As Odysseus Went His Many Roundabout Ways, So Too Did My Absentee Ballot

{dropcap text="Y color=AF2234}ou have reached the New York City Board of Elections. Your phone call is important to us. Please press ‘one’ if you would like to continue in English,” says the automated voice messaging system.

I’m in my dorm. The 19th century radiator is so powerful it’s drying out my skin, but somehow the room is still freezing. I have 300 pages of Pride and Prejudice left to read, and yet I have chosen to persist in this month-long endeavor of obtaining my ballot.

After being on hold for an hour, I am put through. A woman answers and I explain to her that the second absentee ballot I requested has not been processed.

Instead of pressing a big red button that teleports my ballot directly to Grays Hall, the woman asks for my name, birthdate, and zipcode where I am registered. She then tells me I need to speak to Kings County directly and the line goes dead. So I dial up Brooklyn — no one’s home.

***

I would consider myself a pretty upstanding citizen. I mean, I voted early in the primary (long live Brad Lander) and I listen to public radio every morning. The sultry voice of Brian Lehrer (the Mr. Rogers of public policy) plus two cups of dark roast coffee really get me going. I even requested my first absentee ballot on Sept. 28, a whole month before the deadline. Imagine my shock, therefore, when some higher power, intent on denying me my Nineteenth Amendment rights, withheld my hallowed ballot for 37 days (and counting).

It all begins with the divine being that is the New York City Board of Elections. It only takes a day for my first application to be approved, filling my heart with false hope. Anyone who has taken an MTA-run public bus knows that that kind of efficiency is unheard of in the wealthiest city in the country.

It does not take very long, however, for my civic dreams to be shattered.

As my ballot winds its way through a bureaucratic Phoenicia, it apparently encounters its own set of obstacles. I can’t tell you the exact monsters my ballot has to fight, but if I were a conspiracy theorist I would certainly accuse the Deep State. Whatever the case, an empty mailbox and two weeks later, requestballot.vote.nyc/tracking says my ballot has been out for delivery since Oct. 2.

Because of my obviously deep faith in the inner workings of the NYC administrative system, I decide instead to blame the Harvard Yard Mail Center. It does not ameliorate the situation that this institution, so enamored with its own superiority, insists on inscribing the Mail Center address as “One Oxford Street” in lieu of the numeral “1” like some common pauper might. (I have also been warned by the friendly people in the Science Center basement that if something is delivered outside of the hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., on weekends, holidays, times of inclement weather, days when the Red Sox have lost a game, or the American government has shut down, your mail will be lost to the void.)

When I request my second absentee ballot on Oct. 17, all my previous naïvete has already been usurped by a brutal nihilism: the world is an indifferent battlefield and I can never trust the system to safely deliver a ballot into my loving arms.

Upon the umpteenth time checking requestballot.vote.nyc/tracking, using the application code for my second ballot, I am not surprised that it still reads “Application Processing.” No matter how hard I push, my ballot will not burst forth from the womb of the NYCBOE computer system.

Before I continue, let me admit something that will upset both Salient writers and “The Radical Left” alike: I find none of the candidates exceptionally titillating.

However, there is only one sane choice in the fantasy realm where I receive my ballot (pro-crime, anti-liberty terrorist that he might be). That is unless I want my beloved city run by a wannabe Donald Trump with all the allegations and none of the pizzazz. Or, God forbid, a crazy cat lady with a forehead tan and a private militia that looks like it just stepped out of the Y.M.C.A. music video. I am fairly interested in the ballot measures, which, unlike every Gov x Econ concentrator with a massive ego and a family connection to Goldman Sachs, I won’t bore you with intricacies of. I will instead return to my ballot’s odyssey.

At this point, I figure I need to make my plea to someone more desperate for my vote; I call the Democrats.

The woman who picks up the phone asks me for my Massachusetts delivery address. After making a frantic Google search to find my new zipcode, I am directed to the Cambridge Election Commission and told to vote in-person. Because I am so intelligent (Harvard-educated, you know), I immediately recognize that Middlesex is not one of NYC’s five counties and I cannot possibly vote there.

I explain this to the woman. “Honey,” she answers in the voice of a kindergarten teacher, “talk to the CEC and I am sure they will clear everything up for you.” Out of intense frustration — I think this woman must either be mentally unstable or an undercover Republican — I hang up.

The next day I wake up, drink my two dark roast coffees, and put on The Brian Lehrer Show. Figuring yesterday’s call was just a fluke in the matrix, I decide to make one final appeal to the New York State Democratic Party. They tell me there is no record of my second ballot request ever being made. We leave it at that.

I then do what any sane and rational adult would do: I call my parents.

A few days later, my dad (53M, Twitter addict — I refuse to credit Elon) visits the early voting station. He manages to locate a city-supplied lawyer at the election site (don’t ask). The man, wearing an inconspicuous black suit and carrying a briefcase that reads “property of the NYCBOE,” informs my dad that an absentee ballot can be picked up in my name.

The lawyer then gets in real close (I imagine). His breath smells of untaxed cigarettes and moonshine. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. “No one will ever know,” he whispers in a husky voice, “if someone else fills out the ballot for her.”

He looks left, then right, then left again. “Don’t let them know I told you,” he says, before disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

The briefcase is left open on the ground — there’s nothing inside.