Jack Brummet - Point: "Why I miss the polling place" Pablo Fanque - Counterpoint: "You're stuck in the 20th century"

Point
By Jack Brummet
All This Is That creative director

It may be a sign of impending or fully-arrived codgerhood, but I already miss the polling place. Washington State has largely replaced the voting booth with mail-in ballots. On "Election Day," you no longer walk around the block to your neighborhood church or elementary school. You lick a stamp and then drop your secure ballot envelope into a mailbox or in the slot at the library. Yesterday didn't even seem like election day, at least until they "closed the polls" and began announcing vote totals after 8 PM.

I don't get to see the poll workers anymore, with their sometimes Parkinson's-trembling hands and shakily applied make-up, or the retired AFL-CIO workers, older party foot-soldiers, and stay at home moms who staffed the voting place on election day. I no longer get to watch as they try four times to find me on the voter list, or have me spell my last name three times.

There are no flags hung on the wall at the mailbox. Our children won't get to see democracy in action as we roll up to the drive-in mailbox. The strange grey steel analog voting machines where you actually pulled down a lever are long gone. Now, the "Austrian ballot" voting booth with the stiff curtain is gone too. Exit polls and political signage lining the street to within 200 feet of the polling place have disappeared. I no longer get to see my neighbors, or meet new ones at our neighborhood polling place at Our Redeemer's Lutheran Church.

The polling place has disappeared like phone booths, writing letters, mail order catalogs, and soon, newspapers and magazines, record stores and bookstores. You rarely find politicians at the retail level anymore, eating sfogliatelle, knishes, and hot dogs, kissing babies, and asking about your wife, as they press the flesh for your vote.

Progress doesn't always feel like progress. I think I liked it a little more when you had to actually do something, like walk to your poll and sign in. Sitting at your kitchen table filling out a ballot will never seem like voting to me. Roll back the stone!



Counterpoint
By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Really, Jack? You may not be that wrong when you point to your fully arrived codgerhood. America outgrew the polling place years ago. You don't seem to have a problem embracing other areas of technology that have changed our lives.

Mail in ballots dramatically raise the number of people participating in elections, and eliminate the costs of maintaining thousands of polling places staffed with workers. Jack, you're stuck in the 20th century, and after nearly a decade, it's time to leap into Century 21. Get out your stamps and pen.

And. . .if you want to meet your neighbors, well, they have doorbells, don't they?
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