If I did nothing else today, I voted. I know I already blogged about the special election primaries for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, but I get a certain geeky thrill from the actual act of voting. My voice, compiled amid hundreds of thousands of other voices… is heard, like a thundery civic choir. Voting is cool!
I always expect voting to be a huge hassle, so I allotted 45 minutes to the task of driving 4 minutes to the polling station and casting my ballot for a single race. I arrived at the local elementary school at 6:50am and loitered around the lobby until the polls would open at 7am. An elderly couple stationed themselves outside the gymnasium doors and peeked through the windows at the workers, and I wondered if they really had to be somewhere, or if they were the most impatient people ever, or if they wanted senior-center bragging rights that they were the first at the polls this morning.
As I waited for the polls to officially open, I perused a bulletin board, plastered with loose-leaf letters from fourth graders to phantom pen pals in El Salvador (I’m not sure why the letters were on a bulletin board instead of in El Salvador, but it made me suspicious of all my elementary school teacher’s pen-pal schemes.) The grammar in the letters was impressive for fourth graders, although the content was typically juevenile (“If unicorns are real I want to buy one”; “I am from China, not Chinatown”; “When I grow up, I want to be a pet sitter”; “It is cold and the animals are going to sleep”; “Does it snow in El Salvador?”)
The gymnasium doors swung open at the stroke of 7am. God bless those trusty senior citizens who work in the polls, every one of them pert and alert, their nimble fingers flipping through the voter registry with time-honed proficiency. By 7:01, I was filling in the circle next to Martha Coakley, a tingly twitter of pride in my chest that I helped elect the woman who will almost certainly be the first female Senator from Massachusetts. Do us proud, Martha.
I was saddened to read that today’s voter turnout was light, especially given the legions of mourners who flocked to Ted Kennedy’s casket last August to “pay their last respects.” Those people got it wrong. If they truly wanted to pay their last respects to Kennedy, they would have flocked to the polls today to choose his successor.
