Some of you experienced long lines today while waiting to vote; others will find lengthy waits later today. But before you decide that the wait isn’t worth it, consider the plight of Rick Valenzuela.
Rick Valenzuela went the extra mile to cast his vote today — 1,200 extra miles, to be exact — riding an overnight Greyhound bus all the way from Little Rock, Arkansas to Washington D.C. to his polling place in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Valenzuela had tried to cast his long-distance vote the old-fashioned way via absentee ballot, applying at the end of September. When the ballot still hadn’t arrived on October 19, he called the city commissioner’s office.
“A woman there verified my address and name and said I should sit tight, that my ballot had gone out that weekend,” he said. But when the ballot still hadn’t arrived in Little Rock by last Friday, 31-year-old Valenzuela went into “panic mode.” He called the commissioner’s office again. The man on the phone said the ballot had been mailed weeks ago and blamed the delay on the postal service. Valenzuela said he believed the ballot would never arrive, and asked what he should do. “It means you don’t vote,” Valenzuela remembers the man saying. “Best you can do is lodge a complaint and we’ll include it in the minutes of our next meeting.”
At this point, a lot of people would be terribly frustrated, but resigned to an unfortunate fate. Valenzuela is not one of these people.
Undeterred, Valenzuela paid $284 for a bus ticket and vented online, posting an angry account of his experience to Friendster, MySpace, and MyVote.tk, a website of his own creation that calls the bus fare a de facto “poll tax.” As of noon today, Valenzuela’s friends and sympathizers had already donated $160 into his PayPal account to help cover his bus expense. He’s also filed a formal complaint through the Committee of Seventy, a local election watchdog group. Luckily, the last 20 feet of his 1,200-mile trip was expedited when he was allowed to skip to the front of a 15-person line. “What’s your last name? They got two separate lines, A through N and N through Z,” the poll worker explained as he ushered Valenzuela to the front. “We got to make sure the N through Z lady is working.” Despite his difficult start, the rest of Valenzuela’s voting experience went off without a hitch. After a minute or so behind the royal blue curtain, he was done.
It’s heartening to hear about a man who takes his vote seriously. Think about Rick if long lines deter you from voting today.