I’ve got a busy day, so I hustled down to the polls at 6 am. Voting was no problem, although I was a bit confused. I figured that you filled in the oval below the candidate’s name, but the instructions said to fill in the ballot above or next to the name, so I had to ask about it. One of the sad realizations I have come to is that most votes on Election Day don’t matter, because most elections have been engineered out of existence. Even a vote for President doesn’t matter much unless you live in a swing state, and most votes for Congress or legislature don’t matter unless you live in a swing district. But this year you have a bunch of statewide races where a vote actually does matter. All the elections in which votes actually matter, other than Mayor.
I have two comments on the new voting system. The bad news is that on the new sheets, the elections that they don’t want to be real elections remain hidden at the bottom of the page – Congress, State Assembly, State Senate. So fewer people will vote. To add to the discouragement, they are under the judges, for which the Republicans and Democrats put up the same choice, and which I think people shouldn’t be voting for anyway. The good news is that the new system makes it very easy to vote for a write in candidate. Before, I believe, one had to take a lot of extra time and ask for a separate ballot. Now it takes no time at all. Had I known about this, I would certainly have had something to say about it. There is now an alternative to voting for the one “real” candidate in a non-election, or a token candidate who did not campaign. Given that only special interests come out to vote in legislative primaries, a write in campaign on Election Day may as (un) likely to unseat – or at least wake up—an incumbent on Election Day as any other method, while getting around the ballot access nonsense.