This Tuesday, I get the entire day off in order to vote. This might sound ridiculous in light of the fact that, even in a Presidential election year, voting takes the average citizen a grand total of five minutes — not to mention the fact that the average citizen probably doesn’t spend the morning meditating on his or her political choices before heading to the polls. But the average citizen doesn’t vote in my neighborhood, and voting in my neighborhood does in fact take all day, because nobody (myself included) bothered to read the little Board Of Elections voter handbook thingie, and as a result nobody (myself included) knows which district or ward or whatever they live in, so everybody (myself included) has to stand in line and wait for a volunteer to tell them which district or ward or whatever they live in so that they can get into the correct line to sign in, and a bunch of people inevitably stand in line for half an hour before realizing that they got into the wrong line, so they switch lines and stand in another line for another fifteen minutes before realizing that they have in fact gone to the wrong polling place entirely, and then they wander out onto the street to ask total strangers where they should go to vote if they live on 33rd Street, but even those of us who did come to the correct polling place and did select the correct line have to wait for the line to move up to the sign-in table, a process that I use geologic time to measure, not only because it takes so damn long but also because the line consists largely of “older” ladies who have almost turned into fossils already, and these ladies usually bring along their equally superannuated asthmatic lapdogs, and one lady always makes a fuss when she can’t bring Trixie into the voting booth with her, and one of the poll volunteers has to explain by shouting directly into the lady’s ear that the presence of a nearly-extinct species of dog in the voting booth will in fact render her ballot null and void, and then the lady shouts back that she doesn’t have all day, for Pete’s sake, and can’t she just take Trixie and vote for that nice young Coolidge chap already, and all the impatient midtown types that took their lunch hour to vote start shifting their feet and muttering, and between the foot-shifting and the muttering and the Trixies yapping and wheezing and the skreek-skreek-skreeeeeek of several dozen walkers and the volunteers shouting at the old ladies about the dogs and the whoosh-CLANG of the booth curtains opening and closing and people on line collapsing from advanced dehydration, voting sort of gives me a headache.

But aside from the fact that I have to bring delivery menus and bottled water along with me to the line, I like voting. It gives me a little democracy-in-action thrill. The first few years that I could vote, I didn’t feel the thrill because I voted via absentee ballot, and I sat at my desk and dutifully punched out the little holes with a pencil, which completely failed to inspire any sense of civic pride, perhaps because I didn’t even have to put on a bra before “voting.” I do remember the first time I voted in an actual polling place, though. My mother and I went down to the junior high school and showed our IDs, and I signed the big registration book, and then the volunteer flipped back a page in the book so that my mother could sign, and I could see the signatures of both my parents marching down the page for every single year since they moved to our town in 1972, which ruled. I never really understood why people wouldn’t vote if they could. No, it probably doesn’t make that much difference at the end of the day, but then again, neither does staying home in some sort of weak protest against the corruption of American politics. If you want to change the system, you have to participate in it, and I don’t buy the whole “but I don’t want to get called for jury duty, maaaaan” argument.

Of course, anyone reading this probably thinks that my knowledge of the candidates and their platforms matches my pro-voting fervor. Well, think again. This year, New York has a bunch of high-profile offices up for re-election, so I’ve followed the issues more closely than I usually do. Ordinarily, however, I get into the booth, close the curtain, and stare in utter bafflement at the names on the ballot. Should I vote for the Democrat? For the woman? Close my eyes and pull a random lever? Look for the most out-there party name and vote for that so the guy running on the Hats Lined With Aluminum Foil Coalition ticket can go to sleep thinking someone voted for him besides his mom? Scrawl “the tooth fairy” in the write-in space? Most of the time, I find myself voting not for but against a given candidate, and that holds true this year. I don’t know much about Chuck Schumer, but I know plenty about Senator Alphonse D’Amato, and I have to vote against him. Ditto the attorney general’s race — I wouldn’t know Eliot Spitzer if he walked up to me on the street, but Dennis Vacco doesn’t believe women have the right to choose, so I have to vote against him. Governor George Pataki hasn’t done anything to speak of, but Peter Vallone wants to spend my tax dollars outlawing smoking, and frankly, I can’t imagine electing a man with a toupee that scary to the highest office in the state, so I guess I have to vote against him. And I voted for Bill Clinton, twice, because if I hadn’t, the Senility Party would have held the White House for another four years and I would have wound up clipping baby food coupons and answering to “Mrs. Biscuit,” and I don’t have anything against mothers or married folks, but you know what I mean.

So, yes, I often wind up voting blindly for Democrats because it seems safer given my belief system, and no, the founding fathers probably didn’t have my “oh, what the hell” selection process in mind when they drafted the Constitution, but on the other hand, it didn’t occur to them to give me the vote to begin with, or to people of color either. Nor did it occur to them to include long-winded and incomprehensible referenda on the ballots; we have the modern political system to thank for those. I would love to weigh in on commercial zoning proposals and educational disbursement bills and district reapportionment, because I almost understand those things, but not when some municipal policy wonk words the questions in a manner more confusing than those Trivial Pursuit questions that read like a German translation of Japanese VCR instructions — the words all look like English, and yet they don’t make any sense and I can’t find a verb anywhere. And why don’t they cook up an interesting referendum or two for a change? I don’t have kids, so it doesn’t really matter to me who pays for the textbooks the kids keep not getting and the extra classrooms the Board of Ed keeps not building, and since the city keeps denying the existence of any potholes, I don’t really care where they get the money to continue not fixing them, as long as they don’t take it out of my paycheck, which they seem to keep on doing, so couldn’t my tax dollars pay for a couple of relevant questions on the ballot? Questions like, “Proposed: drivers honking unnecessarily in rush-hour traffic may consider themselves subject to citizen’s arrest,” or “Proposed: we the New York Police Department officially declare the city of New York a fascist state,” or “Proposed: nobody gives a flying fig about Fashion Week.” Or just a couple of questions that don’t read like an automotive manual.

Okay, we have now established that I don’t really follow the actual politics and that I don’t know what the hell I just voted for when I approve a referendum. Perhaps I should stop relying on campaign advertisements for information, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t escape the barrage of commercials the candidates run on TV. The media has made much of the so-called negativity and mud-slinging going on this year, but that doesn’t really bother me; politicians want to get elected, and politicians have a way of doing whatever they have to in order to get elected, so I don’t really know what people expect. The commercials do annoy me, though, with their sheer frequency, and also with their willful ignorance of rhetorical technique. If these candidates spend the money on image consultants and ad teams, you’d think they would learn how to use parallel structure. I don’t care if they insult their opponents, but when they capitalize words in the middle of sentences, I get irritated. Anyway, at least it will have ended by Tuesday night and I can get back to throwing my Pumas at the TV every time that accursed Buddy Lee pops up on the screen.

I don’t know the campaign issues, I don’t understand the proposition questions, and I spend my time parsing the grammar of the campaign ads, but I still consider myself a relatively informed voter. More importantly, I consider myself a voter, and if you didn’t plan on going to the polls on Tuesday, I would urge you to go and cast your ballot, if only to tell the morons at CNN once and for all that this election has not one damn thing to do with Clinton or with any sex had or not had or not defined as had or whatever in the Oval Office — like, hello, we already ELECTED that guy, so LET IT DROP already. You might not think your vote makes that much difference, but first of all, if everyone thought that, we would have a problem, and second of all, we shouldn’t let political commentators keep telling each other what we think when they have it wrong, and finally, this country has some problems but at least we can go to the polls and elect a different set of problems, and I guess I should wind this up before I start singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” or something.

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