Cookie Crumbled

I cast my first vote in Canada at the Muriel Collins Housing Co-operative in downtown Toronto. Initially, I was struck by the simplicity of the ballot: just a list of names where I was to place a single X next to my preferred candidate for member of Parliament. And then, as I headed toward the door and back home, I was struck by the lack of cookies.

I have not missed a federal, provincial, or municipal election since becoming a Canadian citizen, but my sentimental point of reference for voting remains my hometown of Albion, Nebraska. I was eighteen when I entered the basement of the local Baptist church to participate in the primaries for the first time. A few months later, I voted again, in a general election that became synonymous with recounts and hanging chads. In both cases, the double-sided ballot asked a whole host of questions. Whom did I back for president and as my representative in Congress? Whom did I want to serve as university regent? What about county sheriff and commissioner for the natural resource district? School board member and judge of the workers’ compensation court? Did I support amending the state constitution to outlaw same‑sex marriage?

For exercising my civic responsibility, I was rewarded with an “I Voted” sticker and offered a variety of baked goods near the exit, supplied by a group of volunteers, likely congregants of the church. A similar scene played out again two years later, during the mid-terms, and two years after that, when I voted in person in the United States for what proved to be the last time. I haven’t sat out a primary or general election since moving to Canada, but I have sent each of those ballots to the county clerk’s office by mail. No stickers, and certainly no cookies.

When I received my official ballot for the November 5 general election, I counted fifteen races for federal, state, and local offices, as well as seven initiatives or referendums, including two proposed amendments to the Nebraska constitution regarding a woman’s right to choose. It’s a lot to digest, especially compared with the Canadian ballots I’ve become accustomed to. Would those Cornhuskers voting at their library or community hall, I wondered, be rewarded for their efforts this year with baked goods and the non-partisan bonhomie that such a small gesture powerfully represents? I asked my parents and my older brother — who laughed at my naïveté.

Gone are the days of ballot box brownies, and gone are the days, it sure seems, of camaraderie that crosses party lines. When a would‑be assassin shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, the top House Democrat, Tip O’Neill, visited the Republican president in the hospital. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the left-leaning United States Supreme Court justice, was a long-time friend of her right-leaning colleague Antonin Scalia. The Democrat Ted Kennedy and the Republican Orrin Hatch made for an odd couple, as did John Adams and Thomas Jefferson centuries earlier (though the two Founders famously fell out for a while). Today some members of Congress, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene, won’t even speak to each other when they pass in the hallway, preferring to trade barbs on social media. “In this age of partisan rancor, when political rivals often describe each other as enemies,” a Los Angeles Times columnist recently wrote, “we easily forget that Americans once took a revolutionary pride in being friends.”

I desperately want that pride to return. During university, some of my closest friends and I vehemently disagreed on Initiative 416, which did, in fact, outlaw same-sex marriage and remains part of the state constitution (though it can no longer be enforced). We disagreed on the president, on abortion rights, on the death penalty, and on the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I’m still close to many former classmates, including some who have championed presidential campaigns that I find objectionable. That puts us in the minority, according to the Pew Research Center, which reported in 2020 that fewer than a quarter of American voters “have more than a few friends” from the other side of the aisle.

Much ink has been spilled on the causes for increased polarization in American politics and, regrettably, here in Canada. From our siloed news sources to manipulative algorithms, we have become conditioned to distrust one another, to associate evil or monstrosity with politicians as well as with fellow citizens who dare see the world differently.

As I mail my completed ballot back to small-town Nebraska, I suspect my sealed envelope will be opened by someone who supports a platform that I do not. Perhaps I am naive, but I trust that they will dutifully count my raised hand. And I want to believe that if I were still voting in person, and if such things still happened, I would graciously accept a cookie from someone like them on my way out.