “Who are you?” an
obviously harried woman asked as I stepped out of my car. I told her I was
there to work at the polls.
“Good,” she said. “Two of my people have had their phone numbers changed
and another two aren’t answering.”
I had signed up to be a bilingual election worker for the City of
Milwaukee. My assignment was at a small, one-room pavilion at a South Side park
that seemed little more than a glorified playground.
The pavilion’s outside light wasn’t working, bolstering my sense that
this particular electoral machine was not well oiled. My husband, who had an
hour before he had to be at work, came in with me.
The one-room polling station was jammed — seemingly haphazardly — with
tables, folding chairs and assorted park-related equipment, including a huge
Weber grill. The polls were to open in less than an hour.
The polling station’s two chief inspectors were frantically calling
missing workers and figuring out how to bring order to the chaos. My husband
was pressed into service to help move the tables. I was handed thumbtacks and
tape to put up necessary notices in English and Spanish.
“Welcome to the bowels of democracy,” I joked to my husband.
Within the hour, the pavilion was transformed. There were still a few
rough edges but it had become a functioning polling station with all the
necessary stations, forms and signs. All the poll workers had arrived.
“Hear Ye, Here Ye, The Polls Are Now Open,” the election chief
proclaimed on the dot at 7 a.m. Lines had already formed. People were anxious
to vote. Our day’s work began.
More than 15 hours later, at 9:45 p.m., I finally left the polling
station.
I can’t remember the last time I worked so hard for so long.
I can’t remember the last time I worked with such a fascinating, humble,
inspiring, and diverse group of people.
LIFE IN THE TRENCHES OF DEMOCRACY
Starting at about 9 p.m., my
daughter had started sending rapid-fire text messages from a New York City
sports bar that had five big-screens, each one tuned to a different network.
“MSNBC is calling it for Obama!” she texted at one point.
“Elizabeth Warren won! Tammy Baldwin won!” another text read. “And all
the ‘rape’ apologists lost!”
Cell phones were not allowed in the polling stations, so I had had no
clue what was going on with the elections. Nor had I received those heartening
text messages as they came in. As my husband and I drove home from the polling
station, I called my daughter.
“Mahalia, life in the trenches of democracy is fascinating,” I
explained. “But I feel like a soldier in a World War 2 foxhole, slogging away
with no clue if the good guys are winning or losing. Tell me more.”
I don’t like war analogies, but I felt this one was appropriate.
What’s more, I was proud to have been a foot soldier. Reading analyses
in the New York Times and following Nate Silver’s blogs had been a part
of my life for weeks. But in the end, I learned much more about the workings of
democracy at this little known, off-the-radar polling site on Milwaukee’s near
South Side.
Above all, I learned how deeply people believe in the right to vote.
They may not always exercise that right. But they want to protect it.
MY FELLOW POLL WORKERS
My fellow poll workers were a diverse group. There
were several older women (including me, with my grey hair) some black, some
white, some Latino. There was the bilingual election chief who wore a sports
jacket and the coolest silver-toed cowboy boots I have seen in a long time.
A middle-aged mother and her twenty-something daughter worked side by
side, both of them fulfilling the South Side stereotype of white working-class
women who won’t take gruff from anyone and who speak in one volume: loud. An
older black man dealt with the pavilion’s minimal heat by wearing his Green Bay
Packers jacket and hat the entire day. A bilingual young woman who had graduated
from Pulaski High School worked with me at a crazy-busy table for voters who
had a change of address or who had never voted before.
Not to be forgotten: the white guy who had lived in the neighborhood for
more than 30 years and knew it so well that he could immediately tell people,
based on their address, which of the three ward tables they should vote at.
We were slammed with non-stop work the minute the polls opened. We
barely had time to go to the bathroom, let alone eat decently or take a break and
relax. Never once did I hear anyone complain.
In many ways, our little polling site was a microcosm of Milwaukee.
Whites were in the minority of voters, but still a significant percentage.
About a third were African American — a fascinating development in a
neighborhood that 40 years ago was a center of white resistance to open
housing. A number of voters spoke Spanish, such as the gentleman who came in
and explained that, at 60 years of age, he had decided to vote for the first
time in his life. No one looked like they had much extra money to spend at the
end of the week.
There were as many fascinating stories that day as there were voters.
One woman impressed me the most.
Sometime in the early afternoon, at a point when I was feeling like a
factory line worker and people were becoming a blur, a thirty-something
African-American woman sat quietly in front of me. Without a word, she handed
me information explaining her situation. I quickly looked it over.
It suddenly dawned me: the woman was a victim of domestic abuse. By law,
she had the right to a confidential voter address, and she had taken the
necessary steps. To be on the safe side, she had brought in a letter from a
transitional housing center documenting necessary information. I looked at the
letter’s date: Nov. 5, 2012.
“You went and got this letter yesterday?” I asked the woman, buying time
as my mind processed the various hoops she must have gone through.
“Yes,” she said, pride and dignity in her voice. “I wanted to make sure
I would be able to vote today.”
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This blog is cross-posted at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Purple Wisconsin project
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