I always get giddy on Election Day, no matter who wins or who is projected to win, because I love the excitement.
And that’s because I’m a reporter, I think.
While many of you have to sit at home and refresh the county clerk’s website and watch the news — maybe nurse a beer and a dour foreboding — I set up camp at the courthouse. The county clerk hands me each batch of returns as each precinct rolls in. The paper is still printer-warm when it hits my hands.
I get to focus on the quirks in the races, rather than obsessing bluntly over who is going to win.
C.S. Lewis once wrote something to the effect that whether it’s a winning or a losing battle, a man feels OK as long as he’s riding a horse. That’s how covering an election feels.
But another reason I love Election Day is because it’s a thrill to vote.
My mama texted me Tuesday that the line at the Riverton vote center stretched all the way to the road. That’s at a building now diplomatically called “The Fremont Center,” but for decades it went by the name of “The Armory,” a way cooler title I still ascribe to it.
Who trades an “armory” for a “center”? The building’s not at the center of anything, but it does have a weird dank vault that looks like it could store a thousand guns.
When we go there for potlucks, I beg my children not to lock themselves into the vault because I don’t know if anyone alive knows how to unlock it.
We’d have to gouge open the building to get my kids out of there, and wouldn’t THAT help me convince everyone that I’m a sound and reasonable news clarion.
Thinking I could dodge the long line, I drove south to Arapahoe, a small town on the nearby reservation where the line to vote was said to be much shorter.
It was, with about 30, or 1/10 the number of voters Riverton had waiting.
But it was not quicker. The line didn’t move for five, sometimes eight minutes at a time. The Husband saved my spot in line and I went outside to conduct exit polls.
When I got back inside to find that The Husband had only advanced three spaces in 20 minutes, I patted his shoulder and told him I was going to try my luck in Riverton. I’d later learn that many of the Arapahoe voters were registering for the first time or after a hiatus, and the election attendants didn’t separate the new voters into their own line until right after I left.
Meanwhile, Mom texted me that she’d voted, and she had time to pick up my kids from school. A short while after that, she texted that she and the boys were going to make campaign signs.
“Absolutely do not post ANY photos of my kids holding campaign signs,” I pleaded. “We CAN’T CAMPAIGN IN AN ELECTION.”
My mom, ever the pink boa to my black suit, chirped back, “Oh silly, it’s for the class presidency.”
I slapped my forehead.
The twins are running for class president. I’ve been urging them only to promise their voters things over which they have control, such as, “I will humbly suggest to the teacher that we can possibly maybe choose a computer game after we finish our work.”
That made for some lame fliers.
So my mom printed off vote-for-me cards for each twin, and sent them home with a roll of Scotch tape so they could strap candies onto the cards and just bribe the voters instead.
Thanks, Mom.
Meanwhile in Riverton, I stood in a snowstorm for half an hour.
Then I shuddered through the open door and tried to make sense of the indoor line’s shape. It zigged and zagged, then looped through a side room (not the gun safe), then zigged and zagged twice, then whipped out to a table of people who almost apologized when they asked for my ID since they’ve known me since childhood and witnessed my most embarrassing moments.
The zigs and zags made for some fleeting reunions. At one point I saw the man who helped teach me how to drive (a mechanic who worked for my dad through my late teen years), and I tried to catch up with him, but our lines shot opposite directions and I yelled a goofy farewell instead.
When it was finally my turn, I voted.
Then I walked back into the cold. Grateful, of course, for the chance to vote, but also to see the whole town that made me who I am, standing in one line together.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
