I voted for myself for U.S. Congress today. I walked into the polling place intending to vote for Michael McMahon, our first term Democratic Congressman. Bay Ridge, y’see, is lumped in with Staten Island for representation. This is the first election that I’ve ever been in a swing district. Boy, the number of phone calls and mailers a voter receives sure can get annoying if the election matters. I now sympathize with the citizens of New Hampshire, slightly.
Now, obviously, there’s a lot at stake if the Republicans retake the House. So, every time I received a campaign call or a survey I’d commit to voting for McMahon – but I’d be sure to tell that campaign worker that I’m pissed that he voted against the Employee Free Choice Act. I figured I would have my cake and eat it too: register my protest but hold my nose and vote for the disappointing Democrat.
But here’s the rub: voting against EFCA cost Rep. McMahon the Working Families ballot line. Y’see, in New York, we have fusion balloting. A candidate can appear on more than one ballot line, but all votes count cumulatively so that a candidate can cobble together coalition support. Most third party ballot lines in New York exist to put pressure on either the Democrats or the Republicans by adding to – or subtracting from – a candidate’s total vote. The Conservative party, for instance, usually endorses the Republican candidate unless that candidate is too namby pamby for this proto-Tea Party group. If the Republican candidate doesn’t headstomp single mothers with enough gusto, the Conservative party may choose to run its own candidate and cost the GOP nominee enough votes to throw the race to the Democrats and teach the Republicans to run a more conservative candidate next time.
Working Families employs a similar tactic, except they almost never run their own candidate. Instead, if the Democratic nominee offends, the WFP merely removes its endorsement. The candidate runs on the Democratic line only, receives fewer votes and is thusly admonished for next time. Ah, but for whom should Working Families voters cast their ballots if there is no nominee? I am genuinely unsure of the answer to that question. I’m sure that most WFP leaders and staffers would prefer that the Democrats not lose a seat that cost cost the national party control of the staff. And yet they’ve essentially told their supports, “Don’t vote for this bum.” Further, I am sure that I’m not the only WFP voter who has never pulled the lever for a Democrat in his entire life (*yes, I know we don’t have levers anymore – more below on that). It is only the thin cover of WFP endorsement that has enabled me to vote for erstwhile Dems on the WFP line. But no name appeared on the WFP line today. Just Democrat McMahon and his Republican challenger. So, I did the only logical thing and wrote in my own name. I hope this isn’t a close race, because it seems like these new voting machines in NY actually count write-ins, and I’d hate to be the margin of difference. Again.
(In case you’re wondering, I voted for WFP in all the other races except for Governor, where I voted for Hawkins and Mattera on the Green line. Cuomo does not need my vote to claim a mandate when he starts beating up on the teachers union tomorrow. I also gave good old Norman Thomas a write-in vote for the fourth judge seat that WFP did not make an endorsement for.)
So, yes, we finally have new voting machines in New York. The pull lever machines that sent JFK to the White House have finally been retired. Our new ballot is kind of a Scantron fill-in-the-bubble sheet that one hand-feeds into a scanner that is no more sophisticated than that all-in-one scanner/printer/fax machine you set up for your parents. It sucks the ballot up, the screen chirps “Thanks for voting!” and you hope your vote is counted. A friend of mine was not reassured by the on-screen confirmation, and longs for the old lever machines.
But the old lever machines used to eat huge numbers of ballots. There were races where as many as ten per cent of the ballots cast were “spoiled” and not counted. Pulling that giant switch when you were done would sometimes cause the machine to crumple and rip the ballot(s) inside. I remember that in 2000, the Socialist Party’s presidential ticket received only two write-in votes in the entire city of New York. Both the candidate and his campaign manager lived in New York, so you gotta imagine that a few votes got lost along the way. My election district did report a vote for McReynolds, so I think my vote was counted. But my poor intern on the campaign, Maddie VanHaaften-Schick, was assigned a defective voting machine at her precinct. The write-in button wouldn’t click and reveal the tiny slip of white paper on which to write in a name. She waited. She fought with the machine. She caused a long line-up behind her of voters waiting to do their civic duty. Finally, the manager of the polling location came over to see what the problem was. Maddie explained that she had ben working on this campaign for five months and wanted to cast her write-in vote for David McReynolds. This useless bureaucrat told her, “Oh, honey, we don’t count those votes!” Not content with merely saying this outrageous thing, he commenced to prove it by spinning the machine around and opening it up to show the weird jumble of paper rolls that were in the guts of the machine. “We don’t even look at these,” he said of the write-in roll – a continuous spool of blank paper with occasional scribbles that corresponded to no set ballot position. Thus defeated, Maddie voted for Nader, who was on the ballot.
In the first couple of days after the election, you could understand how I was left cold by complaints that some ballots might have gone uncounted in Palm Beach because voters couldn’t punch the right hole. Votes go uncounted all the time. The only way you can be sure your vote counted, it would appear is to write in your own name.