Voting!

Municipal elections are held every five years, so this is our first election season experience here.  Local election day has recently been declared a national holiday (national elections have been days off for a while) with schools and businesses closed, and those that are open (i.e. malls, as this seems poised to be a huge shopping day) having to pay their workers double their regular salary.  Everyone else gets a paid day off. I'm interested to see what voter turnout is like here!

Today we voted for Mayor and City Council.  Since we're not horribly displeased with Mr. 2-Term Incumbent, we're in a win-win situation (although I do think things will be improved if Ms. Challenger wins).

Voting here, in "Start Up Nation" is surprisingly low-tech.  In fact, I couldn't believe that nothing seems to have substantially changed since the voting scene in the 1960s classic movie Salach Shabati, where he enters the voting booth and does a "some of these-some of those", stuffing his envelope with tons of ballots for all the parties that tried their hardest with promises of favors and outright bribes to get his vote (not that anyone tried to bribe us, but a STUNNING amount of improvements to the city have come about in the last few months, leading to a frequent comment of "Wouldn't it be great if it was always election season?!").

We voted at one of the local kindergartens and checked in with our teudat zehut national identity card.  I didn't quite understand the "intake" process, as one person checked our card against her roster and then announced our number out loud and SEVEN other people working the polls checked us off of their lists.  I have no idea what it meant, as she was the only person checking people in and there was only one voting booth....).  We were given one envelope for each race being held and then entered a voting booth, which was a child-height table with a cardboard enclosure, like from a science fair.  In the booth there was a selection of paper ballots representing each group running for City Council (one does not vote for individuals for City Council, rather for a particular political party who has put your supported candidate(s) on its slate.  In our case, a slight dilemma as a woman from our neighborhood [who hosted us our first Shabbos here] was running on one party, and someone we're friendly with from ulpan was running on another party.  Both parties supported our choice for Mayor.  What to do, what to do....).  Ballots are little paper rectangles with one or two big letters standing for the Party's name and the full name written beneath.

 

We learned that it's very important when voting to check that no hanky panky has been done to your ballot, because if the ballot you choose
is bent
or wrinkled
or has anything written on the front or back (even a scribble)
or you put more than two in a ballot envelope
......your vote is invalidated.

I did experience a brief moment of panic when staring at the TON of ballots for the different parties running for City Council.  As there was only one voting booth, I wanted to make sure I didn't hold up the line...There were about 16 different parties running, and I could see how hard it would be for someone with little Hebrew (although I'm not sure it justifies the "tip" below, which was sent out in an innocuous-looking pamphlet called, "Your Guide to Easy Voting" [which perhaps should have been more aptly-called "Your Guide to Easy Voting for Our Party and No Other"]:

After exiting the booth, we deposited our envelope in a big cardboard box (just like in the US, but way more low-tech), took our Identity Cards back and woohoo--we had our first experience participating in Israeli democracy!

The World Needs More People Like This!

Our city is built on a big....height.  It's taller than a hill and smaller than a mountain.  I'm not sure what the word in English is (if there even is one!), but the word in Hebrew is rama.  There's a lot of "uphill" in walking around here (and remember that cars aren't anywhere near as common in Israel; for example, while I know many people with 0 or 1 car, I know *no one* who has two cars).

Arial photo (cropped by me) by Seth Aronstam (thank you!).  More daunting at street-level!

One of the main roads in town is a straight shot up.  It's one of the few roads that you can see the top of when you're at the bottom, and it can be a bit daunting, especially when it's a hot day (which it is most of the year.  It's mid-October and I haven't put on so much as a light sweater yet).  So it was a delight to discover that there's a family of absolute tadikim who have made part of the entrance to their home into a water station:

There's a water fountain with cups, a sign with the blessing to say before drinking water, and a sign asking that every blessing should help bring healing to a person special to them.  The sign on the left says, "Know this, dear one: the Creator of the World loves you very much".  During the hottest part of the summer, they put a few chairs out as well.

The world needs more people like this!