Election 2008: Voting in Different Precinct Locations

Voting in church? That's a little unusual, isn't it? Like something out of South America or George Orwell? Church controlled voting? State-controlled elections? Casting ballots with only one candidate? Voting in name only? Well folks, that's what it will be this year for many voters. In 2007, voters in Michigan began voting in altogether different precinct locations. I've been voting since 1982. Depending upon where I was when, I voted at the local fire barn, elementary school or township office. I remember casting my vote for Dukakis in our local fire barn/ township hall on a frosty November morn. I was expecting our second child. I remember trudging in the rain to Ferry elementary to place my ill-fated vote for Kerry in '04.

Except for the time I voted absentee in college in 1986. I lived and went to school in different counties. Wow, what a monstrosity that absentee ballot was! It came in the mail, all folded up. When I spread it out, the ballot looked like a road map of Chicago and Environs! It took up most of the floor in my microscopic dorm room floor. And to think that I spent all that energy to cast a vote for Reagan. What a colossal waste!

But as par usual, I digress. Since time immemorial, we've voted in local public buildings. In 2008 I will go up the street to St. Patrick's family center, coincidentally my home parish, and vote. Although we vote in the family center and not the church proper, it feels blasphemous, like anathema. For several reasons. First and foremost as a Catholic, church ground is sacred and consecrated. I feel uncomfortable doing anything so philistine as voting. In medieval times, souls were denied Christian burial within church walls, if they had died in suicide.

And second, isn't there a small segway in our constitution which refers to 'separation of church and state'? It isn't just Catholic churches in which voters will make their mark. Any church with a sufficiently large parish hall or meeting area can act as polling center.

I don't know just yet if I believe, like my tenaciously devout, adamantly political husband, that voting on church grounds is wrong. He has an unerringly precise nose for discerning foul from pure. I have to plod painstakingly along. I don't come to snap decisions. I have to methodically weigh everything, sifting the chaff, sorting and pondering. Maybe voting in church isn't so wrong. Maybe it's just different.