Guest post by Jan Gilbrecht
(Jan Gilbrecht is a long time friend of my family. She wrote up a wonderful first person account of working at the polls on Super Tuesday, and. I invited her to post it as a guest on the Daily Dose. Yesterday’s primary was tough for the Green New Deal, but the process of building and ensuring a democracy is ongoing.)
As a poll worker, Super Tuesday was unbelievably intense, exhausting, exhilarating and ultimately disappointing. As a supporter of Bernie Sanders—the only Green New Deal candidate left standing—I had hoped he would be leading over Biden. But there are still many states to go.
After working fifteen hours as an elections clerk toggling between diverse low-income precincts in Richmond, I was left bone tired and sleepless. But I sat down that night to write about it, because I wanted to try to capture and share something about the strange warm calmness the whole experience also left me with. I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but that level of engagement was powerful—I didn’t have to wonder if I could have done more, because I did everything I could.
My experience was obviously a very partial view of what happened overall in our City, County and State. But my experience made it clear to me just how crazy the whole primary system is and how even in California’s Contra Costa County there is evidence of race and class disparities in voting access.
I worked the Ballot/Eligibility table at each place. Even with an extensive background as a legal para-professional, it was a struggle to get up to speed with the new rules and apply them throughout the day, as well as deal with all the special rules related to the primary process.
There were seven or eight different ballots available, each one with different candidates listed. Donald Trump was running against several challengers and we did hand out some of those ballots to Republicans who were treated kindly by all. The Democratic and Dem crossover ballot had three long columns of presidential candidates. If you registered No Party Preference (NPP), your ballot had no candidates for president, but you could ask for a Dem crossover, Libertarian or American Independent Party ballot.
If all went well, voters presenting at the registration table had their name on the list with their party preference stated, or NPP voters with their three choices. They were given a ticket to carry to the ballot/eligibility table where they received the correct ballot in a folder to mark and then feed into the tabulating machine. Voters whose names didn’t appear on the list, or who had a party designation different than the one they wanted to vote, were also sent to the ballot/eligibility table.
The bad news is that a lot of people came to our tables without a ballot ticket. The very good news was that because of changes in law and rules since the midterm elections, every one of them got to cast a ballot. The sad news is that the great majority of those votes did not get counted yet. I had to ask each of the no ticket folks which Party’s ballot they wanted, without implying a preference. I also wasn’t allowed to ask who they intended to vote for but many chose to tell me. And then there were the voters who entered the polling place announcing their vote, and there were plenty of those for both Bernie and Biden. No one gave me a verbal Warren, but I think that’s because her supporters play by the rules. But I just know she had some votes – that beautiful younger Black woman in a business suit who had to hug me twice and praise my strong female leadership for standing up for her right to trade her NPP mail ballot for a same-day Dem. I’m pretty sure she was Team Warren.
Here’s what I observed—for what it’s worth—and it was sadly similar to putting people in the same racial boxes that the national media does: Bernie owned the white and Latino vote and the multi-ethnic youth vote hands down in these poor working-class neighborhoods. But there was clearly a surge of Black support for Biden evident by a number of first time or infrequent voters who same-day registered to vote for him. I am including in this number some assumptions: the African American mother/daughter pair who said their mother/grandmother made them come down before she would feed them dinner I gave to Biden. All the 18-year-old extended family members that the Latina twenty-something community organizer brought in I gave to Bernie.
As this ethnic divide emerged in real life I became anxious and sad, because I was worried not about the outcome but about how easily we can be divided up when we have so much in common, living side by side on sometimes pretty mean Richmond streets in the shadow of a giant refinery. Richmond has been a site of strong Black and Brown solidarity organizing for environmental justice over the years. I hated the thought that anyone would feel like they lost at the end of the day – our battle is not with each other. And I was concerned that the turnout was much lower than in 2018 – I hope more than a little of that is about COVID 19, and that those who were worried chose to vote by mail.
To me there was a clear lopsidedness of obstacles people faced in voting between a majority Black vs. a majority white polling place. There was news a few months ago that an accidental purge of the voting rolls occurred – obviously different zip codes fared differently, and I bet you can guess which came out on the short end. At the largely Black polling place many regular voters discovered that the County had switched them to a mail ballot without their knowledge which they never effectively received. An African American woman in her 60s stated with on-the-spot corroboration that she had been born and raised in that neighborhood and church and had voted Democratic there in person in every election. The County now had her listed as NPP by mail, so while she kept her voting record intact, it wasn’t counted on Tuesday. We ended the night with a massive pile of provisional envelopes, and most were not a new voter same day surge. Of course, back when the lists were compiled no one knew there would be a surge of Black voters for Biden: systemic racism isn’t candidate specific.
But then there were the other moments: the thirty-something young man of color who is deaf and proudly announced in writing to me that he was registering for the first time in his life and had no idea what to do. I felt so privileged to be there to help him. As I recall, he resembled my idea of an ethnically accurate Jesus, and he did have a faint glow about him. Going back and forth on paper, I asked him which party he wanted to register for. He looked troubled and said he had no idea about political parties, he just knew who he wanted to vote for. I pulled out samples of the various ballots (in numeric order) for him to review and watched as he ran his finger down and up the columns of Democratic candidates’ names until he got to Bernie’s. His glow and smile grew as he pointed Bernie’s name out to me and gestured “this one.” I also recall the older African American woman who hadn’t voted in some time also knew who she wanted but didn’t know which ballot he was on. I tried the same trick with laying them out, but she couldn’t see the names without her glasses. Finally, in frustration she looked me in the eye and said “I want to vote for the one that all the poor people are voting for. You know who I mean.” I said nothing, gave her a Dem ballot and she went away happy. I learned there was a process for registering a homeless person without an address, because we did so (he did have his party info clear, by the way).
I ended the day at my favorite assignment and one of the best workplaces I’ve been in. The other clerks were a gay male couple in their forties—one white, one Southeast Asian—and two Latina teens, one not yet old enough to vote. They gave me a great deal of hope. Our voting system in the East Bay has been maintained by members of the African American community from the voting rights era. They have kept it going for all my voting life, but they are getting on in age, but I am happy to say that the future appears to be young and Latinx. Our Leader was a Black man a few years older than me. He works as a supervisor at the Ports, and is responsible for the movement of millions of dollars of cargo every night. He’s worked as a poll inspector in every election for decades. He ran a very tight ship and commanded unquestioned loyalty from us all by being such a pro at delegating tasks, assuming responsibility and reinforcing our common mission: EVERYBODY GETS TO VOTE. I could guess but I would have no way of knowing how any of us voted, because no one of us would have dared to make a partisan comment on his watch.
The place was empty when, a couple of minutes before 8:00 pm, the Latina organizer came back with her fuzz-faced younger brother who had accidentally registered as a Libertarian. While we re-registered him, his sister explained that she was so set on getting her younger cousins and siblings out to vote because she, a former DACA recipient, couldn’t vote herself. This was her opportunity to try and make some change happen. Our Leader asked her how old she was when her parents brought her here, she said she was just two. He sighed deeply, shook his head in disgust. Then he said: “It’s just us here now, and the polls are officially closed now so I’m going to say this to you, and I speak for all of us here.” We all nodded, certain we would be in agreement with whatever he had to say. “The way that you have been treated, that your people have been treated, the children in cages at the border” – and here he and we all teared up – “we are all of us committed to ending this, to making this stop. And we will make that happen. We will come together to make it better.” We all nodded again, she thanked us, her brother finished and then they left.
Without another comment, Our Leader put us all to work closing up.
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