Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This afternoon, I went downtown to help register new citizens to vote. This was organized by MIRA, an immigrant activist group; they've been doing it every week at least since the spring, because groups of people are naturalized every week in Boston.

I had meant to do this in the spring, missed the first time because I was confused about the location, and then put it off for various reasons of busyness and my thumb injury. This was the first week since my thumb felt better that the timing worked for me.

There were four of us doing this, the paid organizer and three of us volunteers. I registered six people to vote; between us, we registered 25. We waited outside the courthouse, and when the newly naturalized citizens came out greeted them with variations on "Congratulations. Would you like to register to vote today?" Some people said yes, some walked past without acknowledging us, and some said things like "maybe later." From what the organizer said, this is fairly typical.

I filled out the form for one person who didn't have her glasses, including looking at her drivers license to copy the number. I was particularly pleased by one of the people I registered, a man who enthusiastically said yes, and had a friend filming him while he filled out the form. He made a point of getting me in the picture, with my badge as a "voter registration volunteer" and the clipboard with "Register to Vote" on the back. They explained that he had planned to have his friend film the ceremony, and then got there and found there was a rule against photography. Registering to vote was something related for them to record, not just him standing outside the courthouse holding the envelope with his naturalization certificate and a small American flag.

I want to do this again, weather and my schedule permitting. MIRA tries to be out there for every ceremony, but the organizer noted that they get fewer volunteers when it's ten degrees [F] outside.

I voted this morning.

I voted because, well, it would feel wrong to skip an election merely because there wasn't anything significant on the ballot. In Manhattan, we had a handful of uncontested judgeships (one "vote for up to four" with a total of four candidates, and one "vote for up to three" with a total of three candidates) and the statewide ballot question, an extremely minor amendment to the state constitution. So I pulled the lever marked "yes," voting in favor of letting the town of Long Lake, in Hamilton County, trade twelve acres of town land, approved by the state legislature, for a specific acre of state-owned land they want to drill wells in. The one acre in question is a state-owned piece of the Adirondack State Park, which means they can't do this without amending the state constitution [1]. If this passes, there will presumably be text about this minor real estate trade in the New York constitution for years or decades.

[1] Our state constitution specifies that several million acres of the Adirondacks are "forever wild." It's a complicated mosaic of public and private lands, not a compact, contiguous [2] area.

[2] That phrasing is specified for congressional and state legislature districts. My father once drew his own map, from the description in the redistricting bill, rather than trusting the one the state legislature had published. Then he let them know they needed to rewrite the legislation, because they'd specified a figure eight.