In the recent provincial election, I voted for the first time as a Canadian citizen. Then, a few days later, I was a ballot issuing officer at a polling station on election day, waking very early in the morning darkness. The first major storm of fall had arrived, what is now referred to as an atmospheric river, and it rained continuously for two days. When my partner drove me to my workplace, everything was dark and glistening, the unwiped areas of the windscreen and side windows bubbled in beads of rain. In places the road was flooded, and we could not see this until the wheels of the car entered the water, and we felt the tug on the tires through the steering wheel. The polling station itself was an elementary school, and we struggled to find it, our GPS sending us into a dark, wet cul-de-sac with no signage. In the end I got out of the car, struggling with my umbrella, rounded a corner and found a flight of wide, shallow stairs leading up to a lighted porch. I entered a school assembly hall that also served as a gym. Some of my co-workers were there already, laying out ballot issuing tables on one side of the space, voting booths on the other, and placing two ballot machines for voters to deposit the ballots by the exit doors on the far left.
The school was curiously old and new to me. It was built, presumably, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the area it was part of was converted from industrial lands to residential use. The design of the building was starkly modernist and angular, and one section of the hall’s ceiling sloped down at a sharp angle behind the basketball hoop on one wall. Tough for ricochets, one of my companions said, if you missed the hoop and the backboard. Yet there was also a patina of age to the room; a worn and repolished wooden floor, heavy and battered wooden desks that we struggled to set up, and ancient plastic folding chairs that proved uncomfortable to sit on at the end of our twelve-hour shits. The room reminded me of the school halls in my childhood, a Victorian elementary school in Newcastle, and then a more modern middle school in Dorset, each a world away. On the far wall was what we called, as schoolchildren, the apparatus, three great frames containing wooden ladders, ropes, and gymnastic equipment that now sat flush against the wall, but which I knew could be rotated outwards and then carefully locked in place. There was a bunch or ropes, too, knotted at the bottom and going up all the way to the ceiling, carefully pulled aside like a shower curtain, and again I remembered something very similar from my childhood. The ropes could be spread out in a row taking up the width of the hall, and we’d be encouraged to climb them by hauling ourselves up and locking our legs around the rope before reaching up again and repeating the movement. Some of my classmates could climb effortlessly up to near the ceiling, but I never could.
We set up our stations. If we looked to our right we could see through the entrance door to the rod outside, a tiny pocket of exterior life. Voters would rise up the steps from the lane below, and then furl their umbrellas as they entered the polling station. Behind them the rain never quite seemed to stop, flashing briefly golden under the lights, and then turning dark again and pouring and pouring down without stopping. The sky lightened, but the rain persisted until the light faded again in the evening.
Voters moved like electrons or traffic, comprehensible both as particles and waves. They arrived in waves that rose and fell following a logic we tried to work out, but failed to understand. We thought of the rhythms of a Saturday and plotted them into the periods of activity and then those long minutes when we waited and only a trickle of people came. Were people having a late breakfast, or an early lunch, or going shopping at certain times? Or did the rise and fall in numbers have to do with trying to avoid rain, which at times lessened in intensity but never quite really stopped?
As particles, there were three characteristics of voters: embodiment, face, and then name and voice. We saw the voters from far off, after they were welcomed into the hall. Some strode confidently looking for a ballot issuing officer. Other hesitated, shuffled, and turned backwards to an accompanying friend. Some brought small children in tow who shyly remarked that this was THEIR school, with quiet but evident pride. Service dogs pattered across the floor of the hall. Wheelchairs rolled, sticks clicked, unless they were walking sticks with soft rubber feet. In terms of dress sense there were certain themes. For younger people, beanies and heavy boots, whether with platform soles or something a little more recognizably branded, Bluntstones with their oversized labels, Dr Martens, even, with a cross stitch of laces laddered up the front of the boot. Older voters sported Arc’teryx gortex jackets, and the very oldest had Tilley hats.
The second thing that emerged was the face, a small oval at first, bobbing along in a tide of legs and coats, and then detaching itself from the crowd and perching, like a bird, just above my desk. At this moment I was never quite sure whether to stand up or to remain seated. Faces varied in expression. Some were eager, some relaxed, others slightly nervous, as though they’d temporarily returned, as adults to school. They differed from each other in other ways. One was heritage, often blurred, sometimes seeming to emerge with clarity. Scandinavian faces, East Asian faces, Eastern European faces, faces in which processes of migration and settlement ebbed and flowed. Another was age. Younger people had pierced noses or eyebrows; older ones silver hair, and lined, often anxious faces.
Then there were names. English names, or at least Anglicised ones. French names. And then names from languages that I knew well enough for me to recognise – French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese. First Nations names. I was required to read out the name when I issued the ballot, and so I developed a habit of asking the voter how to pronounce the name, or at least part of the name. They appreciated this, and they’d sometimes say, spontaneously, this is an Albanian name, a Croatian name. And there were some wonderful hybrids, which I’m reworking here so as to not give real names — Mariko Wong; Jean-Luc Henderson; Pedro Matsuda. At times even a simple name would be difficult to pronounce, since I wasn’t sure how its sound had changed through the process of settlement. I’d pronounce Wien as “Veen” and be gently, almost shamefacedly, corrected by the voter – it was “Ween”, the pronunciation changed in this new continent, at the end of the world. And then with the ballot box in hand, the voter departed, satisfied. The face turned away from you. The name receded, vanishing from your computer screen, and only briefly lingering in the voters cards that accumulated like the leaves falling outside, and that one of the other poll workers periodically gathered for shredding.
At the same time the name came to you, through the ID or the voter’s card, you also heard the voice. First generation migrants still carried traces of another life or place in their voices, even in old age, thirty or forty years after arrival. By the second generation the voices had become mostly the same. And there was something, too, indefinable but inescapable about the way in which the body moves; as if the first generation’s flesh and bones carried a memory of somewhere else, while the second and subsequent generations did not. You see families where this has happened, walking together, the children running and laughing, the parents solemn: they, like me, have come from elsewhere, while the children have only ever really known here.
Of course, you can’t forget histories of colonialism and violence, or ongoing social inequality. But the hall is a strange space of suspension. We engage in a collective ritual that somehow draws us together in hope for the future. New citizens often spontaneously tell you that this is the first time they are voting, and sometimes ask you to show them how to complete the ballot — with a cross or by completely darkening the circle next to the candidate’s name, not a check mark.
Perhaps the strangest thing in the hall is this. We are in the middle of a contested, hard-fought bad-tempered election, but we are forbidden to talk about politics. We genuinely have no knowledge of how each voter might vote, and no way of guessing. Politics is everywhere in the hall and also nowhere. At one time a co-worker makes a brief coded reference to the “blue party” and the “orange party” but is then shut down by our collective silence. It’s like the still centre of a storm, when the winds briefly die away. This is strangely reassuring. This is a space in which we come together. This is a ritual that we all enact, collectively, as citizens, something in which the majority of us still have faith.
At the end of the day all the poll workers are tired, but somehow content, at peace, with a feeling of warmth towards the world. In the bathroom, after the doors have closed, after the last voters, a tiny stream and not the final flood we anticipated, have gone, I go to the bathroom and check my phone for the results, which come quickly due to our efficiency. I return to news sites and social media, right-wing populism, the anger of selves made over by neo-liberalism, that diminishing space of democratic socialism. The shared space of the polling station recedes.
When I leave the hall, the rain is as strong as ever.