{"id":63681,"date":"2024-10-26T18:37:31","date_gmt":"2024-10-26T22:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=63681"},"modified":"2024-10-27T17:04:29","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T21:04:29","slug":"on-a-beautiful-autumn-day-in-nyc-i-voted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=63681","title":{"rendered":"On a beautiful autumn day in NYC, I voted"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve never been a patient person. I don’t like lines and avoid them unless unavoidable. Today, though, as I walked up Columbus Avenue to the new wing of The American Museum of Natural History<\/a> for the first day of early voting, I yearned to see a line.<\/a><\/p>\n

There was a line.<\/p>\n

Under the big trees, still leafy but just turning gold, the voting line extended along the sidewalk for a full New York block, and grew after I joined it. I began to smile. I’ve been smiling ever since.<\/p>\n

Even when I lived and voted in the Village, a high voting area, a line was pretty unusual. Generally it’d take me no more than fifteen minutes to vote — and fifteen minutes used to be a long time.<\/p>\n

But today, and this was the first of nine early-voting days before November 5, the line turned out to be an hour long — an hour spent delightfully, first finding out what was the meaning of the t-shirt worn by the guy in front of me (Sad Dads<\/a> \/ The National<\/a>), and having a long chitchat with a statistician (yes, polling came into it, especially how shaky polling is now that so many younger people have cell phones, while older people, many of whom don’t, vote reliably). The stat guy talked quickly and nearly constantly about a lot of different things. His wife, a lovely, smiling woman with silver hair, had been a physician but was now asphasic, which I found sad.<\/p>\n

(There were actually two separate groups in front of the museum: our voters line and the people going into the museum itself, which was distinguished as “the butterfly line,” even though it was not a line.)<\/p>\n

My new statistician pal calculated how long it would take us to get into the museum by counting ten feet of our movement forward and evaluating the line length. Or something like that. He said it’d be 55 minutes to an hour. We got into the museum at 56 minutes.<\/p>\n

And everybody smiled. The election workers, the voters, a couple of dogs who presumably were voting — one sported a leash from Harvard — some children. We were a happy bunch.<\/p>\n

I got two stickers, both of which are true. One says, “I voted early 2024,” and the other says, “I voted early 2024 at the Museum.” The first one is on my bathroom door, next to the New Yorker cover of Kamala Harris. The other one is on my jacket.<\/p>\n

Can you tell from what I’ve written how joyous and excited I am to have voted in this agonizingly crucial, if insanely abnormal, election?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve never been a patient person. I don’t like lines and avoid them unless unavoidable. Today, though, as I walked up Columbus Avenue to the new wing of The American Museum of Natural History for the first day of early … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9432,8679,10885,4789,1095,1175,1265],"tags":[10984,10985,6399,4127,3184,10947,10982,10983,57],"class_list":["post-63681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-government","category-kamala","category-political-campaigns","category-politics","category-the-facts-of-life","category-voting-rights","tag-american-museum-of-natural-history","tag-aphasia","tag-early-voting-nyc","tag-kamala-harris","tag-polling","tag-pollsters","tag-sad-dads","tag-the-national","tag-the-new-yorker"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t