For the past few weeks, asshole mailmen have been bombarding DCQ HQ with “election guides” and “voting cards,” and persistent old mamasita volunteers have been stuffing hit pieces under our door. Apparently there’s an “election.” Bah fucking humbug, I say. After all, King Bloomberg already re-upped his City Hall lease with a four-year, $85 million extension, there’s no spicy legalize pot/criminalize gays ballot measures, and what the hell is a “comptroller” anyway?!?
But haunted by a childhood riddled with Schoolhouse Rock videos (odd how that cuddly little roll of paper left out all mention of “lobbyists”), I succumbed to the nagging urge to “fulfill my civic blah blah” and walked to the local polling place. The wrong one. Outside, loud factions stood on the corner opposite a bodega and screamed at the occasional passerby to vote for their chosen Latina City Council candidate (more on that later). They yelled at me going in and coming out. I feigned confusion: “Wait, who should I vote for?” The ensuing cacophony made me smile until the machetes nearly came out and I decided to mosey along to my proper voting location at the other PS whatever.
Lo and behold, I made it to PS Whatever, and with relative ease received a voting card and a place in front of a curtained booth. “Have you ever used a voting machine before?” the lady asked. “Yup,” I answered, thinking she meant the neat standing contraption with the little pokey thing that produces those pesky hanging chads. You know, a “voting machine.” Instead, I slipped through the black plastic drapes to find myself before the motherboard the little guy operated to create the illusion of the Wizard of Oz in the eponymous movie.
There were scads of rigid plastic knobs and nozzles and whirligigs to fiddle with, set amid a blinding grid of candidates and party affiliations and positions and lines. There was no clear order to the scene. It was like a drunken Scrabble marathon morphed with a game of tic-tac-toe run amok. To top all, at the bottom of the mess there was an industrial-strength red lever — the kind the villain would pull in the Adam West “Batman” series or Leslie Nielsen would employ to great comedic effect in any number of more contemporary works.
I thought this was all great fun, so I uttered not a word to the usher lady looming outside. I yanked the big red lever all the way to the right, which prompted the Wizard of Oz machine to release a satisfyingly Adam West-y “ka-chunk!” I voted for mayor (against Bloomberg just because, you know, fuck the man and whatnot). I slammed The Great Lever back over to the left like an ice road trucker intent on reaching Fairbanks before the whorehouse closes. The console displayed a little “x” next to my mayoral candidate of choice. One motherfucker down. I grabbed the lever again to throw it back over to the right; it wouldn’t budge. I juggled some switches and flicked some knobs — no reaction. My voting was done. The machine stared at me, daring me to feel entitled to some class of explanation: “You dumb motherfucker. Gentrification’s a bitch, ain’t it? Your old-timey neighbors wouldn’t have been so cavalier with my Great Lever. Now go home and watch The Wire on your Macbook.”
So I did. And my curtailed vote didn’t matter: Bloomberg won (albeit not as handily as most had expected), and my vote wouldn’t have changed the local City Council race — incumbent Diana Reyna took it easily despite being thrown under the bus by Assemblyman Vito Lopez, her former boss and benefactor, a Brooklyn Democratic kingpin, and, awkwardly to the fullest, her current neighbor up on South 5th Street.
Lessons learned: Don’t antagonize the mobs picketing in front of polling places, not all NYC public schools are the right place to vote, and never, ever disrespect The Great Lever.
Ain’t democracy grand?
