Politics Without End

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Casting Call

I've been poring over the California primary returns for the last week looking for my vote. It's not there. And I'm waiting for a promised call from controversial and very nice Assistant Registrar of Voters for San Diego County Michael Vu. 

Confusion loves momentum. Seemingly casual blunders are really just foot soldiers looking to bring on the madness. And so it was that events conspired against my polling station, leading me to cast an illegitimate write-in vote for Barack Obama on the Green Party ballot. I wasn't pranking around in the polling booth looking for a good story to tell when this happened – I intended to cast my primary vote for Obama as a registered member of the Democratic Party. Little things went wrong until poll workers and I were officially irregular.

I have written a one act play about this experience and am now casting performers. A word of special thanks to Michael Vu whose surprise guest appearance transformed this from boring voting story to personal political drama.

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Bring It On

Yesterday I worked the polls, as did two fellow bloggers, Trina and Chuck. Unlike Chuck, who articulated his experience in terms of celebrating a working democracy, doing my civic duty did not leave me so much with images of revelry as it did with a dream of voting absentee for the rest of my life. 

In a word, it was awful.

Working with the public wasn’t bad - neither was getting up at 4:30 a.m. nor finally wrapping up at 10:30 p.m. Maybe getting one tiny 45-minute meal break in a 17-hour day wasn’t so great, but that’s not what made it unbearable.

What was awful was working with someone - I’m pretty sure loathed me by the time the votes were dropped off to the Sheriff. She may have started to despise me earlier in the day, but it was clear by then where she stood.

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The Morning After the Democracy Party

Having been working at the polling station at Escondido's Pioneer Elementary School from 5:30 a.m. until we left to turn in our ballots at 9:30 p.m., I can attest that yesterday was certainly an Election Day. On the other hand, the exhaustion and soreness this morning all point to a highly successful Mardi Gras celebration.

Mind-numbing paper counts and the stickers, stickers, stickers attitude lead to morning-after effects very similar to the more traditional Mardi Gras activities.

The worst part of the day was putting this news junkie into a news blackout zone for most of Super Tuesday. The TV was turned off. There were no publications around that might politicize the environment. The occasional news update message to the Blackberry served as more of a tease than to satisfy any actual cravings for good, hard news, and small doses of KPBS coverage over the car radio while running errands on my breaks were all I had to keep from going into complete withdrawal. 

From my standpoint, Touchscreen Inspector for a precinct that only had one electronic ballot cast, the election went smooth.

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