Voters go to a polling place to cast their ballots on the final day of early voting for the 2024 election on Nov. 1 in Atlanta. Photo by Getty Images
By means of Joel Bellman
November 8, 2024
Dear Gaia:
We worked together briefly on Election Day at the Los Angeles County Vote Center, where we handled over 900 walk-in voters – one voter every four minutes for 13 straight hours!
You and the two other student workers at the high school looked so dejected as you huddled over the news feeds on your phones. If we had had more time to talk that day, I would have told you this:
Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “The world breaks everyone and then many are strong in the broken places.” The world may well break you prematurely, because you have a lifetime ahead of you to become strong and resilient, stripped of naive and foolish illusions.
When my brother and I were young teenagers, we volunteered for the George McGovern campaign in the summer and fall of ’72, which doomed a presidential candidacy as surely as it ever had in my lifetime. Following the news, yet somehow ignorant of its reality, we poured our hearts and souls into campaign work, cold calling potential donors, distributing factory gates, setting up tables for events, writing thank you notes, and going door to door. went out the door. , to transporting seniors and disabled people to the polls in my old 1950s Plymouth as a 16-year-old first-year driver.
When election night arrived, there was a blowout in 49 states, 520 to 17 in the Electoral College. McGovern didn’t even win his own home state of South Dakota. We sat around the television in our headquarters and cried quietly. We were broken, but more than fifty years later, we are stronger in the broken places. Trust me, you will get through this too.
I would ask you to put aside your bitterness and confusion about the outcome, and instead think about some of the voters we have helped. Consider Anjelica, a young Latina I recorded, who quietly admitted that her hometown was a homeless shelter. Steve, a man with one leg who slowly and painfully hobbled in on crutches.
George, a Korean-American man who is two years younger than me and looked fifteen years older. He had no fixed address. “Yeah, you know, I had a place, but with the pandemic… family dynamics…” he trailed off. I asked where I could register him now; he gave me the address of one of the city’s rented motels for the homeless. He asked if I knew of a way he could get on a list for The Montecito, a former grand Mayan-themed art deco registered apartment building around the corner from the voting center that had once housed a young Ronald Reagan and James Cagney, but that had been converted into senior housing. He gave me a friendly fist bump and said, “I need some luck, buddy.”
There was another young man, barely older than my eldest son, who quietly admitted that he was homeless and living on the street near the last apartment he had been evicted from. And I helped Blanca and Julio, a newly registered older Latino couple, smile as they held the ballots I had issued them and headed to the voting booths.
Gaia, let’s not forget the dedication of our fellow pollsters: Norma, a Filipino 20-year-old American veteran who wears her Desert Storm Veteran hat every day; Tura, a multilingual, French-Italian-Persian-Azerbaijani qualified architect who proudly showed me a photo of herself with Frank Gehry when she worked on his team; Ross, another qualified architect and gay man who had escaped the repressive small town of Indiana to be himself and work in Los Angeles; Hana, our Philippine lead manager, a psychiatric nurse at a district hospital whose parents were also both retired nurses.
Together, these voters and we pollsters were all part of the process that has helped ensure the continuation of American democracy, flawed and imperfect as it may be, since George Washington was elected our first president in 1788. When my four grandparents emigrated to As Jews escaped persecution and death in Ukraine and Lithuania more than a century ago, they too faced economic challenges and discrimination, but they embraced the unimaginable freedom this country offered them to exercise their voice to raise their voices and speak out. a voice in their future. That is a privilege they bequeathed to me and one that, as a Jew and a descendant of immigrants, I can never take for granted. I have found nothing more satisfying than helping others secure and exercise their right to vote.
Gaia, after my generation is gone, you will have decades to try to right our wrongs, as we tried to do when it was our turn. As bitter as these election results have been, I hope that you will look back on your voting center experience with us with pride, and that you will never let temporary discouragements or disappointments undermine your faith in the power of our vote to help fix the world. stagger.
Your friend,
Joel
Joel Bellman spent nearly a decade in television and print journalism before serving 26 years as press representative for three successive Los Angeles County supervisors. He has been a regular pollster since 2020.
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