Losing Isn’t Everything! or Curing the Ballot in Orange County

I checked in early with the organizers of Seed the Vote at its temporary headquarters in Garden Grove, in northern Orange County, near Disneyland. Despite living here for thirty years, I had to remind myself where I was going, following Siri’s directions even as I took in the sights. Of course, everything here is near the Magic Kingdom, a lazy journalist’s context-builder for any story about this region. The city of Garden Grove is near Santa Ana, Orange, and Anaheim. Other easily defining, if also perhaps irrelevant nearby landmarks are UC Irvine Medical Center (where my kid was born twenty-two years ago), Angel Stadium, the Honda Center, Cal State University Fullerton and, news to me, an indoor water park and family hotel called the Great Wolf Lodge, the city’s biggest employer. All of this unhelpful information bowdlerizes Pooh-Bah in The Mikado: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

Gilbert and Sullivan have lately been my cheerfully hopeless go-to post-election line and seem to apply to nearly everything.

Except for this: My union’s legislative officer invited me to join the “ballot curing” effort in the 45thCongressional District, also near Disneyland. Because I trust Trevor Griffey, and because we are friends, and because I seriously needed to do something, anything in response to November 5, I signed up. As a retired adjunct university instructor, writer and sometime labor activist, I was of course charmed by the metaphorical resonance of what turns out to be an otherwise fairly straightforward and not at all poetic administrative task. Still, “curing” seemed about right for the injury or illness of Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ reliable failure in so many races. Also, I’d donated a hundred bucks to Seed the Vote’s Get Out the Vote efforts in targeted states, including Arizona where my union pal had knocked on doors, however futilely.

My impetus also involved seeking redemption or some karmic backfill. I hadn’t gone to Las Vegas, Phoenix or Detroit myself. A handful of friends had. No, I’d put up a Harris/Walz sign, walked my small neighborhood precinct, and worked my Santa Ana mountains community OC Vote Center as a “Lead” Customer Service Representative (CSR). My jolly civic engagement and dutiful support of the system was rewarded with smiles, thanks for my “service,” and my in-person voting neighbors casting overwhelmingly for Trumpolini.

Shamed, angry, and provoked (familiar motivators) I met the Seedsters in an office just off the Garden Grove Freeway in a complex whose landlord’s neglect of the facility offered the immediately instructive atmospherics of scrappy grassroots politics. The meeting room provided by Unite Here Local 11 was on the top floor of a dilapidated Escheresque construction built intentionally, it seemed, to confuse visitors. No directory or helpful signage, weirdly arranged staircases to nowhere, a disorienting theater-in-the-round lostness, locked men’s room, peeling paint, windblown trash. Of course, I found my people, about two dozen other volunteers, waiting in a bespoke headquarters resembling every shoestring campaign I’ve joined for forty years: boxes, fold-up tables and chairs, clipboards, nametags, lunches bagged up and ready to go, a handbook to read, a waiver to sign, an app to install on my cell. The locked restroom’s key hung on a wall behind the printer, charging station, and mini fridge.

There was, we were told, sincere and challenging work to do, and it wasn’t going to be done by the battalions of good folks who had recently knocked on doors, rung bells, gently coaxed likely or infrequent or occasional or uncommitted voters and then left a pamphlet in a half-dozen swing states.  So said the two young Seed organizers in charge. No, this was detective work, repo man or process server type stuff. We’d have to be stubborn, bold, and unshy. Ring the doorbell and don’t stop ringing. Knock. Check in with the next door neighbors. Make multiple trips. Find the voter or find out how, where, and when to find them. Take notes.

You will by now have deduced that this hardcore activist cadre was assembling to cure ballots in OC’s 45thCongressional District, where Democrat Derek Tran was in a remarkably close race with the odious Republican Michelle Steel. I could bore, delight or infuriate you with her political profile. Briefly, and as masochistically as possible, she is married to GOP dark lord Michael Steel, embraced Trump early, opposes abortion rights, called out her Vietnamese opponent as not being as Vietnamese as her (she’s Korean American), and, to make her easy to remember and root against, offered in three phrases the perversely transparent hyperbole and hypocrisy which might perhaps have otherwise earned her a victory --- but, big reveal, didn’t! --- in this “conservative” (read: reactionary) district, which includes cities and precincts in both our County and southeastern Los Angeles County.

The first two were, no kidding, her campaign slogan: “Stop inflation. Lower Gas Prices.” As if. The final, as part of her concession speech was, no kidding, “Everything is God’s will.”  

She lost. Tran won. In, yes, a very small if important part, this was due to ballot curers. UNITE Here Local 11 represents 32,000 workers employed in hotels, restaurants, airports, sports arenas, and convention centers in So Cal and Arizona. Needless, but fun to say, Michelle Steel was, while running as benign, centrist, and patriotic, in fact a singularly reactionary Trumpist. She is a proud enemy of public education teachers, unions, taxes, regulation, environmental legislation, women’s reproductive freedom, the whole cartoon hate agenda. (I am not sure, am never sure, about the God’s will thing. He’s always there, either victorious or fatalist, or both. Not sure how He voted.)

Hey, OC politics is fun. Anaheim is a company town. Disney just agreed to settle a class-action wage theft lawsuit for $233 million. (It's a start.) Garden Grove and Westminster are still guided by the South Vietnamese Air Force. Huntington Beach is a Trumpy shit-show. The Supervisors who control the actual County are the remaining Republican stronghold with a “moderate” Dem who votes with them to stay in power. He recently changed his tune when his fair-weather friend Andrew Do plead guilty to fraud, having used COVID money to buy his daughter a house. Despite recently going blue, the old OC abides.

So when the OC Registrar of Voters started counting and the Tran-Steel race seemed close, very close, --- tantalizingly if still unconvincingly hopefully close --- Seed the Vote jumped in to provide the curing. Honestly, I had despite my numerous trainings as a CSR never heard of or imagined “ballot curing.”  

The best, clearest, and most reliable primer on ballot curing is the form itself, provided to Seed the Vote by the Orange County Registrar of Voters: “Combined Signature Verification and Unsigned Identification Envelope Statement & Instructions.”

You’ll be impressed with the syntax and punctuation of this government document. I was, especially as I’d spent six days at what used to be called a “polling place” but now is called a “Vote Center.” It’s a weird language. But then Republicans used to be called “conservatives.” Democrats were once led by FDR and nominated anti-war candidate George McGovern.

We have determined that either the signature you provided on your vote-by-mail or provisional ballot identification envelope does not compare with the signatures(s) on file in your voter record OR that you did not sign your ballot identification envelope. To ensure that your vote-by-mail or provisional ballot will be counted this Statement must be completed and returned as soon as possible. --- The Orange County, California Registrar of Voters.

So, armed with my cell phone and a newly installed app, a clipboard and a barely convincing (see verisimilitude) ID card on a lanyard featuring a reminder of my constitutional rights, I drove to Brea.

Did I mention nearby Brea? I generally avoid it, both mentioning and visiting. In fact, the most time I’d spent in this rightist bastion was on a comically, predictably doomed if high dudgeon visit in the early years of the Afghanistan/Iraq war, leading a citizen delegation to the office of its then-congressman, his office and lobby decorated in Nixon posters, American flags, eagle statues, photos of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne.  He’d agreed to sit with a dozen of his constituents who opposed the war. He listened, sort of, interrupting to introduce the ghosts of all his dead uncles and grandpas who’d served in the military, then pivoted to “support the troops” bullshit while completely ignoring our insistence that Bush’s invasion was wrong, illegal, costly, immoral and would, of course, result in civilian deaths and the manufacture of more wounded US veterans and dead US troops. 

He’d agreed to fifteen minutes with us and lasted twelve. I spotted his aide outside the office, checking his wristwatch for how soon he could pull his boss out of the meet. That was twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, Seed the Vote assigned a dozen voter names and addresses in this hell mouth, but I am a cheerful guy, the warm Santa Anas were blowing, I had my Seed the Vote sandwich and juice box, and a full tank of gas in my Prius. Perversely, Dylan’s “Desolation Row” was on the CD player. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging. They’re painting the passports brown.” Perfect!

Six hours later, I’d visited a dozen addresses, some multiple times, all within a five-mile radius, driven maybe twenty miles up and down hills and through arroyos, parked in areas where my cell had no reception. I rang doorbells, made notes, and asked Siri and Dylan for directions again. The Seed folks were right. People pretend not to hear you. But ring their bell (everybody has a Ring wireless video doorbell) three times and they answer. Or their dog barks. I spoke to America’s parents, grandparents, spouses, children and neighbors. Five voters were not home, not ever, and, despite multiple visits, I never made contact with them. Noted, and reported on the app and via text to my Seed supervisor.

Happily, some of my work turned out to be valuable intelligence gathering as, indeed, some targeted voters had already signed the County affidavit because somebody else had just been there. Here’s where it got interesting. Besides the grumpy dad and the nice hubby, both of whom confirmed visits by another volunteer, I met two women, middle aged, mothers of young, first-time voters, both male.

The first opened her elaborate mesh iron screen door so I could actually see her. Like me, she had a young adult kid. It was late afternoon, and she listened to my spiel. I hoped that it was fair to imagine that her son might support the Democrat Tran based on listed party affiliation. I half-stated and half-asked this. But it worked. She immediately confirmed their family’s political affiliation. But, she said, he’d driven back to Davis.  I asked if she might text him my phone number or at least let him know that we could together make his vote count, possibly win the race, and redeem democracy. I might have actually said that last part! She said she would but that her son never responded to her texts. We laughed, two parents familiar with both the 1) innocent or ignorant carelessness that had (so far) invalidated a Vote- by-Mail ballot and the 2) strategic carelessness employed to manage Mom and Dad.

My other favorite interaction was in a high-end condo cluster perhaps designed by the same architects of the Garden Grove office complex. No idea where to park, where the front door was, and just guessing at the correctness of the address, I noticed the garage open. I hollered past car, boat, bicycles and Sea-Doo. The nice lady saw me from her kitchen as a harmless, cheerful old white dude, and walked out to meet me. Like the other parent, she knew her kid and understood youthful carelessness. Her son was at school, presumably nearby CSU Fullerton, and wouldn’t be home till late. I asked my over-polite vetting question about who he might have voted for or, rather, attempted to vote for. She said they did not talk politics. Okay, I said, but is he pro-choice, a Democrat as indicated on my roster, a sane human being? (Well, no, not that last one.)

She took my phone number but then, as in one of those clumsy low-budget TV private eye shows, remembered that the kid had received mail about this. She seemed happy to go inside, get it and show me. No, not mail, it was a hand-delivered blank affidavit form from my nemesis and yours, the Michelle Steel campaign.

Clearly, I was doing something right. Or at least doing something. Evidence of the struggle to cure encouraged me. Various outfits, on both sides, were out there. Imagine, my evil doppelgänger, probably a paid courier, on the same trail! I returned for the fourth time to the address where a neighbor had earlier told me that by 5 pm my target voter, a thirty-year-old female registered Dem, would be home. I waited for twenty minutes, enjoying the Golden Hour, especially beautiful during Santa Anas. Something about how the Mojave sand and toxic particulate matter combine to capture the light. She never showed but by now I had nearly memorized “Desolation Row.” Thanks, Bob.

Democrat Derek Tran defeated Republican Michelle Steel in CD 45 by only 613 votes. I personally delivered not a single completed affidavit, but local Seed the Vote volunteers cured 167 ballots in this winning race. In CD 13, in California’s Central Valley, Democrat Adam Gray beat Republican John Duarte by 187 votes, where Seed volunteers cured 105 ballots. It’s a geographically huge district, hundreds of miles, including parts of Merced County, most of the population of Madera County, and parts of Stanislaus, Fresno, and San Joaquin Counties, all places as weird and curable and real as Brea.

All of this is corroborative and true detail for a narrative (and a system) you might otherwise find pretty darn unconvincing.

Andrew Tonkovich is the founding editor of Citric Acid and longtime editor of the Santa Monica Review. His fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Faultline, Juked, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He wrote for both OC Weekly and the Orange County Register.  With Lisa Alvarez, he co-edited the landmark Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, and is the author of two fiction collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. His review of A People's Guide to Orange County appeared recently in Alta online. He is curating a show celebrating the art and writing of an influential Orange County artist and activist at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, "Peter Carr: Artist for Survival," October 28-December 13, 2024.

​