Democracy in action

Okay, so I voted today.

 

This blog is not a pulpit from which I preach and seldom do I go out of my way to tout my politics. However, I’m a freakin’ vegan from New England. Vegans from New England don’t vote for reactionaries from Alaska, and I cannot envision a scenario in which I would willingly attempt to elect Sarah Palin to public office. All of that is, I’ve no doubt, pretty obvious given the fact that I’m a vegan from New England.

Of late, I’ve been fascinated with polling data. I think that anyone who would bet money on polling data is just as likely to win as someone betting money on weather forecasts 6 months out. Still it fascinates me. So does fake meat… I’ve always wondered what that’s about- real meat never interested me. I like logging on every morning to see where the electoral projections are. It’s all pretty exciting.

I know a lot of people who are feeling energized about this election and I have to say its too bad that the Democrats couldn’t come up with a worthy candidate 8 years ago- perhaps we wouldn’t be in a war that, stunningly, costs far more than this unprecedented banking scheme congress has concocted. I know they had no real choice, but still, it is pretty ridiculous.

So I got to town hall this morning and filled out a form for my absentee ballot. In NH it is a pain to vote early, you pretty much have to swear that you’ll be out of state, otherwise they expect you to show up on November 4th to vote. Well, it turns out that my registration had disappeared, and I was basically told I was not going to be able to vote absentee this year. And I’m headed for Colorado on Saturday, so no absentee ballot means no vote… So I pretty much freaked out. I don’t yell when I get upset, but I do get pretty intense, and the woman who was helping me does yell. Well, they told me I must have walked out of town hall this August with my voter registration form- a form I should never have had.

They were all too happy to blame me because on that day back in August I had been a bit of a nuisance. I changed residency, registered a car and (I thought) registered to vote. All of that required a great deal of paperwork and no small amount of money in two separate townships ~30 minutes apart. Well, in all of my flustered disinterest in filling out more forms, I distracted the woman there enough that she gave me $30 extra in change, something I discovered much later in the day… So they had me bring the money back (fair enough.) So they remembered me being a pain nearly 3 months out. Ouch.

Well, I walked out of the building thinking that I was not going to be voting in what is perhaps the most interesting and (in my opinion) exciting elections in my lifetime- AND in a swing state! I went to my car and opened the glove box and discovered, just as they had predicted, my voter registration form, clearly dated August 15th. I had filled it out along with other paperwork and I guess it just ended up in my pile not theirs. I ran back inside, handed it over, and they made it happen (after all, I was never supposed to have the form, it seems wrong to put the blame on me completely, even worse to deny me the vote) To their credit they were super nice about the whole thing in the end, and I think I was pretty friendly at that point too.

Okay, so now it’s your turn. I think that election day should be a national holiday and that the electoral college system should be trashed, that if I’m in the US I should not need to be in my state to vote on election day- the valid ID should do the trick. And I think everyone should stand up and vote, and if they don’t they should not have the right to criticize the government. Or something like that. Maybe we should just stop telling people we live in a free society- people as a group seem to have some pretty stupid ideas about the essence of freedom, thoughts like we need to bomb others to be free, we need to cut money from education to fight all of our social problems, we need to be able to carry assault weapons, we MUST be free to do nothing at all times and complain about how corrupt the government is… I believe that the best candidate for the most people can only be elected if people get off their butts and vote and I hoe they’ll vote blue as I did, but at least they’ll be a part of it- one way or the other…