Voting in the Age of Pandemic
Today, the day before the U.S. presidential election, three of PLATFORM’s editors reflect upon voting in the age of pandemic: as historians, scholars, citizens, and voters. One of us is a new voter in the United States, the other two have been voting for decades, and all three of us are convinced that this election is so unprecedented—because of the high stakes in terms of policy and governance, the pandemic, and a range of new procedures (some related to the pandemic)—that it bears reflection. We are not writing to endorse particular candidates, but rather because PLATFORM is not just a venue for publishing history, but for recording it.
The editors realized last March that PLATFORM needed to discuss the pandemic and that our site, an agile DIY digital publication, could pivot easily toward this task. We opened the site to reflections from writers that have taken our readers around the globe. One inspiration came from colleagues who launched the COVID-NYC Documentary Project in April. Drawing on lessons learned in the aftermath of 9/11, they knew that they needed to start collecting in the present. (Robert Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and PLATFORM author, is one leader of this project; another is Peter Agnier, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History and editor of the Gotham blog, one of the inspirations for PLATFORM).[1]
Figure 1. Local Elections in Lowell, Massachusetts, November 3, 1987. Photograph by John Lueders-Booth. The polling place is the local firehouse. Courtesy of Prints and Photograph Division, U.S. Library of Congress.
This post, which sits in the space between an op-ed and a collective diary, is part of this archive-making project. It continues the line of thinking that Andrea Borghini and Min Kyung Lee (now a contributing editor to PLATFORM) brought to this digital forum with their remarkable day-by-day account of dwelling in a time of quarantine. In today’s post, the editors record their reflections on new, radical shifts in how democracy takes place amid twin, and we believe, related crises: the pandemic and the accelerated attacks on voting rights in the United States.
For many Americans, voting still means walking, driving, or biking to a polling place tomorrow and casting a ballot (Figure 1). For the first time, however, most Americans have voted early, in person or by absentee ballot. What does this shift mean for the public experience of voting, and for how we practice democracy? Does that experience mean more or less at a moment when opportunities how to vote have proliferated, yet the right to vote safely and peacefully feels as precarious as ever?
Election Season Matthew Gordon Lasner (ML)
Until recently, elections in the United States, as around the world, happened synchronously, to borrow one of the keywords of this annus horribilis. We voted in person, on Election Day, which in many school districts was, and remains, a holiday, allowing school cafeterias and all-purpose rooms to be given over to voting machines.
Not only were elections synchronous and in person, they were physical. Physical as in heavy-duty voting machines (see Figure 6); physical as in hanging chads; physical as in the paper ballot that a voter marked. They were also physical in terms of the body, and how “we”—at least the enfranchised among us—recorded our votes.
Figure 2. “Scene at the polls, New York City--Boxes for the distribution of tickets--Everybody busy,” 1856. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 2, no. 49 (1856 Nov. 15). Courtesy of Prints and Photograph Division, U.S. Library of Congress.
As historian Jill Lepore reminded us on the eve of another monumental presidential election in the United States, in 2008, historically in this country, and elsewhere, votes were cast by lining up on one side of the village green or the other. Later, to ease tallying, small balls, called ballotta in Italian, were introduced, which we placed in one bucket or another. Only gradually did we come to use further abstractions like paper ballots, and to cast those ballots in private, out of the view of our friends, neighbors, betters, and—crucially—ward political bosses (Figures 2, 3). Even “poll,” she writes elsewhere, originally referred to the top of one’s head.
Figure 3. Going into polling booth. Election day, McIntosh County, North Dakota, November 1940. Photograph by John Vachon. The polling place is a school. Courtesy of Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photograph Division, U.S. Library of Congress.
As a child, in the 1980s, I walked with my parents to our local public school—my school—on Election Day, to be with them, in the booth, as they cast their ballots. Although I was unable to vote in 1992—I turned eighteen two weeks after the November election—I made the ritual my own the following year, in New York’s mayoral election. Later, while living in Cambridge, then Atlanta, I continued this tradition, even if in sunbelt-scaled Atlanta the walk to my local polling station was much further (and verifying one’s identity with volunteer poll workers required reading a statement, in what struck me as a covert literacy test and a violation of the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965). In recent years, I’ve taken my son to our local school—his school—continuing the cycle.
Along the way, however, Election Day has become Election Season. While studying abroad, and traveling within the United States for research and sabbaticals, I occasionally voted by absentee ballot. But so, too, did increasingly large numbers of other Americans, taking advantage of new, state-by-state provisions allowing more kinds of voters—not just those temporarily away for work or military service—to “vote by mail” regardless of whether one was out of town, or to cast their votes in person in advance of Election Day, in what has come to be called “early voting.” Conceived to expand the franchise, boost flagging rates of voter turnout, ease crowding, and accommodate the less able-bodied, these provisions accelerated the decoupling of the franchise and time and space.
This year, the year of the novel coronavirus, severs that relationship further. Poll-watchers expect only 40% of the anticipated 150 million voters to vote on Election Day, in person. Two weeks out, 60% of expected voters (based on 2016 turnout) in Texas had already cast their votes by mail or through early voting. One week out, more than nine million Texans had voted, exceeding the total number of ballots cast in the state in 2016.
Election Season 2020: A Timeline
September 29 (ML)
Figure 4. The 2020 Voter Guide, and other material sent to registered voters by the New York City Board of Elections, October 24, 2020. Photograph by Marta Gutman.
Back in the spring, I had requested an absentee ballot for the New York State primary weeks before the application deadline. But apparently not early enough for the dysfunctional and nepotistic New York City Board of Elections: my ballot arrived the day after the election. For tomorrow’s general election, I filed my application even further in advance, through the Board of Election’s new on-line portal (in the spring, applications still had to be filed by mail or email). The site advised that ballots would be mailed out beginning September 18. Plenty of time, I thought.
My ballot arrived September 28, with the afternoon mail: so far so good. In the morning, I complete it, place it in the “oath envelope” that has one’s name and election district printed on it, and sign. I seal the oath envelope in the provided return-mail envelope, add two first-class stamps (for good measure), and head to the post office.
Not so fast. One the way, I run into a friend. I show off my envelope and tell her where I’m headed. Had I seen the story that the New York Times just posted, she asks? The one about how a hundred thousand ballot packets sent to absentee voters in Brooklyn may have been miscollated by the third-party printer, and, as a result, included the wrong oath envelopes? No, I had not! I inspect my envelope. And there it is: someone else’s name. Foiled again. I return home and email the Board to request a replacement. I also consider how fortunate I am to have run into this neighbor.
October 15 (ML)
Two weeks have passed. The Board of Elections has not replied to my email. But it did announce that replacement packets would be sent to all voters who may have been affected by the mishap. I wait. And wait. On October 15, concerned about the diminishing window to return by ballot, I email again. Then the mail arrives in the afternoon. It includes my new ballot. The correct ballot. I fill it out, double check the news and the Board of Election’s website, and walk my envelope to the blue USPS mailbox two blocks from home. This time, the experience is solitary. I make the journey alone, run into no one I know: no community, no PTA bake sale, no “I Voted” sticker to announce to friends, colleagues, and passersby that I have exercised my right to vote.
October 17 Marta Gutman (MG)
My husband, Gene, and I walked to the post office on West 125th Street in Harlem and put six hundred letters in the mail. Each letter urged a registered voter in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, or Ohio to vote (Figure 5). “It takes my vote, and yours, to make democracy work,” we wrote. “You’ll feel good all day,” we assured them. That’s a lot of letters, I hear you say to yourself. Yes, it is. (Also a lot of envelopes).
Figure 5. Letters to prospective voters, urging them to vote, October 17, 2020. Photograph by Marta Gutman.
In the late spring, a small group of friends and colleagues decided to engage in political work from the bottom up: what we learned to call relational organizing. We knew the stakes were high in 2020; we knew we weren’t eager to go knocking on doors during the pandemic; we knew we couldn’t sit on our hands; we knew we had to find another kind of space.
All Friends United 2020 we called ourselves. We signed on to Vote Forward’s 2020 get-out-the vote campaign, an outgrowth of what organizers learned in the 2018 midterm elections, which is that writing a letter to a prospective voter helps—a lot. Starting in July, Gene and I wrote twenty letters a week, meeting up with friends, family, and colleagues, via Zoom, on Saturdays. Our group of writers grew from six to ten to fifteen. Vote Forward set October 17 as the date of the big send, and people like us put 17.5 million letters in the mail.
As Gene and I were depositing our letters, we met a few middle-aged women who were mailing another kind of letter: their absentee ballots. Gene struck up a conversation with one of them who explained that she was a poll watcher. “Vote early,” she cautioned, her concern evident on her face even though she was masked. A middle-aged Black New Yorker telling two white New Yorkers that they needed to be alert, on point, on guard. Was she thinking about the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement, who put their lives on the line in the 1950s and 1960s so they could vote? We assured her that we would do so. “That’s the plan,” we said, “to vote early.”
Before 2020, I didn’t make a voting plan. I took my access to the polls for granted, meaning that I would be able to walk to the polls, usually no more than five minutes from my house, enter the building, sign in, vote, and walk out the door, wearing the sticker that showed, “I voted.” I admit that I did feel a certain frisson of concern (fear?): Will my name still be on the voter rolls? Will my signature be challenged? Thankfully, none of this ever happened.
Figure 6. Eleanor Roosevelt Votes in Hyde Park, New York, November 3, 1936. Photograph by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (NLFDR), U.S. National Archives.
My first vote for president was in 1972, and my candidate, George McGovern, lost in the landslide that elected Richard Nixon. I fumbled while learning to use the voting machine: a big grey metal box made up of more than 20,000 parts (Figure 6). The 800-pound device promised privacy and security, although newspapers were full of stories at election time of tampered tallies, and impounded machines. They were mothballed in 2010, replaced with paper forms and scanners, because it was a better bet. Safer. More secure. Supposedly.
Figure 7. Election Day, the centennial of women's suffrage in New York State, November 7, 2017. The author and her daughter, Nina Sparling, have just voted. Photograph by Marta Gutman.
Each time I go to the polls, I remember that I grew up in an immigrant family. My grandparents, who came from a place where they did not enjoy the franchise, taught me that voting was my responsibility and underscored the point by taking me to polling places as a child. I did the same with my children. In 1988, I took my 5-month old son to my polling place. The poll workers were amused as I struggled to balance machine and child. Yet again my candidate, Michael Dukakis, lost, in the landslide that elected George H. W. Bush. Soon enough, my son was pulling the lever for me, a fan of the mechanics, the theatre, the process itself. When my daughter and I voted together in 2017’s local election, we celebrated the centennial of women’s suffrage in New York State (Figure 7).
In 2020, however, I need a plan. I have one, I told the poll watcher in the post office. After considering voting by absentee ballot, I decided instead to vote in person and early. I want to be seen; I want to claim the space in public that comes with the exercise of the enfranchise; I want it to be known that I am voting. I’ve already figured out where to go, and when early voting starts.
October 18 Kishwar Rizvi (KR)
Although absentee ballots have been cast for decades, the prospect of missing the temporal and physical experience of Election Day shreds at one’s sense of citizenship, which is, at its most basic, a standing together. Yet the act of witnessing each other performing one of the core rituals of participatory democracy is a precarious one, as stories of voter intimidation and suppression reveal. These insecurities are exploited by those invalidating the process of absentee and early voting.
The absentee ballot becomes a metaphor for an age of disenfranchisement and reckoning, marking an absence brought about most immediately by a pandemic and the injustices that have lain at the surface of American life for decades. And yet, the process of voting itself promises visibility to those who participate.
Separations define life in the United States in 2020: the political, racial, and economic boundaries etched into the physical fabric of the country like scars—deep and raw—reified by the real estate market, local governance, and even social and educational services. The dispossession of segments of society is evident not only in the arena of voting, but in everyday life.
Figure 8. Voting at Wilbur Cross High School, New Haven, Conn., 2016. Photograph by Kishwar Rizvi.
Even after living almost twenty years in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, it wasn’t until I became a U.S. citizen a few years back that I began to pay real attention to the minutiae of who the stakeholders and power brokers were in my adopted city. The earliest indication of these covert structures for me, some years before, was in the city’s school districts, which are strangely demarcated and suffer from an unequal distribution of resources. Living two blocks away from the most desirable public elementary school and yet outside its catchment, I found that my children were unable to attend because we were on the “wrong side” of the street. The resources and opportunities in this New England city, I learned, were not available to all its residents.
A little further away, is the public high school where voting for my district takes place. Wilbur Cross High School, named for a governor, sits on the edge of two very different socio-economic zones: on the one side are densely packed, but well-to-do, homes of Yale faculty, graduate students, and affiliates; on the other side are apartments and houses on smaller lots, and the residents are more economically challenged. The school serves the children of both communities.
Yet even this sharing is unequal, thanks to a curriculum that reinforces social, economic, and—sadly—intellectual hierarchies on the children. Advanced Placement classes are available to those whose parents can help and steer them towards those options; sports and restorative academic practices create other spaces of community for at-risk and struggling students. That these education disparities coincide with race is a fact of public school education in most U.S. school districts.
Figure 9. The football field at Wilbur Cross High School, New Haven, Conn., 2020. Photograph by Kishwar Rizvi.
Yet the school serves as an important public space. The parking lot is a prime location to watch the 4th of July fireworks; it is also where the annual Run for Refugees fundraiser starts and ends. And on Election Day, the entrance hall is outfitted with polling booths and staffed by a diverse group of New Haven residents. It is where I cast my first vote as an American citizen, in 2016, awash with the realization of finally, fully, being part of a process that I had only observed from afar (Figure 8). On that Tuesday four years ago, I stood in a line with hundreds, the sense of purpose and camaraderie palpable across differences in age, occupations, and even political affiliation. Granted New Haven is a solidly blue “sanctuary” city—the type demonized by President Trump. But it is far from homogenous.
Figure 10. Ballot drop off boxes behind the Hall of Records, City Hall, New Haven, Conn., with empty lots, 2020. Photograph by Kishwar Rizvi.
Cross has been shuttered these past nine months, although its outdoor spaces have been crucial for the neighborhood. While the halls of the school have been empty, the track and basketball courts have not (Figure 9).
A multitude of residents use these spaces: grandparents, young children, ROTC marines, members of the school’s football team, college students, those with disabilities, and immigrants from Korea, Guatemala, Syria, and the Caribbean. This is where I experience citizenship in the age of pandemic. Regardless of your socio-economic status or race, your presence on the campus will not be contested or questioned.
Figure 11. A voter dropping off his absentee ballot, New Haven, Conn., 2020. Photograph by Kishwar Rizvi.
Cross won’t be quiet on Election Day. I, however, won’t be there this year. I have chosen an option made available to all New Haven residents: absentee voting. Connecticut does not, unfortunately, allow early voting. Although my ballot for the spring primary never arrived, that for the general election had. I fill it out, place it in the double envelope, and contemplate the next steps. Some in my household choose to mail their ballots. I decide to personally deposit mine in a drop box provided by the city.
I bike down to City Hall, and it takes a little while to realize that the drop boxes are not at the main entrance, overlooking the New Haven Green, but in the back, on Orange Street (Figure 10). I am surprised by what I find: two small boxes, looking no different than abandoned boxes for the defunct New Haven Advocate. It was hard to believe that there are only two boxes for a city of 130,000 residents! Sitting unsteadily on the edge of the sidewalk and the curb, one box faces the street and the other the Hall of Records: one was for pedestrians and the other for cars.
The block where City Hall is located is desolate, with empty lots and decrepit storefronts. On this Sunday afternoon, the street is eerily quiet. I looked around hoping to see someone else, but finding no one I take a photograph documenting my dropping off my ballot, afraid that I could be making a mistake and these boxes are a prank and illegal.
Just as I get on my bike to return home, a couple of young men drive by and come to a stop in front of the drop boxes, car blinkers flashing. The passenger leans out of the window, then cracks the door. He slips the ballots into the drop box facing the street and pops back into the car (Figure 11). As the car drives away, I feel better, a little more hopeful.
The two young people, who likely don’t even register my presence, are the reassurance I need. Even a drive-by encounter on a desolate street, allow me to feel part of a ritual that millions of people are enacting in the lead-up to Election Day: the act of voting.
October 20, 2020 (MG)
Today, this message arrives, by email:
Attn: Marta Gutman. One of the relatively unlikely voters to whom you sent a letter visited votefwd.org and clicked the “Yes, I’ll be Voting!” button. Congratulations! This person might not have cast a ballot without your encouragement. Thank you for taking concrete action to strengthen our democracy! Sincerely, Vote Forward
I write to my friend who ignited the organization of All Friends United 2020. “Such a thrill to get this email, and with good news about a battleground state too (I sent letters to 20 unlikely voters in Pennsylvania; the others went to likely voters in Texas, 280 of them). I sure hope this voter is a Democrat.” I feel good all day, as I hope this voter did, too, after she opened my letter.
Figure 12. Marchers with SCLC sign for the Savannah Freedom Now Movement during the March on Washington, Washington D.C., 1963. Photograph by Marion S. Trikosko. Courtesy of Prints and Photograph Division, U.S. Library of Congress.
October 24 (MG)
Today, early voting starts in New York State. Gene and I walk to the site, a laboratory building in the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital complex, about a mile (1.6 km) north of our house.
Figure 13. Lining up to vote on the first day of early voting in New York City, October 24, 2020. Photograph by Marta Gutman.
Figure 14. The entry to the polling place, a laboratory building at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York City, October 24, 2020. Photograph by Marta Gutman.
Figures 15. Celebrating early voting in New York City, October 24, 2020. Photograph by Marta Gutman.
I figured in pre-pandemic times that this year, the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, would be one to celebrate the political victory that women had won; an earthquake that upended the entrenched gender order, imperfect as the outcomes of this legislation were. I figured I would be thinking about them, as I voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants, and first woman of color to run for vice-president. I figured I would be thinking about my grandparents. I figured I would be thinking about voting rights activists in Birmingham, who made a plan, defied thugs, water hoses, and batons, and won the right to vote (Figure 12).
I am not prepared, at all, for what I see—hundreds of New Yorkers out in force, to vote—and what I feel: the waves of emotion that overtake me as I join the queue. A line of people winds around the entire city block, not once, not twice, but three times (Figure 13). Everyone is wearing a mask. Everyone is in a good mood (yes, this happens in New York). Everyone is patient. Everyone is enjoying seeing other people, being part of a crowd, on line, waiting to do something important. And yet, there is concern about standing in line with so many people. What is the risk? Should I leave? Am I going to get sick?
A man walks up, looks around, sees the line, is astonished. Then he addresses the crowd, his grin lighting up his face behind his mask, “Wow. Wow. I guess this means we’re throwing him out.” Another woman offers a reminder about how our ballots are designed, clearly worried about mismarked forms: “Remember: Vote down [the ballot]. Vote down. Not across. There’s a lot of new voters here. I wish I could tell all of them. Vote down.” Meanwhile, the line advances.
The mood, the cheering, the patience, the exhilaration, the sense that a big change is about to happen remind me of another presidential election. In 2008, I stood on a long line to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I live in West Harlem (also called Hamilton Heights), and while gentrification was ongoing, I was the only white voter waiting to vote. In 2020, the line has more people who look like me. I mark my ballot, scan it, and walk out of the polling site to cheers and applause led by one of the Black women working as poll watcher (Figure 14). I say to myself, this time, the landslide is coming to us. I was right in 2008. I hope I am again.
We walk to a cafe, and sit down to enjoy a cup of coffee outdoors, for the first time since March. I start to take a photo and a passerby offers to help out. He saw our “I Voted Early” stickers (Figure 15). We introduce ourselves, and he says, “Here’s to democracy.” Indeed.
Election Day
Tomorrow is Election Day. As of this morning—roughly twenty-four hours before day-of polls open—95 million Americans have voted, including 60 million through absentee ballots (or nearly two out of three early votes). So while the nation physically ails (9.2 million people infected and 230,000 and counting dead from COVID-19), 12.6 million Americans are out of work, and our government is in shambles after four years of willful negligence, at least this strand of our civic structure remains healthy.
Yet despite the apparent ease of early and remote voting, the expansion of Election Day to Election Season has not come without problems. Detemporalizaton and despatialization are taking a toll and making it harder than ever to forge consensus and set aside the vitriol that has poisoned this election cycle. Not a new challenge for Americans, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out many years ago.
As everywhere, early voting in New York City attracted astonishing crowds. During the first weekend that early polls were open in the city, 174,000 people cast their ballots. A reporter on WNYC radio commented on the exuberance, good spirits, music at early voting sites, and played a clip from an interview with a woman waiting in line. She said that an absentee ballot was not right for her, that she had to be in public, that she had to be seen, that voting had to be this kind of spatial act even during the pandemic.
But the reporter continued with a counter narrative, one, she reminded listeners, that revolves around voter suppression. Why were the lines so long? Why weren’t there more sites? How did the Board of Elections choose them? How were they distributed geographically? How many voters were assigned to each place? Was it equitable? Cultural institutions, funded by city taxes, refused to open their doors to early voting. Public schools dithered. In 2016, when New York first experimented with early voting, parents were annoyed that their children lost access to cafeterias and gymnasiums. This year, they are worried about COVID-19.
Around the country, meanwhile, conservative governors like Greg Abbott of Texas spent summer and fall working to restrict the franchise in the same way they have worked, for decades, to restrict access to abortion: by severely limiting the number of places where the deed can be done: in this case by declaring each county in the state, including Houston’s Harris County, with a population of more than four million and an area of nearly eighteen hundred square miles (forty-six hundred square kilometers), may have only one drop box.
In California, the state Republican Party has tried to sow confusion and mistrust by installing its own unofficial collection boxes (which, to everyone’s surprise, is perfectly legal under that state’s laws.)
Most egregiously, the presidential appointees who run the already beleaguered United States Postal Service spent the summer restricting work hours, hobbling the agency’s capacity for mechanically sorting mail, and removing mailboxes, until public outrage forced them to announce they would reverse course, although as recently as last week, the agency was still struggling to make good on this promise.
Yet in a year when so much that we cherish has withered, when so many have died, when Americans have become, arguably, more divided than ever—by race and by region, not to mention class, income, education and opportunity—the proliferation of options for voting is welcome. For no matter when and how we vote—tomorrow, early, by drop box, mailbox, or post office—the important thing is that we vote.
NOTE
[1] This documentary endeavor has developed into a robust project, with multiple venues in New York City: the Journal of the Plague Year at Brooklyn College, Pandemic Diaries at the New York Public Library, Queens Memory at Queens College/Queens Public Library, and an unprecedented collection of artifacts that is ongoing at the Museum of the City of New York. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture also has a web archiving project, #SchomburgSyllabus, which has a COVID subcollection.
