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Voting on election day
[T]t’s not so hard to adjust our imaginations… we can take a moment to picture a labyrinthine, sometimes obscure process in action — people and machines working together, perhaps under unpleasant circumstances, to obey our command… we might imagine a forest of gears turning, intricately enmeshed, and wonder if they’re the right gears, and if they fit as they should, and if they’ve been inspected.
This morning I got up early to bike to the polls, here in northern Virginia. Last night I arrived home very late, flying back from a midwestern gig, but today wanted to get ahead of any lines. I was the only one in the house to vote today, as everyone else already did mail-in or early voting. For me, the voting day experience is fascinating, and I wanted to see how it went in this fraught election.
(Why biking? For exercise and to reduce my carbon footprint.)
A Vermont small town election in 2016. Note the paper ballot going into the huge wooden box, like the 1800s.
I’ve been to this voting location before, but only by car, so after pumping up my tires I asked Google Maps for a route, checked it out, then hit the road. The app and my legs soon took me along the edge of town, where I pedaled a long, uneven road which quickly changed from suburban to rural. Next up was a complicated set of…
