From Anxious to Paranoid
I got to vote!
In fact when I got to my polling place I was listed twice. And one of me, had a giant TRACEY JACKSON in block letters that no one else seemed to have next to my smaller font name. Tracey Jackso. was nowhere to be found. Though I did have two voter ID numbers. Maybe that was some red flag. But there was no meddling, at least not with me. At least not that I know of.
But this just shows two years with Donald Trump in office has turned me from merely a high strung, anxious person to a paranoid one. I was never paranoid before. I trusted in basic civil liberties and felt safe in the world at large. Kind of. But he has turned us all – some of us – at least me – into a freaked out, paranoid human.
It didn’t help that a friend of Taylor’s mother experienced the same thing. Her name had been removed and she was not registered. But she too got to vote.
BUT, but, but, the voting was just a fucking mess. There are many reports of all sorts of problems that fall under the heading of “voting problems.”
We were both supposed to vote at Hunter College. Like I said I was fine; but when we got there Glenn was told he was supposed to be voting at Central Synagogue, which is nowhere near where we live. We voted there once eight years ago, then our place changed. And when we checked two weeks ago he was signed up to vote at Hunter College. Paranoid with reason.
Because of this, he was given a provisional vote. Not the best of solutions, except he was in and out in ten minutes. The provisional votes not being allowed to be scanned on the spot. They will be “dealt with” later. Paranoid with reason.
So he left, he said he would wait for me, but we were at one of the spots where the scanners were broken. He had better things to do than wait for me.
There were four scanners in the room. When I finished filling out my ballet two of those were broken. A line of people clutching their unscanned ballots began to form.
We were told to be careful separating the two parts, not to rip or it could break the machine. We were not told until an hour and a half later when the line had swollen to about three hundred and we were down to one working machine that if you got a drop of water on your paper that would break the machine. Considering there was a monsoon outside, this might have been a valuable bit of information.
Thank God I told Glenn to leave when he finished. I was there for over two hours. By the time I left the line was ten times longer than when I got there.
But the people in our line were so nice. We were all friendly and all anti- Trump. We let an elderly man who had to get to the hospital to complete a test jump in front of us. I took a man on a walker out of the back of the line and put him in front of me. We let a man with a baby go to the front too.
But honestly, it felt like voting in a third world country. Chaotic with nothing working. On top of which they read our votes before they scanned them, They ran out of envelopes so people were just holding their ballots without covers as they asked for our envelopes back.
Isn’t voter privacy part of the system? I remember it being so private you had to go in alone and nobody could see your ballot, even your child. Now we were out in plain sight, our ballots were uncovered and then, the people who scanned the votes read them. Then put them in the scanner. WTF is that about?
New York is a Democratic state and this polling station was mostly Jewish and liberal. If you overlook Rudy Guiliani’s arrival to vote. So why were they reading each and every ballot before scanning on the one working machine?
I told you, I’ve gotten really paranoid.
It happens when you have a dictator in charge.
The votes are now coming in. By the time you read this, hopefully, we will have some big changes.
Everything Crossed.
