Dorset, Vt.
In the morning on Election Day, I went up to the school building where people in my town go to vote. When I got there, a little after eight, things were already in progress and, as usual, going smoothly and efficiently. You walk through a door, into the gym, and identify yourself to one of two people sitting behind a table. Each of them has a list of registered voters. There isn’t a problem with picture IDs or any of that. Everybody knows everybody.
The person who checks for your name on the printed sheet really doesn’t have to. You see each other in church or your kids went to school together. Something like that.
“Oh, hello,” she will say. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
She gives you the sheet with all the choices printed on it and you step over to one of five tables with curtains on the side. It is supposed to be a secret ballot, after all. You mark your choices on the sheet and then you take it over to a machine where you insert it into a slot to be scanned.
Takes five minutes. Ten, tops.
I spent almost all day at the school.
I suppose I was indulging in a bit of nostalgia. I had cast a lot of votes, over the years, for a lot of candidates, here at the school. I had counted paper ballots late into the night, when I was a justice of the peace, back before the advent of scanners. I had even been a candidate myself on one Election Day. I’d spent several uncomfortable hours standing outside the school greeting people when they arrived. I didn’t ask them for their votes, which would have been a vulgar thing to do. But I did say “good morning” or “good afternoon” and call them by name, if I could remember it. So my friends, neighbors, and fellow townspeople punished me for my sins by electing me to the school board.
But I forgave them and kept coming back every Election Day, not merely to vote but to soak up a little of the essence of American democracy. It can be intoxicating and reaffirming, and this year it was almost as though I felt a craving for that. American democracy, you think, has to be more than CNN, Politico, campaign consultants, all-star panels, the latest tracking polls, and the entire inflated apparatus surrounding the dismal ordeal of the presidential campaign of 2016.
I had in mind something a little more human, something a little more in the spirit of Tocqueville, when I arrived at the school a little after eight. The day was shaping up to be a beauty. High blue sky, no wind, temperature in the 50s. The sort of weather you can permissibly call “heavenly.” My friend Jack Stannard was standing out in front of school at a discreet distance from where the actual voting is done and beyond which campaigning and campaign materials, buttons and the like, are prohibited.
I knew Jack would be there because he was running for the state legislature. Running, in fact, to be my representative in Montpelier, where the laws are written and the money is spent. I knew Jack was running only because someone had told me. I hadn’t seen a single lawn sign bearing his name, and lawn signs are important in rural campaigns, even if the big-name consultants for national candidates tend to disparage them.
Jack hadn’t called to ask me for my vote. And when we’d run into each other at the post office or Williams Store—our town’s answer to Walmart—where he goes for coffee every morning, Jack and I would talk about the usual things. Which is to say, turkey hunting, mushroom gathering, trout fishing, and other affairs of state. Now and then, he would share his thoughts about an article of mine for this magazine, to which he subscribes. On the odd occasion, we would talk about the Civil War. An ancestor of his, Brig. Gen. George Jerrison Stannard, had commanded the 2nd Vermont Brigade at Gettysburg. That unit played a decisive part in turning back the Confederate attack on Cemetery Ridge. Since I come from an Alabama family, this added flavor to our conversations.
Jack is one of those yeoman Vermonters. He is versatile and capable. He ran a family plumbing and heating business until recently. And for years, people around town called him when they had a problem with nuisance animals. These would include the usual coyotes that were preying on pet cats and skunks that were . . . well, being skunks. Just the sort of man, in other words, you want in the legislature—not afraid to handle the messy problems.
Jack is also filled with that sense of civic engagement that is peculiar to New England and, especially, Vermont, with its town meeting tradition. Jack told me, when I saw him at the school, that he figured this was the twentieth time his name had appeared on a ballot as candidate for some office or another. I didn’t have to tell him he had my support.
But Jack didn’t expect to win this one. He had decided to run because nobody else seemed willing to be the Republican candidate. And Jack is the old kind of Vermont Republican. His ancestors were, no doubt, among the voters who made Vermont one of the only two states that went Republican in the Roosevelt landslide of 1936. The other was Maine.
Jack comes from a long line of Republicans, and the idea of an election in which our town did not offer voters a Republican candidate for the legislature offended something in him. Perhaps he saw in that a sign that his party and the party of his ancestors was in danger of extinction in a state that routinely sends Bernie Sanders to Washington. He filed as a candidate and got his name on the ballot but said he would withdraw if someone else would come in and run. That didn’t happen. So Jack decided that his Democratic opponent would make a capable legislator and that he would support her.
This confused a lot of people who came up to the school to vote and saw him standing next to his opponent, Linda Sullivan, and holding a sign with her name on it. Many of these people, especially Jack’s old friends, were sort of defiant.
“Well, I’m still going to vote for you anyway, Jack,” one of them said. “I don’t care if you want me to or not.”
Jack said that was fine, and Linda Sullivan, who was standing next to him, smiled. I suppose she could afford to, since she had the thing in the bag.
The three of us talked amiably but not much about politics, which was sweet relief. After a while, I went inside to look for coffee. Parents of the school’s eighth graders had put out a table of baked things for breakfast. The doughnuts and the brownies were sinful—and expensive. A woman who had stopped to talk to Jack after she had been inside to vote said, “Two dollars for a brownie? Seems awfully dear. I’ll go on home and bake my own brownies. Make a whole tray for less than that.”
I paid the two dollars, figuring it was for a good cause, namely, a trip to Washington for the eighth graders, whose parents—moms mostly—had laid out the spread and were cheerfully relieving people of their money. I went back later for lunch and it was tough deciding between the mac and cheese and the chili . . . with or without meat. I went with the mac and cheese and it was delicious.
But first I visited with Sandy Pinsonault, the town clerk, who was running the voting operation with her customary efficiency.
“How many on the rolls this year?” I asked her.
“Just over 1,600,” she said.
It had been slightly over 900, back when I was counting votes. This was reassuring. The population of Vermont is static and aging. Good to know our little town is growing. But most of the people voting that morning were decidedly not youthful looking.
Some, like me, were what they call—not always charitably—”flatlanders.” That is, people from elsewhere, usually one of the big cities, who have moved to Vermont for the simpler, pastoral life. And some were wealthy retirees, a breed we see more and more of. And then there were the real Vermonters, people like my friend Jack, who go back some of them to the days of Ethan Allen, who made a lot of his pre-revolution mischief in the hills and valleys around these parts.
A few of these voters could have stepped straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, which is no big surprise. Rockwell lived in a town about 20 miles south of here, and his neighbors were his models. I knew some of these people. Jack knew them all. So there was a lot of conversation; there was a sort of unspoken agreement that the morning was just too lovely to spoil it with talk of Trump and Clinton or the race for governor or any of that. We’d all had enough of it, thanks very much, and soon would be getting more.
We talked instead about things like those two-dollar brownies. Then, what with winter bearing down on us—and this is serious stuff in Vermont—the talk turned to the price of fuel oil, then to wood stoves and firewood and, inevitably, to chain saws. People in Vermont talk about their chain saws the way urban people talk about their smartphones.
A neighbor I knew as a clergyman of some sort had joined us and brought up the matter of ethanol in gasoline and the havoc it plays with the two-cycle chain saw engines.
“And you know why that is?” he said. “It’s the corn. Out in Iowa, they grow all they can. To get those subsidies.”
The government’s ethanol program was good for at least 10 or 15 minutes of conversation at the conclusion of which there was agreement that it was a bad thing and entirely typical of the way things got done in Washington. We pay taxes to give money to farmers to grow corn that is distilled into alcohol that we are then compelled to use in our lawnmowers and chain saws, the engines of which it fouls so badly we have to take them in to the shop for repairs. Only the government could come up with something like that.
“Good for the mechanics, I suppose,” someone said.
The conversation wandered down other paths and people walked by, most of them known to Jack. More greetings were exchanged and I found myself experiencing the kind of neighborliness that Rockwell famously captured and that sophisticates find awkward and phony. I recalled how, when I lived in New York, I had learned to make my way down sidewalks carefully avoiding eye contact. Here, outside the little school where people were coming to vote, I spoke to almost everyone who went by, whether I knew them or not. And they would, inevitably, speak back.
“Morning.”
“Good morning. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes it is. But looks like a weather breeder, I’m afraid.”
A couple of people knew me well enough to know about the Alabama connection. So they said things about the game between LSU and the University of Alabama the previous Saturday night. “Your boys looked good. I don’t believe the other team could have scored them if they played all week.”
Small town small talk. Chain saws. Football. The price of brownies. Nothing about Obamacare and the minimum wage. The stream of voters was steady. Most of them were older, and I guessed them to be retired. They took their time and generally lingered to visit, the way worshipers do after the church service is over. The mood of the people coming out of the school wasn’t solemn or grave. But there was an obvious sense of respect for the occasion.
This was probably the big event of the day, or even the week, for many, not to mention the best possible excuse to get out of the house and see some people. But at noon, the look of the arriving voters changed. They were younger and dressed for work in the stores and banks and restaurants. They hurried in to vote and then get back to their jobs. Voting was something they had to squeeze in.
“Seem like a pretty good turnout to you?” I asked Jack.
“Does,” he said.
I remembered from my time of counting votes that anything over 50 percent was considered a good turnout. I wondered if my sense that it was heavier today was correct so I went inside and asked. You can do that sort of thing in small towns. Sandy Pinsonault went to the scanner and checked the count. It was nearly 900, including the absentee ballots that had already been counted.
“That’s good, right?”
“Very good,” she said. “We’ll get a big push in the middle of the afternoon when people come to pick up their kids. And another between five and six when people are getting off work. Then it will slow down. Then a few people—the kind who put everything off until the last minute—will get here right before seven, then we close up and do the count.”
“I remember,” I said.
“Don’t you miss it? You should run for JP again.”
This, I said, was not happening.
The turnout seemed sort of counterintuitive. This was supposed to be an election that offered a choice between two very unpopular candidates. And this being Vermont, there wasn’t much suspense about which unpopular candidate would carry the state. The race for governor was interesting but hadn’t seemed to catch fire with the voters. Why would a demoralized electorate in a state that was the furthest thing from a tossup be turning out in unusually high numbers?
“Beats me,” Jack said, when I put the question to him. “But I’m pretty sure it is not because people are coming out to vote for me.”
“No,” I said. “I think we can eliminate that as a possible explanation.”
Toward the end of the afternoon, my wife arrived to vote. When I told her about the robust turnout, she was not surprised. I asked why and she reminded me of a conversation she’d had a couple of months earlier at the place where she takes her car for service. It was going to be a while, and the mechanic said that one of his people would drive her to the local mall where she could wait. She took him up on it.
“My driver was a guy who just worked around the garage,” she’d told me. He’d been to Vietnam. He had worked some kind of factory job that went away. Now he was running errands at the garage.
“I don’t know how we got into it, but we started talking about the election and he said he was for Trump. He wasn’t aggressive about it, so I was curious and asked him why.
“He thought about it for a minute or two and then he said, ‘Well, you know, people are hurting.’ He didn’t have to tell me that included him.
“Then he said, ‘And I believe that he cares about our country.’ ”
This was at the point where Trump was the candidate believed by just about everyone to have no chance.
When she heard that line, my wife told me, she knew that “he might even win.”
And that, she said, was what accounted for the turnout I was seeing on Election Day.
“You really think so?”
“What else could it be?”
After she voted, we visited for a while with Jack and some departing voters who were neighbors. The light was fading even though it was not yet five.
She left for home. Jack did the same. I stayed around to see if a late push of voters would materialize and if there was any evidence it had been motivated by Trump.
They began showing up a little after five. Men, mostly. Wearing Carhartts and work boots, with oil-stained hands and fingers and, some of them, with sawdust and wood chips caught in their beards. It would have been hard to read them as Clinton voters.
A few came with their wives or girlfriends. And one or two of these couples had small children with them. During this late rush one of the JPs arrived to do his part. The man’s name was Howard, and I’d known him for a long time, ever since, as a volunteer fireman, he had helped put out a grass fire at my house. The fire was my fault. I’d been burning a brush pile carelessly and, worse, I had no burn permit.
I’d expected Howard to write me up but he showed mercy on a hapless flatlander and gave me a pass. We’ve been friendly ever since.
So we did what I’d been doing all day. We made small talk. The topic of our conversation was bears. My wife and I had seen a sow and two cubs on our driveway a month or so earlier. I told Howard the story. Then he told me about the sow with triplets that he had seen and photographed. There are a lot of bears around town these days, providing lots of material for conversation.
Howard finally had to get to work, checking arriving voters against the names on the rolls. I went to have one last conversation with Sandy Pinsonault.
“We are at almost 1,100,” she said proudly, and that put the turnout not simply about 60 percent but at nearly 70.
“It’s the best,” she said, “that I have ever seen.”
Good news, however the vote divided.
She would close down the voting at seven, she said. Then the JPs would look at all the ballots and count the write-ins. There are always some of those. Then she would put the ballots in a secure container and drive them back to her office where she would lock them in a vault.
“We keep them for 22 months,” she said.
“And then?”
“We burn them.”
“When can I learn the results?”
“Call me tomorrow,” she said. “Or look on the town website.”
I did just that. Even in the excitement and panic generated by Donald Trump’s victory, I was intensely curious to find out what the turnout had been in our little town.
In the end, of those 1,641 registered voters, 1,171 had come to the school and cast their votes. That worked out to 71 percent and change. If the presence of Trump on the ballot had motivated people to come out, then plenty of them had voted against him. Clinton got 740 of the votes cast at the school that day, Trump 334. The rest went to the fringe candidates, and there were a few write-ins. People turned out to vote, I think, not so much in support of either flawed candidate but in support of . . . voting.
In an interesting footnote, Bill “Spaceman” Lee’s name was on the ballot as the Liberty Union party’s candidate for governor. Lee is a former major league baseball pitcher and a legendary screwball. He got 23 votes.
As for my friend Jack, he had never made a defiant statement of non-interest in being elected. No “if nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.” Many of the people who had known him for years went ahead and voted for him in spite of his wishes. But not enough to send him to Montpelier. He got 448 of the votes cast at the school that day. His opponent got 681.
The moms who ran the food table where you could buy brownies and cupcakes and chili earned $1,500 toward the eighth graders’ class trip to Washington.
And that was how the election of 2016 went where I vote. There will be another, in two years. And another two years after that, when people can vote, again, for president. The ritual will survive the results, as it has for a long time now. All the way back to when that ancestor of Jack Stannard’s was leading his men in battle at Gettysburg and the fate of the republic truly was uncertain.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
