Many reasons to celebrate this election

Yesterday, I voted in a presidential election for the first time. As I waited in line at the Harnwell polling site, clutching my driver's license, passport, phone bill and first-grade report card (sadly, my registration card never came), I found myself suddenly recalling a very different election. In the summer of 2003, I observed a Mexican election while staying in a small Michoacan town.

When I first arrived in Santa Clara de Valladares (population: 6,300), I noticed posters tacked onto telephone poles that promoted various political candidates. The local sugarcane refinery sported a colorful banner endorsing the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the political party that exclusively controlled the government from 1929 to 2000.

Curious about the advertising, I asked my Mexican friends about the upcoming election. Their responses puzzled me. One person said she thought the election had already passed; the posters simply hadn't been removed. Another told me that the election had not yet occurred, but he wasn't sure when it was. But most people responded, "What election?" -- before conceding that there probably was an election sometime soon. When I pressed for details, I found that no one seemed sure about who was running, what positions the election was for or what the various parties advocated.

Despite this confusion, the (not so) big day did, in fact, arrive. One Sunday afternoon, I was walking with a large group of friends, when we suddenly discovered a polling place. Most of my friends had not realized it was voting day and could not participate because they lacked voter identification cards, but one person said that she'd heard about the election and planned to cast a ballot. As she entered the makeshift booth, a friend explained to me, "Here, people can vote if they want to. But voting is for the voter, not for the government." After the election, I asked my friends who had won. No one seemed to know, even though the results weren't contested.

When I returned to the United States two months later, I was still unsure what election I had seen. After scouring an online Mexican newspaper, I discovered I had observed the 2003 national congressional elections. All 500 seats were up for vote, in addition to governorships, state assemblies and municipal leadership positions in many states. Having watched the proceedings, I would never have guessed.

Although my Mexican friends are smart and civically minded, they see little correlation between voting and improving their quality of life. Because the government is weak, they cannot count on it to provide even basic services.

For example, one day in Santa Clara, there was an armed robbery of a local pharmacy. The distressed pharmacist ran down the street, telling the devastating tale to anyone who would listen. I rushed to call the police. My friends chuckled at my na*vete. "The police don't do anything," they explained. Although Mexico has a 060 emergency line, equivalent to 911, calls to 060 are rarely answered. Similarly, roads go unmaintained, fire departments rarely respond and homes built without permits or safety standards sometimes collapse on the occupants. In some towns, unreliable trash pickup forces residents to burn their garbage outdoors.

The ineffectiveness of government convinces people to give up on voting and take matters into their own hands. Because the police are often ineffective and sometimes corrupt, the major crime deterrent is an informal Good Samaritan policy where neighbors watch out for one another and publicly shun miscreants. When someone's car breaks down, half the town arrives to help. These neighborhood solutions are sometimes wonderful; the community feels like a family. On the other hand, I once saw a serious auto accident on a narrow Michoacan road. Because police, ambulances and rescue equipment never arrived, neighbors futilely tried to save the injured passengers by prying apart the cars with their hands.

I admit that my experience might have been different if I had been in a major city or resort area. My friends live in a small town, and are neither well-off nor well-educated. In Mexico, as elsewhere, if you have a lot of money, you can get things done more easily. At the same time, though, this environment hardly encourages political participation.

Regardless of the election's outcome, all American people have reason to celebrate. We can be grateful to live in a country where the government is (usually) effective, and there is actually a point to voting. Although it's tempting to decry America's perennially low voter turnout and uninformed public, most Americans can name the major candidates and what position they are running for. We're not any smarter than my Mexican friends, but our populace actually has reason to be engaged.

As I waited to cast my vote in Harnwell yesterday, I realized that, as flawed and frustrating as the American government can be, it presents us with a rare opportunity. We can vote in elections where our choice matters.

Jennifer Weiss is a senior Linguistics and Theatre Arts major from Los Angeles. War On Error appears on Wednesdays.

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