Originally published NOVEMBER 17, 2000 (in the Middle of Gore/Bush War in Florida)

I don’t know about you, but I am still riveted by this election thing. Better TV theatre than Watergate, almost. It’s like watching the OJ trial – actually, it’s like watching 5 or 6 of them. A lawyer’s paradise, for sure.

Notice how many sports analogies are used to describe the thing? If you don’t watch TV football, you probably can’t follow the electoral action. This guy is the quarterback of a candidate’s team. One set of lawyers attempts an end run around the other set. We are reminded that politics is a contact sport. And as I sit here on Friday morning, the consensus is that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision will be the whole ballgame.
And on and on.

Having made clear that politics is a game and a dirty one at that, you could never have more fun playing it than in Chicago in the early ‘70’s. I was a pollwatcher for some Independent Voters and got to watch the hand to hand combat first hand. The city was still reeling from their cops bashing in demonstrators’ heads four years earlier at the Democratic Convention, and Mayor Richard Daley exhorted the faithful to vote early and often. Say what you want about Richard Daley, at least he never ran on a good governnment platform, like some hypocritical presidential candidates whom I will not mention.

But I digress. We trained as poll watchers to keep as many dead people as possible from voting. We were trained in somebody’s basement in an atmosphere that resembled a CIA briefing. Here were our instructions: Bring your own coffee. This would avoid that embarrassing incident in which the Democratic precinct captain had given the opposition poll watchers coffee spiked with ex-lax. For the same reason, we were told to never leave our coffee unattended. You could leave your wallet in plain view but not your coffee.

Then we were given the name and phone number of the lawyers who would bail us out when we got arrested. Opposition poll watchers had a short life. A Chicago cop who had memorized the entire Election Code was stationed at every precinct and if you even sneezed a hostile political word (like “Independent”) you were carted off to the pokey for campaigning inside the polling place

Poll watching was an event. Every time someone came in to vote, the precinct captain would read out their name and the Republican, Democrat, Independent, and about six other people would fan through their voter lists to see if the person had already voted. Not that it mattered if they had, but at least it gave the polling place a carnival atmosphere. I felt like I was a trader on the floor of the stock exchange with thousands of people shouting at each other and paper flying everywhere. Except that some of the traders would occasionally get arrested.

Imagine my disappointment when I arrived in California and there primly sitting before me at the polling place were three elderly women from the League of Women Voters. Gone were the precinct captain, the cop, the Democrat, Republican, Independent, People's Worker Party chick, and others shouting and throwing things. I thought I had walked into a morgue.

And 30 years later, while everyone else votes by absentee ballot, I still go to the polling place to vote. I think somewhere deep inside I keep hoping I’ll walk into a time warp and get some of that old time ward politics. Nothing like a good shouting match to remind you that politics really is important enough to fight about.
©2000 Adrienne Larkin