Election Day

Today I visited two voting sites; one in my neighborhood in Baltimore at Thomas Johnson elementary school where I cast my own vote and the other at Chadwick elementary school in Baltimore County where I was paid fifty bucks by a media research firm to call in the final numbers when the polls closed so that these statistics could be relayed to various media outlets. My expectations on what I would find at each school were low as this primary election in Maryland means little because the candidates for the major parties have already been set, there has been a wave of warm weather that has put everyone in an outdoor frenzy, and because the two neighborhoods aren’t considered hotbeds of political activity.
What I found was really quite sad. In the morning I walked two blocks up the street from my third floor apartment, past a bunch of old weathered people hanging out the door of the beaten Heath Street Pub, some stray animals, and a face-pierced juvenile couple groping each other in the middle of the road. When I made it to the brown-bricked school, there was no one out front, not one sign of affiliation and I began to wonder if I miscalculated either the day or my location to vote. Only one door was held open with a thick chain that normally kept it shut and people out. Inside a slow moving janitor was mopping down the main foyer. I found this to be strange in an area expecting traffic and I asked him,
"People voting here today?"
"Some." he said. "Watch your step."
So I walked past him down the hallway, unpainted likely since I would have been a child twenty years ago, alongside glue outlines all the way down from plaques or pictures or something removed, perhaps a result of an esteem-building initiative that had been cut or a type of motivation that was no longer relevant to the students occupying this space. It was dingy, the linoleum tiles were beige, and quick peeks into open rooms told me that this hallway wasn't the exception, it wasn't the last bit of the school to be painted or refurbished; the whole school was in a similar state of disrepair.
I moved into the gym where twelve election workers were spaced out and waiting for a rush of voters to come in. I was the only voter at this time and all of their attention focused on me. A couple of them straightened up just in case I might be heading in their direction while the woman who I approached first and handed my voter card said, "Aw, hon. Your down there." meaning her Republican table would remain idle a bit longer. After using the new voting machines and enjoying a bit of conversation about their effectiveness, I walked across the length of the dumpy gym to exit. I told the workers not to work too hard because I was taught to say this when it looked like people were going to be getting paid to do very little and because it felt like I might be the last voter of the day.
I passed no one on the way out and returned down the same road to my apartment and saw a bunch of checkered hat, NBA jersey wearing white kids in an alley that eyed me up and spoke a slurred language I could barely understand.
In the evening, I drove 15 miles west into Baltimore County where Chadwick Elementary is located. I had my tally sheets and I wondered how many would vote for Kerry, Edwards, and the other three candidates still listed. Traffic on the Beltway held me up and I wondered if anybody had ever just made the numbers up to collect their cash. If a precinct contained ten thousand people I thought, at least one thousand should be able to make it to the polls in a 13-hour period. I could easily divide a thousand votes amongst the candidates.
When I arrived around 8 o'clock, the parking lot held six cars. There was no late rush. I passed the dumpster and slid into the gym constructed of materials from over forty years ago, and found an emptiness similar to Thomas Johnson where weary workers and a handful of others were hoping to soon go home.
"We're closed now." Said the older gentleman in plaid shirt and khaki’s.
"I'm not here to vote. I need to get the final numbers for a media firm."
"Oh fine. It will be about 15 minutes." he said, walking toward a voting booth where an assistant was waiting.
I sat down at a fold-out lunch table with a middle-aged black woman and an older Latino man who was clad in a t-shirt and hat that listed all of the district judges names on them—they were being nominated today too. I looked around at this environment and it was in sad shape also, city and county indistinguishable. The gym floor had patches where tiles were broken, but the replacement tiles didn't match and they weren't brand new either. In fact they were older than the original floor tiles and this took me some time to figure out.
I looked at the faces in the gym. They were tired, a number were hustling around trying to finish with their machines. Stern looking, big-bodied black women primarily with a couple of meek older white men thrown in to the mix. A retarded teenage boy who was sitting on a folding chair by the door suddenly came in my direction.
"That my mom."
"Which one?"
"Over there. She, she, she...a teacher. And my mom." He said slowly tilting his head up and to the right as he spoke.
"Which one?"
"With the hat. Black hat. She's my mom."
It struck me then that they were all teachers, the older foundations of school staffs like my father’s elementary school in the notoriously inept Prince George’s County thirty miles to the south near Washington DC. Like my father, they were probably Retire-Rehire’s, people sticking around because for the first time in their lives they were making decent money. They had taken their day off to come back to the same dinky school environment that they come to everyday, for 14 more hours to make a couple hundred bucks on Election Day and because voting was still important to them, an obligation.
"We been here all day. Less than 300 voters. And I gotta work tomorrow," the freckled black woman sitting next to me said.
And I pitied her. Like I pitied the physical demise of the school with its glass-encased RECORD BOARD listing no greater achievements in the triple jump, the standing long jump, pull-ups since Theresa Johnson made a clean sweep of these events in 1980. Like I pitied the teachers of this older generation who have been left behind to tackle societies problems with antiquated resources and who are reminded from every conceivable angle that their value system is becoming equally out-of-date. Like I pitied the system that has election coverage everyday for the past year but offers few the incentive to participate.
The main administrator was busy consolidating the final numbers. From the far corners the workers began to grab their personal belongings and head toward the door.
"Where is that calculator? I saw one.", he said.
"The calculator? That was my calculator." a grim woman responded, clearly used to her stuff disappearing in the classroom.
"Well, can I use it and we can get out of here?"
"If you give it back." She smiled.
The numbers were posted on thin print-outs outside the gym door by a deliberately paced woman. I wrote them on my sheets and I made my phone call. I took a solid look at the group assembling before they left. I hoped somehow that they felt they were appreciated, and said good-bye to the retarded kid.
“We, we gonna take these doughnuts. I….I…I gonna lay in my bed. In my bed, I gonna eat them doughnuts.”
“Make sure your mom gets one.” I said.
“Mom? Yeah, yeah, they are plenty. I gonna eat mine in my bed.”

Scott Ciambor is currently living and writing in Baltimore, Maryland where he returns after a decade of movement that included stops in Chicago, Northern California, and Japan. He has held a multitude of jobs in these locations including teacher, counselor, and political researcher and much of his writing focuses on the people and situations he encountered along the way. Readers can contact him at clammy1@verizon.net