On 28 October 2018, people in Mexico City queued to vote in a consultation on the capital's new airport project. Reuters footage records the sequence directly: voters waiting in line, documents being checked and ballots placed in boxes. The following day, President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador cited the result when announcing that the airport under construction would be cancelled.
Unlike an ordinary election, the choice at the end of this line was not between candidates but between futures for a huge public project. Whatever the consultation's wider legal and political debate, the footage establishes the act of ordered waiting. Citizens were verified one by one and placed different judgments into the same box. Billions in spending and the future shape of a city were compressed into a small personal procedure: wait, identify yourself and cast one ballot. Large policy decisions reach participants in the intimate unit of 'my turn.'