I have not meticulously journaled such things, but I have a reliable memory most of the time. I used to be one of those “get there around 5:30 am and wait in the car with the heat on until other voters start showing up” people. In the pre-covid word, I usually got out of my car around 5:45 am as the line(to enter the gymnasium) was forming and I sometimes wound up being first.
In 2020, I was a first time candidate and Mask Madness was running full tilt. Not wanting to draw attention to myself as the lone dissident, I wanted to get voting out of the way and was met by a line, albeit with 6′ apart muzzled sheeple, out the door and almost all the way to one side of the building. That was at 5:15 am 11/3/20.
Having run for office 3 times and held a totem outside Charlotte School for almost all of the 14 hours of operation those times plus one other city election, I observed the slower times of the day and noted that mid-late morning was usually time when a voter would enter the building and reappear outside about 5 minutes later.
I decided to avoid the 6am rat race at the floodgates and opt for 3 hours later with the expectation of minimizing the wait time, but ran into an unpleasant surprise. The gymnasium had a table set up with 7 lines and guess which one was the longest and by a landslide!
A-B (2 letters)
C-D (2 letters)
E-G (3 letters)
H-K (4 letters)
L-M (2 letters)
N-R (5 letters)
S-Z (8 letters)
Not to be a drama queen about it, but I can’t be alone in recognizing this unfair treatment. I even commented to my nearest line waiters in the ONLY LINE that extended out the gymnasium door AND all the way outside. The other 6 lines weren’t even close to reaching the gymnasium entrance. In fact, a staffer was greeting each voter with asking what the first letter of their last names was. The ones lucky enough to not be condemned by this setup were cheerfully escorted to their much shorter lines while the rest of us had to listen to all kinds of small talk about it, whether or not it included some gloating. People who showed up together and got funneled into separate lines made comments as they parted and several minutes later when the ones not in my line finished voting and returned to “hang out with” their fellow voters still awaiting their finish line.
I played with my phone, took pictures, checked email, sent and received texts, in addition to thinking about this situation. I’ve been voting in the same place since 2015 and voted in every state/federal election, every city election, every primary and every special election, so I have enough “crude data,” meaning observations that were very real, but would get rejected by the hard core analysts. I have to say that the number of lines has varied over the years, sometimes as a few as 4 or 5 and perhaps 7 is the maximum I’ve observed. However, my line has almost always been the longest. The one time it wasn’t the longest, it was definitely the slowest. Murphy’s Law does say that “the other line always moves faster.” If it’s really true at the Market Basket registers and elsewhere, why would voting be any different?
Before you answer that, keep in mind that shoppers get to CHOOSE any register line they want and they own that decision. If they made a bad one, they can do a few things about it, mainly leave empty handed and either come back later or go to the nearest competition or get in another register line.
Voters don’t get to choose their lines. I suppose one could address this situation in advance by taking some extreme action. They could move/vote elsewhere. They could change their names. They could vote absentee. They could just not vote at all. Most of those solutions are either immoral, irrational, unproductive or all the above. Let’s assume for a moment that we are still having elections in the future.
When I complained via electronic means to some out of town friends, one in a place far from here commented that the S-Z line is always a problem in that community. Read that again, please, before dismissing me as a lone wolf malcontent or saying “it’s a blue city thing.” A blue city thing would be the NTU scheduling an event at one of the 9 places where Nashua voters vote and taking up all the parking all day. Yup, such a thing really did happen and it is fact checkable. People took video of cars circling the lot as though they were at the Pheasant Lane Mall on a December Saturday decades ago. I’m certain that more than one would-be-voter just abandoned the task and not voted at all. In my lay opinion, that was voter suppression happening in that particular ward.
I submit the theory that there is a statewide patchwork of voter suppression against people with last names beginning with the latter letters of the alphabet and nothing will ever be done about it unless we elect more people unhappy with this unequal treatment. If you happened to have noticed how many lines there were where you voted today and how many letters were included in the alphabetically last group and the difference in line lengths, please put it in the comments.
