What you miss when you fax in your ballot
I live in the Dominican Republic, so I voted this year by emailing the Miami-Dade County elections office requesting an absentee ballot. They sent my ballot in PDF format. My wife printed it out in her office. I filled in the bubbles with a black pen and signed the envelope. I downloaded a fax machine app, loaded up $10 worth of credit, took pictures of the ballot, the envelope and a privacy waiver with my iPhone and faxed it all in. A few days later, the elections office confirmed my vote was counted.
It was seamless and easy, the way democracy should be. I’ll probably vote that way again in two years. But you definitely miss out on something.
The first time I voted was in 2008. I was 19, and I cast my ballot in a little township hall behind the public library in Randolph, Ohio. I was a little nervous because waiting in line to engage with a bureaucratic system makes you nervous. Like maybe my name wouldn’t be on the list. Afterward when I walked out to my car on a cold Tuesday morning I felt something like a religious experience. It was the same feeling as walking out of the confessional after my First Reconciliation (which, in my case, was also my last Reconciliation). That is, I felt 10 pounds lighter, and my conscience was clear.
Voting still feels like a religious experience, like Communion. Everybody’s standing in line looking at what the other people are wearing. We get to the front, and an official person gives us something—a ballot—which transubstantiates ideas in your head into government policies that you hope will help someone.
A bit older now, waiting in line at the public library in Coral Gables, Florida, to vote in this year’s presidential primary, I found myself suddenly biting back tears.
By now I’ve lived in countries where polling places have been bombed, where election-day violence is common or where citizens aren’t allowed to vote at all. American political campaigns can feel just as fraught, and this one especially so. But on the appointed morning, here we were. Nobody asked me whose side I was on. Partisans outside politely held their signs and observed the statutory prohibitions about where they could and could not stand. Everyone looked proud and purposeful. They remarked on the turnout and offered up a chair for those less able to stand. You know that stupid-ass “proud to be an American” song? In that moment, I could’ve tolerated it.
For all America’s bullshit, for all the things foreigners rightly tease us about, you can’t mock this. You know this is something extraordinary. Today’s a good day.
Tomorrow’s gonna suck.
