Proud to be a voter in the United States

By JAY AMBROSE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Because my wife and I had moved a few months back, our polling place in Alexandria, Va., was a new one, but all we had to do, we had been told, was head south on Route One, take a right at the palm-reading place, find Fort Drive and take a right there, which we would have done except for the garbage truck.
It was going slow-motion up the narrow street with cars parked on either side. A half-dozen cars behind the truck had come to a halt. So we dodged Fort Drive, parked elsewhere and started walking up the hill. A pleasant fellow who was walking down assured us that, yes, we were heading in the right direction but that the lines were long.
They were indeed, and we first got in the wrong one -- the L-Z line instead of the A-K line -- but that's OK because we had a chance to meet this nice young Democrat handing out sample ballots and discovered he had graduated from Colorado College. My wife and I are heading back to Colorado to live at year's end and have friends who attended the school in Colorado Springs. Ours was a convivial nonpolitical chat.
We soon made the discovery that we had chosen the wrong line, alphabetically speaking. It was a win for us; the number of A-K folks was fewer, meaning the distance to the voting machines had been cut nearly in half. We were in a parking lot outside the thoroughly unpretentious, white-frame Fair Haven Community Center -- this day a center of democracy in action -- and I took in the day and the crowd.
Fall is my favorite time of year, and the weather was perfect: cool but not so cool you absolutely needed a jacket. A partial moon hung in the light blue sky, and bright yellow and orange leaves were everywhere -- still in the startlingly brilliant trees, but also scattered on the asphalt, their happy colors contrasting with the dark gray.
No complaints
The first thing to say about the crowd is that there was no sign of impatience. Our wait, like everyone else's in the comparatively short line, would turn out to be about an hour and a half. The wait was maybe two hours and more for the L-Z people, but I heard no grumbling, no complaints. The voters were mostly quiet -- with outbursts of laughter here and there -- as they read newspapers and books, scanned the sample ballots, talked in subdued tones with each other or just stared ahead.
My sense of it, as I looked at this mostly middle-class, mostly middle-aged collection of citizens, was that they were feeling good about what they were up to and pleased with the attention they received. Every so often, an election official would come by, making sure we were in the right line and the right voting district, asking if we had any questions and providing special assistance to anyone with disabilities.
As you entered the building, you saw a sign with red, capitalized lettering -- POLLING PLACE -- and were handed a blue voting permit, which you handed back when you came to the table where you showed your driver's license and said your name and address. A woman found my name in a ledger, made a check next to it, and then said my name out loud as I was guided to one of six voting machines. I had never tried touch-screen voting before, but it was easy and fun and afterwards I received an "I VOTED" sticker with a flag design in the background.
"Vote early and often," I heard someone joke as I had entered the building, and I made a similar joke to a friend I encountered while leaving: "Vote at least twice," I said with a smile to this ideological brother.
Yet just voting once is something special, even if it turns out my favored candidate is defeated. I had just engaged in a ritual whose meaning arrived by no shortcut; it took centuries of thought and struggle to get here. The meaning is that we the people get to decide who governs us. We are the bosses, finally, and that means we are listened to. Civic duty translates into civic empowerment.
I am wearing my sticker with pride.
X Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers.