By Jeff Green
Written October 29, 2020
Election night in Shelton used to be an all-American experience full of drama, anxiety, pride, pathos and triumph.
People from all over Mason County swarmed the courthouse and climbed the stairs - or took the rickety elevator - to the courtroom on the second floor. There they’d pack the wooden pews, or stand in the back and along the side walls.
Not long after the polls closed at eight o’clock, poll workers from various precincts started to arrive carrying locked wooden boxes full of ballots. Election department employees would unlock the boxes and prepare ballots for counting by a machine set up right in the midst of the courtroom.
Between ballot counts, every hour or longer, people chatted, moved around or tried to devine meaning through their pocket calculators.
As the evening moved along, the courtroom grew hotter and stuffier from body heat and the ancient steam radiators whose regulators had long ago been stripped and no longer worked.
The courtroom’s large windows were thrown open and the chilly November night air cooled the stifling courtroom by two or three degrees. It was great to stand near the windows and feel the cool air.
After the machine spit out each count, the county clerk would write the ballot sub-totals on butcher paper affixed to blackboards. The room quieted and you could hear her marker squeak as she wrote the numbers for each candidate. Supporters cheered or groaned depending on how the numbers fell.
Most people were there for the local races. Some races were settled early as one candidate would pull away and keep increasing his or her lead.
But the best races were those where the lead changed back and forth - and back again - during the night. That was when election watchers were in their element; their nerves frazzled, their pulses racing.
And then, it was announced the final count was being tallied on the machine. Sometimes that was well after midnight. The room fell silent. Most held their breath as the clerk wrote the totals on the boards.
Sometimes the courtroom exploded in whoops and cheers from the backers of winners, while those favoring the runners-up sighed and started putting on their coats.
Eventually, everybody went home in the late-night or early-morning cold. It was always exciting, always a spectacle, always electric to watch the returns roll in.
In today’s vote-by-mail era, there are no precinct workers. Gone are the wooden boxes, the butcher paper, the buzzing of the vote-counting machine. The courtroom is dark and empty on election night.
These days printed results are handed out to the few who show up at the county commissioners’ chambers and posted online shortly after eight.
The process is fast and accurate but mechanical. All that’s missing is the humanity and emotions and pulse-pounding atmosphere on election night of year’s past.
Jeff Green passed away in 2022.
