Chalkboard Democracy

Today is Election Day, and I found myself thinking about election nights as a kid. In the 1960s and 70s, election night in Cleveland County, North Carolina, meant going downtown to Shelby.

The Shelby Daily Star had a huge chalkboard on the side of its building. Across the top were the precincts. Down the side were the candidates, grouped by office. A couple of men stood on ladders with chalk in their hands, waiting for numbers. No instant returns scrolled across a television screen. No website refreshing every few seconds. No phone buzzing with alerts.

The votes were counted by hand at the precincts. The results were called into the election office at the nearby courthouse. Someone carried the numbers down to the newspaper, and the men on the ladders wrote them on the board and updated the totals.

And people waited.

Sometimes I went with my Dad. I remember the crowds filling downtown Shelby. Candidates were there. Their supporters were there. Democrats were there. Republicans were there. Mostly, though, they were just people from the community standing together and watching their election happen.

You could feel the mood change as the numbers went onto that board. Someone would smile. Someone else would start looking worried. A candidate who had been behind might suddenly pull ahead when another precinct came in. If you stayed until everything was settled, you might still be standing there at two or three in the morning.

I have been thinking about why those memories have stayed with me.

Part of it is nostalgia, of course. There is something almost quaint now about grown men climbing ladders with pieces of chalk while hundreds of people waited below for election returns.

But I think something else was happening too. We were physically present with one another.

Politics had its divisions then. Cleveland County certainly had its arguments. Yet on election night, everyone watched the same board. The numbers belonged to everyone. Eventually somebody won, somebody lost, and everybody had to go home and continue living in the same community.

That connects with something I have written about several times while exploring Stoicism. The Stoics believed citizenship carried obligations. They saw human beings as members of a larger whole, with justice as a virtue that should guide how we live. Citizenship meant participation in the common life, rather than simply looking after yourself.

I returned to a similar idea recently in an essay, “What We Choose Together.” Citizenship is an ongoing practice. Voting matters, but so do attending meetings, knowing who represents us, listening, speaking up, and accepting that sometimes the vote will go against us. Democracy depends on people who keep showing up anyway.

Maybe that old chalkboard represented a small piece of that. Election night was something the community experienced together. There was suspense and disappointment. There were winners and losers. Yet everyone stood beneath the same board waiting for the same numbers.

Tonight the results will arrive much faster. I can watch precinct totals on my phone from the comfort of my living room. By the time someone in 1972 had climbed halfway down the ladder, I can refresh a webpage three times. Technology has made election night easier. I am less certain it has made it better.

There was something valuable about standing in a crowd with your neighbors and watching democracy happen one precinct at a time. Something worth remembering about seeing the people who disagreed with you standing only a few feet away, waiting for the same piece of chalk to move across the same board.

Maybe the chalkboard was primitive.

But the gathering was citizenship.

 The image is AI generated. Try as I might, I could not find a photo, though I’m sure they exist. If any of my Cleveland County friends have one, I would love for you to send it along.