I thought my first time would be meaningful
It wasn't though. I didn't have any strong feelings. There was nothing I really wanted. In fact, I had to be prodded into doing it at all.
Local elections here remind me of high school class president elections. Basically, it's like a big popularity contest, as if nothing really important is riding on this. Sure, we all want a nice prom and good cafeteria food, but we don't actually know anything about the people who stand there and say that they want us to vote for them, except for their faces and their tag lines.
The most obnoxious tag line I saw this election season was something like "vote gimmel and get". Get what, you ask. Well, the poster had all these hands in the air reaching for something. Handouts? Whatever. It was tasteless.
For a few weeks I've been complaining that voting was going to be something like standing in front of a dartboard and seeing where my darts fell. M was proactive enough to help make that not quite the case, but only a step above that. He read some random city council meeting minutes from a year ago to get an idea of who the mayoral candidates really were, and I listened to what he said there. As for picking a party for the city council, well, that might as well have been a dart board. I ended up voting for the party among those I actually knew something about that I disliked the least. That rules out all the local Petach Tikvah only parties. Holy freaking cow! How can such a tiny place have so many f-ing political parties?!
In the end, M dropped me off at my polling place, where the entrance was blocked by annoying campaigners trying to shove their party ticket into your hand. There were two entrances, and tons of people in front of both of them. I didn't know where to go, and quite frankly didn't want to be there at all. I called M, who was on his way to get some fuel for the car, and basically said, "This is a mess. I don't like this. I think I'll just go home." He talked me out of walking home without voting. It's a good thing that I have friends like him so that I can say that I voted now and that I have my bitching license. (Funny that balanceinchaos called it that on Nov 4. My mom always called her voting receipt her bitching license, too.)
The first entry I went to turned out to be the wrong one. A friendly police officer looked at my voting card and pointed me in the right direction. The entry I needed to go to had an even more annoying campaigner at the entrance and no police officer in sight. I don't know what was up with that. Once inside the school campus there were handwritten signs with numbers and arrows. It took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck the number thing was all about. There were several places on the voting card with numbers. I narrowed it down to the right spot based on the available arrows matching only one of the numbers on my card.
Voting here consists of showing your id and voting card to an election clerk who checks for your information on a list and double checks it against the list of a second election clerk sitting with them. In my case, my name was crossed off one of those lists and the second clerk said, "Wait! You already voted!"
Which shocked my already annoyed self, but I stayed cool. "Not possible." I said, simply but firmly.
They compared lists again, and then the first clerk pointed to the initials by the side of the line. It was someone else's initials, probably someone who'd worked earlier in the day.
The first clerk said, "No, it was a mistake. See? She's not marked here and it has ***'s initials."
And so they let me vote. The handed me two envelopes. One white. One yellow. In the yellow envelope I put my choice for mayor. In the white one my choice for party. No, you don't get to pick a council member. You pick a party. The parties who get the most votes then get to decide who they stick in their council seats.
I'm trying not to be snobbish about the American version of democracy. The US doesn't have a monopoly on the democratic process. The way that Americans vote for city councils and bodies of representatives is not the only way there is. But, Bwwwwaaaaaa!! I'd really like things to be more familiar and comfortable and, and, and... you know, American! (Isn't the whole culture shock thing supposed to end after one year? Why do I feel more alienated now in my second year than I did in my first?)
D came with me around to the place with the blind where you pick out the little slips of paper with your choices. I put the slips into the envelopes and let D seal the envelopes for me. Then he helped me put the envelopes into the ballot box.
Would it be awful to mention that the ballot box is EXACTLY like those cardboard boxes we used for elections in high school and college? I'm such a snob. I'm sorry! I really am... It's just homesickness, I guess.
Anyway, I don't really care how it turns out. It's mildly interesting, but I don't feel like I have much stake in it. I don't have any sense that anything will actually be any different due to my vote.
Petach Tikvah is a nice city, actually, despite the bad rap it gets. We have nice parks. Some nice little museums and galleries that almost no one knows about. We have some rather decent schools. In fact, I'm rather fond of D's school. We have nice community centers. We have lots of public art -- and yes, a lot of that has gone up during the campaign period, but they'd been putting new things in place for at least the last year and a half. They are building a light rail system that looks nice in the posters by the construction zones. We have excellent medical facilities, cute main street shopping areas, a large mall and some big box type shopping in another area. People who make fun of Petach Tikvah clearly haven't actually been here any time recently, or else they are too stupid to realize that Tel Aviv might be a nice place to hang out on Thursday night, but it's not as great a place to raise a family.
I don't know who's most responsible for all the good stuff here, and certainly no one campaigning made any attempt to inform me (or any other voters as far as I could tell) of the real work they were doing. It was all "blah, blah, blah! I'll make it better!" with no description whatsoever of what "better" meant or how they were going to go about that.
I take that back. There was one bit of campaign material that I saw that seemed comprehensive at all was in Russian. So, maybe I should have voted for "Petach Tikvah Beiteinu" (Petach Tikvah is Our Home) and hoped that what is good for the Russian speaking population of Petach Tikvah is good for me, too. (Eh, no. If they'd had the same pamphlet available in Hebrew, I would have struggled read through and considered it, though.)
So, here's a little message to all you future Israeli candidates for whatever, and political parties of all stripes. Israel is one of the most Internet connected countries on the planet. We have lots of language groups represented amongst our citizenry. Next election, don't just tell us to "vote and get". That's BS. Use Social Media. Use the Net. Use volunteer translators. Reach out and tell us what you are REALLY going to do. And make it a two way conversation. Use that same technology to listen to us.
Cuz you know what? If you don't, you are going to continue to frustrate the best of us, and the brightest and most marketable are going to continue to flee to "more civilized" countries where even if they can't vote they can still talk to actual representatives and have a say in the little things about their real lives. And all the work put into bringing in North American and European born Olim will be for naught, too, because we do have a choice of where to live, and a lot of us really do prefer a real democracy over a place we can call "ancestral home".
And if you want partners to make Israel better and stronger, well you just can't get that by playing the popularity card. You have to do that by engaging the people.
Local elections here remind me of high school class president elections. Basically, it's like a big popularity contest, as if nothing really important is riding on this. Sure, we all want a nice prom and good cafeteria food, but we don't actually know anything about the people who stand there and say that they want us to vote for them, except for their faces and their tag lines.
The most obnoxious tag line I saw this election season was something like "vote gimmel and get". Get what, you ask. Well, the poster had all these hands in the air reaching for something. Handouts? Whatever. It was tasteless.
For a few weeks I've been complaining that voting was going to be something like standing in front of a dartboard and seeing where my darts fell. M was proactive enough to help make that not quite the case, but only a step above that. He read some random city council meeting minutes from a year ago to get an idea of who the mayoral candidates really were, and I listened to what he said there. As for picking a party for the city council, well, that might as well have been a dart board. I ended up voting for the party among those I actually knew something about that I disliked the least. That rules out all the local Petach Tikvah only parties. Holy freaking cow! How can such a tiny place have so many f-ing political parties?!
In the end, M dropped me off at my polling place, where the entrance was blocked by annoying campaigners trying to shove their party ticket into your hand. There were two entrances, and tons of people in front of both of them. I didn't know where to go, and quite frankly didn't want to be there at all. I called M, who was on his way to get some fuel for the car, and basically said, "This is a mess. I don't like this. I think I'll just go home." He talked me out of walking home without voting. It's a good thing that I have friends like him so that I can say that I voted now and that I have my bitching license. (Funny that balanceinchaos called it that on Nov 4. My mom always called her voting receipt her bitching license, too.)
The first entry I went to turned out to be the wrong one. A friendly police officer looked at my voting card and pointed me in the right direction. The entry I needed to go to had an even more annoying campaigner at the entrance and no police officer in sight. I don't know what was up with that. Once inside the school campus there were handwritten signs with numbers and arrows. It took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck the number thing was all about. There were several places on the voting card with numbers. I narrowed it down to the right spot based on the available arrows matching only one of the numbers on my card.
Voting here consists of showing your id and voting card to an election clerk who checks for your information on a list and double checks it against the list of a second election clerk sitting with them. In my case, my name was crossed off one of those lists and the second clerk said, "Wait! You already voted!"
Which shocked my already annoyed self, but I stayed cool. "Not possible." I said, simply but firmly.
They compared lists again, and then the first clerk pointed to the initials by the side of the line. It was someone else's initials, probably someone who'd worked earlier in the day.
The first clerk said, "No, it was a mistake. See? She's not marked here and it has ***'s initials."
And so they let me vote. The handed me two envelopes. One white. One yellow. In the yellow envelope I put my choice for mayor. In the white one my choice for party. No, you don't get to pick a council member. You pick a party. The parties who get the most votes then get to decide who they stick in their council seats.
I'm trying not to be snobbish about the American version of democracy. The US doesn't have a monopoly on the democratic process. The way that Americans vote for city councils and bodies of representatives is not the only way there is. But, Bwwwwaaaaaa!! I'd really like things to be more familiar and comfortable and, and, and... you know, American! (Isn't the whole culture shock thing supposed to end after one year? Why do I feel more alienated now in my second year than I did in my first?)
D came with me around to the place with the blind where you pick out the little slips of paper with your choices. I put the slips into the envelopes and let D seal the envelopes for me. Then he helped me put the envelopes into the ballot box.
Would it be awful to mention that the ballot box is EXACTLY like those cardboard boxes we used for elections in high school and college? I'm such a snob. I'm sorry! I really am... It's just homesickness, I guess.
Anyway, I don't really care how it turns out. It's mildly interesting, but I don't feel like I have much stake in it. I don't have any sense that anything will actually be any different due to my vote.
Petach Tikvah is a nice city, actually, despite the bad rap it gets. We have nice parks. Some nice little museums and galleries that almost no one knows about. We have some rather decent schools. In fact, I'm rather fond of D's school. We have nice community centers. We have lots of public art -- and yes, a lot of that has gone up during the campaign period, but they'd been putting new things in place for at least the last year and a half. They are building a light rail system that looks nice in the posters by the construction zones. We have excellent medical facilities, cute main street shopping areas, a large mall and some big box type shopping in another area. People who make fun of Petach Tikvah clearly haven't actually been here any time recently, or else they are too stupid to realize that Tel Aviv might be a nice place to hang out on Thursday night, but it's not as great a place to raise a family.
I don't know who's most responsible for all the good stuff here, and certainly no one campaigning made any attempt to inform me (or any other voters as far as I could tell) of the real work they were doing. It was all "blah, blah, blah! I'll make it better!" with no description whatsoever of what "better" meant or how they were going to go about that.
I take that back. There was one bit of campaign material that I saw that seemed comprehensive at all was in Russian. So, maybe I should have voted for "Petach Tikvah Beiteinu" (Petach Tikvah is Our Home) and hoped that what is good for the Russian speaking population of Petach Tikvah is good for me, too. (Eh, no. If they'd had the same pamphlet available in Hebrew, I would have struggled read through and considered it, though.)
So, here's a little message to all you future Israeli candidates for whatever, and political parties of all stripes. Israel is one of the most Internet connected countries on the planet. We have lots of language groups represented amongst our citizenry. Next election, don't just tell us to "vote and get". That's BS. Use Social Media. Use the Net. Use volunteer translators. Reach out and tell us what you are REALLY going to do. And make it a two way conversation. Use that same technology to listen to us.
Cuz you know what? If you don't, you are going to continue to frustrate the best of us, and the brightest and most marketable are going to continue to flee to "more civilized" countries where even if they can't vote they can still talk to actual representatives and have a say in the little things about their real lives. And all the work put into bringing in North American and European born Olim will be for naught, too, because we do have a choice of where to live, and a lot of us really do prefer a real democracy over a place we can call "ancestral home".
And if you want partners to make Israel better and stronger, well you just can't get that by playing the popularity card. You have to do that by engaging the people.