Confessions of A Poll Worker

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

SPENCER HERE, WITH SOME UP-FRONT ITEMS. This following edition is going to be a Sam joint. I'm currently moving a Zeteo piece of mine through their editorial process. That piece isn't really about the election—it's about Gaza, the Mideast regional war, and the imminent departure of the Biden team that supported all of this—but it's a place to put my election-time thoughts and feelings. FOREVER WARS subscribers will get that and other pieces in their inboxes directly, so I'd encourage you to sign up. 

I want to be really clear about something that journalists can often obscure. I am not an elections reporter. I have no particular insight into Crucial Whateverthefuck County. When it comes to elections, I'm just another random person shaking his head at his phone. I've benefited over the years from working alongside campaign reporters, and I've certainly reported on campaigns—but only insofar as campaigns interact with foreign policy and "national security," not the parts about winning or losing elections. This is all to say that when I write about elections, I am not presenting you with expertise. I never want to be the kind of journalist who postures at possessing expertise because they want to say something. I want to be the kind of journalist who stays in their lane consistently enough to navigate that lane skilfully, thereby building reader confidence for when I stray outside. Your thoughts on the election are likely to be as salient as mine, unless of course you're dumb and disagree with me. 

That's a long way of introducing this panel on the election and foreign policy I did with Stephen Wertheim and Maya Berry. Maya is someone who really understands the election, and you can and should listen to her introductory remarks about Michigan, her home state, which I think will be salient for a long time during the Second Ascendancy of Donald Trump. I don't have the video yet, but oh well, here's the audio. You will not hear me talk about the election for the sake of the election. You'll hear me talk about the genocide, the regional war, and the election. Hopefully I made sense while speaking extemporaneously and relatively informally. 

During the 90-ish days before Trump takes office, I'm going to keep an eye on something the Washington Post highlighted last week:

Whoever wins, Israeli hawks are eyeing President Joe Biden’s lame-duck period as a potential opportunity to elicit U.S. support for more far-reaching strikes on Iran, hoping the outgoing administration will be less wary of political blowback at home.

Such support is unlikely to be limited to the lame duck. Trump is putting an Iran warmonger, Brian Hook, in charge of State Department staffing, Politico reported. During Trump's first administration, I reported on Hook, both in his capacity as Iran policy potentate and in his willingness to root out perceived disloyalty involving a department staffer with Iranian heritage. Hook's return indicates that the Trump administration will accelerate bellicosity against Iran, as was entirely predictable. 

OK, this is Sam's show from here on out. We'll have my Zeteo column up next for you, so hit that subscribe button. 

YOU CAN'T BUILD POWER from the top. 

A few weeks ago, I decided that rather than spend election day checking my phone and generally being useless, I would do poll worker training and actually go down to the polls and work at the tables with a bunch of people from my neighborhood. I live in a pretty conservative area of Brooklyn—we have the only Republican congressperson in the five boroughs—and I ended up assigned to my own polling place, so I worked the table in my own assembly district. That meant that I said hi to all my neighbors as they came through and voted, gave friends’ kids stickers, made sure everybody knew not to vote for president twice, learned the name of a guy I’d seen on the subway a dozen times, and so on. I ran into Spencer’s dad.

Then I went home and saw that Trump was probably going to win. I felt the horror and despair attendant on the understanding that this was going to happen again. But it was alloyed with something I’m going to try to articulate here that may not be what anyone wants to hear, but that I think is important.

Tuesday was the longest working day I’ve had in quite some time: a double shift, starting at 5 a.m. and ending right around 11 p.m. It left me so simultaneously tired and keyed up that I couldn’t even sleep when I got home. The polling place was staffed with some locals I recognized, most of whom were from the same big Brooklyn-Irish family—they weren’t all Republicans or Democrats, though I ended up sitting with two Republicans since I’m a registered Dem and they pair you off with people from the opposing party. 

I don’t want to go on and on about how Republicans are people too and they deserve your sympathy because that’s not what I mean. But I do think it’s worth noting that all the poll workers really did want to help. They spoke multiple languages and were extremely fair-minded and pleasant to everyone irrespective of whether or not that person decided to yell out who they were voting for or had to be told not to put campaign literature on the table or smelled bad. They leapt out of their seats to give Future Voter stickers to babies and helped Arabic speakers find interpreters and were unapologetic sticklers for making sure every single ballot was accounted for. They were neither militiamen nor election thieves.

And they fit in perfectly with the people I know well and love, with whom I’ve lived for ten years in this neighborhood. A woman who’d been a barista at the coffee shop we frequented all through the pandemic saw me behind the table on Tuesday. She came back to the poll site a couple hours later with a large coffee and a big bottle of water. My son’s classmates’ parents made it a point to say hello. Everybody was very excited about democracy, or at least that’s what they were telling each other they were excited about.

I made it a point not to look at people’s party affiliations needlessly. I’m sure most if not all of the registered Republicans at my polling place voted for Trump. It’s a Trumpy district. It's verboten to talk politics at the polls, but I can tell you they didn’t have any of the obvious animus to their neighbors that has been the hallmark of Republican politics my entire life. Quite the opposite. They were not “political junkies,” at all. 

This is how fascism works: Not the sudden monstrosity of your neighbors but the moment when your neighbors are presented with the chance to choose monstrosity, because some of them always will. It’s such a small, private, irrevocable thing. These people are kind and generous and love babies and take care of their cats. And they are the bedrock of fascism. Not “but,” “and.” They are the bedrock of every political movement. If fascism excluded them, it wouldn’t be a political movement, it would be a shelf of books in the library. I’m leery of drawing grand conclusions two days after this election but one theory I’ll be entertaining is that perhaps the goal of democracy is to test the moral character of the electorate as little as possible.  

Throughout the evening I saw people I knew, and I saw types I think we all know—the tiny hippie moms, the smirking clean-shaven guys with white brushcuts and pot bellies. I also saw people who had rushed to the polls, utterly thrilled by the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect the first woman president and were flummoxed but not stymied by our apologetic, bipartisan refusal to help them spell “Jill Stein” in the write-in box. (Stein was not on the ballot in our assembly district. My co-workers told multiple people to Google the spelling out of fears of talking politics as an election worker.)

These are absolutely normal people. That does not absolve them of any responsibility for their choices. But I’m not sure where blaming them for the state of our politics gets you.

The overarching problem with our politics is the power of oligarchy. The world's two richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, staked their fortunes on Trump, and won. The government of Russia, which is not much more than a thin scum of bureaucracy over the stolen wealth of the former Soviet bloc countries, soft-launched a series of terrorist threats, and it, too, can expect influence in the White House as it seeks to consolidate its hold on eastern and southern areas of Ukraine. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will be able to “finish the job” in Gaza without even the anemic interference of the occasional finger-wag from a Democrat. Wealth had its say, and now normal people have to live with the consequences. And with each other. 

About that: I went home and tried to sleep, without much success. At 1:50 a.m. somebody in my neighborhood set off fireworks. About ten minutes later somebody else came rocketing down the main drag outside our apartment building honking his horn loudly. When I got up a few hours later, I saw several folks—one man who I believe is homeless, one man of color, two more white guys—wearing their MAGA gear around like their football team had won. That afternoon, when I picked my son up from school, he said most of his classmates—”especially the girls”—liked Donald Trump and he didn’t understand why. As we walked to the subway, I tried to explain that people don’t necessarily understand what’s going on, not even grownups. On the platform, a clean-shaven sixty-something man in a plain red shirt heard us talking. He stood next to us and started yelling TRUMP! TRUMP IS MY FATHER! THIS ONE’S FOR YOU, TRUMP! PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN, BABY! And when I muttered “asshole,” he turned to me and said, “You wanna hit me?”

No, I told him. I don’t want to talk to you. Me and my seven-year-old, holding hands, walked away from him down the subway platform. I saw him walking after us and yelled at him not to follow me. He got embarrassed and went away, this time.