OYSTERVILLE DAYBOOK, NOVEMBER 6, 2012

Oysterville’s Polling Place 1907-2002

Dear Daughter:  This has been election day and some way it has been strenuous. Thus began a letter written by my grandmother, Helen Richardson Espy, on Tuesday, November 3, 1914.  She was writing to her oldest child, Medora, who was away at school.  The letter continued:

            Papa, Mr. Stoner and Mr. Goulter have charge of the polls.  Mrs. Stoner took the men up their noon meal and I sent dinner tonight.  Our stove has been smoking to beat its record, and I had an awful time getting anything cooked.  To top it off, your three year old brother went off with little Albert Andrews today and had an undress parade right down Fourth Street.  I was so provoked.  They were not together fifteen minutes.  This happened while I was off voting.  Willard has been threatened with dire results if he went ever since their last “undress parade” so I punished him this time and think he is duly impressed.  It just goes to show that women belong at home and not at election polls.

Helen Richardson Espy, 1908

Despite the wry tone of the letter, my grandmother took her responsibility seriously and was undoubtedly pleased that women had won the right to vote in Washington in 1910 – a full ten years before the 19^th amendment granted that same right to women across the nation.  She was not a stranger to the political process or to the issues of the times.  She had been an active behind-the-scenes helpmate to my grandfather during his years in the Washington State Senate. In fact, in the election of 1920, she actually had her first (and maybe only) paid job working at the Oysterville polling place.

In those days (and for all subsequent years until the current mail-in-vote process), the people of the Oysterville precinct voted at the schoolhouse.  My first experience voting there occurred shortly after I had moved here full-time in 1978.  After years of voting in the anonymous-feeling polling places of suburban California, I finally felt a grassroots connectedness here.  I miss that.

OYSTERVILLE DAYBOOK POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 5, 2013      

Dale Espy Little at 95, 2006

During the last few years of her life, my mother’s dementia was such that she really didn’t understand much about the world around her.  Still, when it was time to vote, her ballot arrived in the mail.  When I called to explain the situation and ask that she be taken off the voting roster, I was told that she would have to make that request, herself.  In writing.   Or, at the very least, she would have to personally sign a statement prepared by her doctor.

Since she could no longer sign her name, the request was never sent in.  She continued to get ballots in the mail, and for controversial issues the temptation was to vote for her and use the rubber signature stamp that she had had prepared years previously when her arthritis made signing her name too difficult.  Instead (law-abiding-citizen that I am), I tore up her ballots and threw them out.  But I’ve often wondered since if that particular glitch in the voting regulations has ever been fixed…