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I voted!...for the first time ever

Writer's picture: Meg SequeiraMeg Sequeira

Updated: Oct 30, 2024


My introduction to the concept of voting came to me, like many western ideas, from an Archie comic. Through the comic’s oft-swollen and tattered pages, Archie and the gang taught me that in other parts of the world, people waited all year for the summer and weren’t trapped in it the way we were in the blistering hellfire of the Persian Gulf. I learned that kids wore whatever they wanted to school everyday, which sounded both exhausting and thrilling while I was trapped in my uniform of a pinafore dress and knee-length socks in the aforementioned heat. And I learned that democracy existed not just in the wider American world Archie lived in, but also at school, where student councils and class presidents gave kids a taste of the political world. 


The first time I read the word “vote” was in a comic in which Archie ran for school president, only to lose to Jughead as a write-in candidate. Voting meant nothing to me as a Non Resident Indian (NRI) living in an absolute monarchy in the UAE. NRIs forgo voting rights in India and as a expatriate child in the UAE, I was subject to the whims of the ruler and his court, which on any day, could waffle rapidly back and forth, a trial and error which put the entire country at the mercy of whatever decree the front page of Gulf News announced that day. Once, as a teenager, I awoke to the newspapers declaring that all cars manufactured before 1990 were to be scrapped, effective immediately and the government only backtracked on that when the entire city was gridlocked with thousands upon thousands of cars sitting bumper to bumper on the way to the dump miles outside of the city, for days afterward. So voting, that is, having a say in anything the almighty government of the UAE would do was foreign to me. 


Setting down the Archie Double Digest, I opened my 400 page Encyclopedia Britannica Volume “V” to look up the definition of vote. “A formal expression of opinion or choice made by an individual or group in response to a proposed decision, typically within a political, organizational or community context”. Laying on my stomach on the cold, tiled floor of the 17th floor apartment building I had lived in till I was ten, I closed the thick volume hard, symbolizing my dismissal. What a silly concept, I thought. Isn’t it just easier if this ruler is the last ruler’s son?


As time passed, I began to think about it more. I saw injustice everywhere I looked in my hometown. In my own life as young, Indian woman whose skin and nationality kept her from being able to have the same opportunities as white people, and in the lives of those who looked like me: the slave laborers who toiled in the hot sun each day, their passports confiscated from them, having had to sign contracts they could neither read nor understand, the Filipino and Indonesian housekeepers and nannies assaulted and beaten, their cries echoing through the neighborhood, piercing through the azan and falling on the deaf ears of people who knew the homes they worked in belonged to police commissioners and members of the court. Around us, dictatorships and monarchies ran rampant from Saudi to Syria and the world I lived in was still on edge as American troops yet again set their rifle scopes on the heads of Iraqis, seeking out Saddam Hussein. Injustice was everywhere I looked. Surely, I thought to myself, all the world was like this and no single vote could stop it. 


In Canada though, I was proved wrong. Here, I saw that people settled their differences at the ballot box. But democracy is expensive, and it can’t fix everything. I’m not even sure it is the most effective system, but it is the only system that allows for the voices of the many and the few and this year, one of those voices is mine.


My experience of voting itself though, was rather anticlimactic. Upon meeting with no wait at our nearby community centre and makeshift voting place, my ID was checked and I ushered into a cardboard “booth” propped up on a plastic table, given an A4 piece of paper with my three candidates' names on it and a new, black sharpie marker. The entire process took less than a minute. When I was done, an Elections BC staffer fed my ballot into the automatic ballot reader and it beeped, rather boredly, while the screen declared “vote registered”. That’s it? I asked. That’s it, they said, as they stuck a “first time voter” sticker on my wool coat and pointed me toward the “selfie station” with an emblematic “I voted” backdrop. Leaving the community centre, I petted a golden retriever that was waiting outside for its owner to complete the process for what seemed like longer than it took me to vote. I had waited my whole life for this moment so why did it go by so fast and so unceremoniously? But perhaps that is the true nature of voting and the normalcy it should contain. Perhaps, voting shouldn’t be full of pomp and circumstance, but instead it should be marked by the mundanity and normalcy of our everyday duties. 


As a well-decided voter and politico, I voted early having followed my candidates platform for years, knowing their strengths and believing in their values, but I was momentarily deflated when announcing my candidate was met with refrains of having “wasted” my vote. These came from those who espouse the method of strategic voting, a concept I have, for a number of years, been familiar with, but wholly confused by. Strategic voting is when a voter chooses to support a candidate or party not because it is their preference, but because they believe doing so will prevent the least desirable party from winning. In British Columbia, a common strategic voting battlecry is “ABC” or “Anything But Conservative”. 


I felt powerless in the Middle East, as a woman, as an expatiate of what the UAE government decided was a lower class based solely on my Indian passport and as someone who they went out of their way to ensure was not a citizen, despite having been born there. I feel utterly incapacitated and ashamed when I see the country whose nationality was bestowed upon me at birth plunge deeper and deeper into inequality, racial and religious division. In India, rifts have grown so deep that votes are more a referendum on who deserves to call themselves “Indian” than anything else, and NRIs like me, certainly don’t get a say. 


In order to become a Canadian citizen, I jumped through every hoop the federal Ministry of Immigration, Citizenship and Refugees held up for ten years, fulfilling every criteria, even giving up my Indian citizenship in the process. So I voted. And even if my candidate doesn’t win, I’ll still know that my vote combatted all the muzzling I felt in Dubai and in India. I'll know that my vote aligned with my values of what I want a better, more inclusive, more climate resilient, more immigrant-embracing Canada to look like and no one can tell me I wasted my vote, because the only wasted vote is a vote where the person chooses to ignore the luxury of a free and democratic society and not vote at all.


-m.


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Cait K.
Cait K.
Nov 16, 2024

Thank you for sharing this Megha. It really is a striking story of how you learned about voting and puts the whole thing in perspective. I have always appreciated the way you talked about this and your value of voting has stuck with me.

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