Working a drive-thru poll site restored my faith
Volunteering at one of Texas’s drive-thru voting locations is one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.
This year, the simple act of performing our duty as Americans and casting a ballot has been rife with fear and uncertainty. COVID-19 has posed a unique public health challenge, making many cautious about heading to the polls. The myth of voter fraud, the threat of voter intimidation and confusion over mail-in ballots have run rampant.
To expand access to early voting and increase voter participation, Harris County set up 10 drivethru polling locations. More than 100,000 people in the county have cast their ballots from their cars. Last week, the Texas Supreme Court rejected a last-minute challenge from the Texas and Harris County Republican parties to stop the practice. But a new petition asking the court to reject those votes is another last-ditch effort by Republicans. I hope those votes and the ones still to be cast will count.
Over the past four years, it has been discouraging to witness divisiveness grow in every part of our country. I worked in public service for most of
my career before I retired, and as this election approached, I felt that old urge to be involved again. I became an election clerk and was assigned to work at one of the drivethru lots.
We have been swamped. Cars are lined up in the dark of early morning to begin a steady stream into our voting slots. They roll down their window, and I check their IDs, hand them a machine to mark their ballots and collect their votes.
Fear may be behind some of the factors causing people to vote early from their cars, but in the act of casting their ballots, there’s a more powerful emotion, something
that has overwhelmed me from the very first hour: joy.
The casting of ballots is a private thing, but what has been washing over me as an attendant is the exuberance, the happiness in the participation and the spirit in which people are engaging in this process. The positive energy coming from almost every car has been heartening. I have come to believe I am at ground zero of a phenomenon.
As their facilitator in the process, I have met some great folks. The elderly Asian couple challenged by English who were thrilled to discover that we offered a ballot in Mandarin. The Marine veteran of the
Pacific War who told me a war story before driving away. The Arabic-speaking family of five who offered me afternoon coffee from their thermos (which, of course, I could not accept given the current health climate). The first-time voters in their 40s and 50s, honored to be there. The first-time teenage voters brought to the polls by their parents, who were proud to watch their children cast their ballots in their first election. The young mothers with babies in car seats behind them. The two little old ladies in a festive mood who, before they drove away, asked me with a giggle if I was married. And finally, my favorite, the middle-aged woman, alone in her car, who began to cry as she finished her ballot, and looked up at me to say, “I have been waiting so many months for this day.”
I have been voting since McGovern-Nixon. It has always been my experience that participating in an election is social. We do it together, whomever we vote for. Lined up at the polls, here we are as Americans, doing what Americans do, like characters in a Norman Rockwell painting. It is our duty, but even more, it is our birthright. It is something we share because of who we are.
No doubt we’re at the polls pulling for our candidates. We are as divided as we were in the 19th century. But this year I think there’s something else going on.
I think this is what renewal looks like. It’s found its time again. Sometimes voting is about more than Donald Trump versus Joe Biden.
It is symbolic, and given the right circumstances, it can produce catharsis. It’s what living in a democracy does to us. It’s about voting for the first time, crying as you cast your ballot and even happy little old ladies in cars.
I know many of the voters I am serving must be my political opposites, but they are just as friendly. How do I know? Because everyone is. That’s the point, I think. If we have the impulse to turn it on and let it flow for a pollworker, we can keep it on for each other. It’s worth a try. I hope that being friendly to each other, no matter who we are or who we support for office, becomes again one of those things that Americans do.