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My Brush With Sexual Assault
There’s a reason they don’t let strangers into schools
November 3, 1992, senior year of high school in an upscale suburban community east of Seattle. I’m class president, writing for the school paper, plenty of friends, life is good.
It’s election day; we’ll find out later that night that the former Democratic Governor of Arkansas, a guy they’re calling “Slick Willy”, will assume the presidency after beating contenders George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot in a landslide victory.
Election day back in the 90’s, in the state of Washington at least, meant showing up at a public facility to cast your vote — usually a school, library or community center. In this case, our high school, as it had in years prior, served as the defacto polling center for registered voters from our community to drop in and mark their ballots.
Voters would show up at the front of the school, check in at a desk manned by volunteers, then enter an assigned private booth — pretty much the way they still do it in states that haven’t yet adopted a mandatory mail-in voting program. The process would take ten to fifteen minutes max, depending on the crowd, and people would come and go from the school throughout the day. As students, we thought nothing of it at the time — just business as usual.
