Boston’s early voting began at 11:00 this morning, so I was in line outside the polling station at 10:40. We’d requested mail-in ballots, but they mysteriously haven’t arrived, and I’m not taking chances with the fake dropboxes and the mysteriously delayed mail. The line was already out of the school and down the corner when I got there, everyone masked and 6 feet apart. Poll workers counted off how many people could enter the building to stand in other masked, distant lines, roped off from the school.
You don’t have to show ID to vote, but the shortest line was the one to have my license scanned without my touching the scanner or the poll worker touching my license, and the shortest line is extra important now that being indoors with other humans is a good way to catch the plague. Then I got a sterilized pen to mark my ballot and a sterilized glue stick to seal it. Then I voted for the guy who kinds sucks but isn’t a literal white supremacist, dropped my ballet in the box, and handed my marker and glue stick back to be re-sterilized, careful the whole time not to accidentally stand close to anyone.
My local polling station is in the school where I taught ESL night classes last school year, until we went home for a few weeks of online classes last March. When I used to get to work about 5PM, there’d always be little kids getting picked up from aftercare. I think a scout troop met there too, and at least one crafting class. There was pretty much always a bake sale in the lobby, and always something to chat about in the school’s main office. I mean, I don’t want this to sound idyllic, I was usually in the main office using their copier because because the night school’s copier was broken again, but still. It was a busy, friendly community school.
The adult ed office is right off the gym/auditorium/general community space that’s used for voting. Of course I couldn’t just go in, it was closed off and there’s no casual visiting in covid anyway. But I know that just off the voting area, behind the locked gate, there are a couple sets of vocabulary matching cards that I left on my desk in the before times.
