An Adventure at a Polling Station on US Election Day
My first week at Yale happened to coincide with US Election Day on November 4.
Thanks to an idea from our ever-curious Professor Jiang Changjian, we decided to slip away from campus and go see a polling station up close. Looking back, it was super, super interesting — easily a highlight of the Yale trip.
It was a bright, sunny day. During the lunch break, six of us drove across New Haven's enormous city green towards City Hall.
When we rounded to a narrow, ordinary street behind that elegant, stately building, we knew without any navigation that we'd probably found the right place: the road was clearly much more crowded, with cars parked all along both sides.
After illegally parking in a lot clearly marked "Government Employees Only," we crossed the street towards an unremarkable back door.
By the roadside outside the door stood a makeshift table and chair, with a banner bearing Harris's name hanging in front. A woman sat there, presumably doing some last-minute canvassing. Following her directions, we entered City Hall; the polling station was one floor down, in the basement.
There were no signs at all, either outside the building or inside City Hall. Without a local to lead the way, I doubt we'd ever have found it.
We took an ancient elevator down to B1, then walked along a perfectly ordinary long, narrow corridor, and at an inconspicuous dead end, we finally found the polling station. Polling stations, it turns out, are assigned by the first letter of your street name — this one was for streets starting with A through N. (It reminded me of China's neighbourhood committees 😂)
We stayed about 15 minutes in all, and roughly every minute someone came in to vote. We even saw an elderly lady with a walker making her way to the polling station with great effort, at an extremely slow pace of about three metres a minute.
At first we just poked our heads in at the door, but the Black gentleman guarding it was very friendly and actually let us in to observe and take photos.
The polling station was a sunken hall, looking a bit smaller than a basketball court. Inside sat volunteers from the various streets — men and women, white and Black, none of them looking particularly young. Their main job was to help log the number of votes.
From that day on, I began to feel the "gentleness" of the people of New Haven. Not warm hospitality exactly, but "gentleness" — I can't find a more fitting word for that generosity of always obliging whatever you ask.
A big group of us with Chinese faces walked into the voting hall and drew only a few curious glances; we felt no rejection or scrutiny whatsoever, so we started "pushing our luck."
From watching at a distance at first, to slowly edging closer and chatting with people, to boldly asking to take photos, and finally going right around behind the table to watch one person cast their vote from start to finish. In the end, even residents who had come to vote had to stand and wait a while before they could vote, because we were having such a good time chatting with the staff. Thinking about it now, it's really funny — and I suddenly find myself missing the people of New Haven.
At one point the Black gentleman told us they had to sit there from 7 in the morning until 7 in the evening. It was hard work, but the pay was decent.
Having had our fill of fun, we followed the corridor out of City Hall. At the door, a pretty young woman came up to us. It turned out she was a reporter doing an investigative piece on the vote; she thought we were voters and came over to interview us. She said that, of the people she had interviewed by the time she ran into us, most had voted for Trump.
That result surprised us a lot. After all, Connecticut is traditional Democratic territory, and a clear Trump lead turning up here — even with a tiny sample — was still unexpected.
Anyway, I've written a rambling log, just to keep a record.
Perhaps ten years from now, looking back, this will have been a day that changed American history, maybe even world history.