Voting: A Family Affair
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen November 2, 2010
Voting this morning I saw several parents with tots in tow, and it reminded me of the many, many times I took my kids to the polls. I took them strapped on to the front of me in baby carriers; I took them in strollers; I took them by the hand as toddlers; and starting when they were 2 or 3 years old, I let them move the metal lever from right to left and back again, once my vote was cast.
Now we get to vote by filling in the oval next to the candidate of our choice on a paper ballot, as if we were taking the SATs. Then you take the ballot and go to a scanner and feed it in. That’s it. It is, as one neighbor said this morning, “about as exciting as going to the bank.”
Not even. At least there you get to see your bank balance rise or walk away with some greenbacks. Now that buying votes has been outlawed, you don’t even get that pleasure at a polling station.
I have long loved taking my children to participate in the sacred secular ritual of exercising our right to vote.
There has been the rare election — like President Obama’s, in 2008 — where there is a real sense of widespread excitement. But there has also been a sense of noble purpose even voting in an ordinary election, like a primary or this gubernatorial race, and I have hoped that my children would absorb some of it.
If I can take any credit for 16-year-old Boychik’s interest in our political system, I’ll do so for having taken him to vote since he was an infant. We will see if his sisters, as they get older, share his excitement. Boychik’s interest far transcends my own. Ask him about almost any House or Senate race in the country and he can speak knowledgeably about the candidates. But long before a child is old enough to digest election-season news for himself, he can be taught about what a privilege it is to vote.
I favor technological advancement, of course, and there’s no question that the creaky metal voting booths used until recently in New York were relics of an earlier era. But there was something dramatic about pulling the vinyl curtain around you to vote, flipping down the little plastic buttons next to candidates’ names and moving that long-armed red lever down and back again to conclude the process.
Feeding paper into a scanner just doesn’t have the same feeling.
So next election season, I pledge that the person who figures out a way to restore a sense of dignity and drama to exercising this wonderful right will have my vote.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
