Editor’s Note: In a series of essays called The Distance, Thomas Lake is telling the stories of Americans living through the pandemic. Email thomas.lake@cnn.com if you have a story to share.
Jennifer Taff went to bed Monday night and lay there, too angry to sleep. The Wisconsin Supreme Court had ruled that Tuesday’s election would go on, despite the pandemic, and the US Supreme Court declined to give absentee voters more time to turn in their ballots. Taff had not yet received her absentee ballot. The state was under a stay-at-home order because of the coronavirus. If Taff wanted to vote, she would have to defy that order.
THE DISTANCE
Taff, a 38-year-old school social worker who works from home these days, got up around 6:30 a.m. Tuesday morning and went rummaging in her closet. She took a piece of cardboard from an old box. With a Sharpie, she made a sign that read: “THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”
At the LaFollette School, a K-8 public school in one of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, Taff is known as “the coffee lady” because she usually has a fresh pot in her office for any teacher who needs a boost.
How angry was she at home on Tuesday morning? So angry that she forgot to make herself coffee. She pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt, put a bandanna over her face, said a prayer, and walked outside, carrying her sign.
True, she could she have stayed home. But she cared about what was on the ballot: the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, the local races for mayor and county executive, the referendum on millions in new spending for Milwaukee Public Schools. “Too many things that meant too much,” as she told me on the phone.
She worked in zip code 53206, one of the nation’s most troubled, with distant grocery stores and high rates of incarceration, where too many apartments had neither a refrigerator nor a stove. Jennifer Taff would vote on Tuesday, even though it meant going out into Wisconsin’s coronavirus epicenter.
She arrived at Washington High School, whose basketball and track coach Ralph Davis, had died in late March. The line stretched down the block and around the corner. She held up her sign. People drove past, honking.
It is possible to think two things at once, to feel two ways that are almost contradictory. Jennifer Taff was proud of the poll workers: the way they scrupulously marked off each voter’s social distancing space, the way they checked IDs without actually touching them, the way they sanitized the booths after each voter went in.
She was proud of the other voters, too: the man who said he had diabetes and heart disease, the others using wheelchairs and walkers. How much would you risk to cast your vote? As Jennifer Taff stood there, holding her sign, participating in one of American democracy’s strangest episodes, she also kept thinking:
People are going to die because of this.
