In Which I Take Communion

I vote at Public School 165, on West 109th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. It’s an oldish building, dingy and utilitarian but with some of the dignified solidity that marked public works in the age of Roosevelt and LaGuardia. You walk through a high gate and across a concrete courtyard right into the gym. When we arrived—we being me, my wife (who can’t vote because she’s not an American citizen), and our son (who can’t vote because he’s ten)—the gym was full of snaking lines of people. We happily weaved our way to the line corresponding to our election district on the other side of the room. It was 7:30 in the morning.

In that room four years ago, the mood was warily hopeful, but with a jangly, jumpy edge. This time it was serene, as serene as the man almost everyone there had come to vote for. It was friendly. It was mellow. Kindness and consideration all around. The poll workers smiled and made gentle jokes. Our line was one of the shorter ones—maybe fifteen minutes.

I’ve always loved the experience of voting. For an unchurched secularist like me, it’s the closest I’m likely to get to the feeling of sacred solidarity which I imagine believers derive from their religious rituals. It’s especially satisfying in New York on account of our ancient voting machines. No punch cards or touchscreens or spindly little aluminum-and-plastic booths that look like they’d tip over at the slightest push. Our machines weigh eight hundred pounds. They’re tall, the size and shape of a confessional. You go behind a calf-length curtain and pull a big three-foot-long lever from left to right, like a gondolier’s oar. It goes Chunk! The candidates are laid out before you in neat columns, with an inch-long black teardrop-shaped lever next to each name. You snap the levers down. Chunk chunk chunk! You survey your work. You pull the oar back from right to left. Chunk! Most satisfying. I let my son pull the little black levers, as I did in 2000, when he was two, and 2004, when he was six. This time he was tall enough to reach the Obama lever on tiptoes, without a boost. Next time he’ll be too big to come into the booth with me. But the time after that he’ll be able to go in alone.

This is the last election we’ll have our magnificent machines, which are slated to give way to some sort of third-rate technology. But the human pleasure of this beautiful civic ceremony will remain. God bless the Upper West Side and the United States of America.