Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, Nov. 9. I’m Gale Holland, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, seated in my Echo Park bedroom/home office, hoping that the scrunchie I tied around the latch of the 85-year-old casement window I’m looking through holds when the next storm rolls in.
California has made it so very easy to vote in other ways that showing up at the polls on election day is strictly optional. Mail-in ballots arrive automatically with no postage due, to drop in the post or one of the election boxes scattered through town.
Voters can also cast ballots in person during nine days of early voting; register to vote online, or in person on election day; or designate a proxy to deliver their ballots. You can even get a new ballot if you mess up early enough.
Easy, yes, but fun? Nope. Fun election day is an American tradition that has faded away entirely since George Washington spent his entire campaign budget, 50 pounds, on 160 gallons of liquor in hopes of persuading 391 voters to go his way. Apparently, it worked.
Election day was even more fun in the 19th century, particularly in New York, where the Tammany Hall political machine used alcohol and muscle to gin elections in its favor.
Instead of robocalls, Tammany Hall campaigners “got out the vote” starting election eve, luring drunks and homeless men with food and alcohol and trapping them overnight in a basement or back room. After a successful “cooping” — as in “chicken cooping” — the men were force-fed more alcohol and food and hauled from one polling place to another, until they had cast enough ballots to put the “correct candidate” over the top.
Corrupt, yes. Violent, sure, but for those with the stomach for it, probably fun.
In the hopes of turning election day into a celebration, people have called to make it a holiday. The idea has gone exactly nowhere.
Awakening Tuesday on a very wet, blustery morning, I visited several polling places, expecting to find ghost towns, given how many Angelenos seem to believe they will melt if they go out in the rain.
But instead, shortly before 9 a.m., a steady stream of voters appeared at El Sereno Senior Center, saying they had waited until election day to make sure their ballots were not lost or tampered with.
“It’s called election day for a reason, not election week or election season,” said one burly man who, like several other mistrustful voters, didn’t want to be identified. “It helps prevent cheating by the filthy Democrats.”
Luis Vasquez, 76, a retired factory worker, said he especially wanted his vote counted against Kenneth Mejia, a progressive Los Angeles city controller candidate. “A little,” he said when asked if Mejia was too radical for him.
Near downtown Los Angeles, Lasell Bourne said he walked from his skid row apartment to the James M. Wood Community Center because his community needed to be present and fight more to improve conditions in the homeless enclave.
“It’s probably also tradition,” said the 69-year-old retired warehouseman and security guard, who also said he wanted to vote for “her.”
“She’s a Democrat and she’s Black,” he said, explaining his support for L.A. mayoral candidate Karen Bass, and his assessment of her rival, real estate developer Rick Caruso, a longtime Republican who changed his registration from decline to state to Democrat while mulling a previous candidacy: “He is masquerading as a Democrat,” Bourne said.
In a helmet and sleeves, Emory Taylor, 79, bicycled through intermittent rain to vote a straight Republican ticket at Irvine City Hall. He told my colleague Gabriel San Ramon that showing up was “just habit.”
“It’s part of my personal culture to stand in line and vote,” he said. “It’s the community coming together.”
Voters were jolly at St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Mid-City, where Ambrea Miller, 32, who works in fashion, walked to cast her ballot. Miller said she too was concerned about ballot security. But she mainly waited for election day because in-person voting felt “more real. It’s official.”
Miller wore her “I Voted” sticker as she walked out of the polling area, as did Marcy Levitas Hamilton, chief executive of a film distribution company, and her husband and business partner, Strath Hamilton. “I like voting on voting day,” Levitas Hamilton said. “I just like that feeling and getting that patch. It’s my patriotic duty.”
Another voter realized she’d forgotten her “I Voted” sticker and rushed back in to get it. “Blessings,” she said as she bid goodbye after a chat about neighborhood news.
I too like the sense of community of voting in person and wearing the patch, pathetic as that might be. I have happy memories of taking my kids into the voting booth and getting them their own stickers. Earlier in the pandemic, Dodger Stadium opened to voting, and my white husky, Lucy, enjoyed scavenging for leftover Dodger dog crumbs.
This was the first year I used a drop box. Next year, I am going to go back to my polling place. I like feeling a part, however minuscule, of the democratic process. And damn it, I want my election day voting sticker.
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