Tag Archives: voting

One More Week!

31 Oct

One more week until the official election day, and it can’t come fast enough to suit us. The phone rings constantly with robo-calls, Name Unavailables, or calls from people pretending to be local.

The Squire went to a site called NoMoRoBo and signed us up; it’s free and even if it wasn’t it would be worth getting. The phone rings once and then stops. The others we just don’t answer. To make matters even worse, several months ago we were called by one of the “official” poll takers – Gallup, perhaps. The woman who called asked if anyone in the house was under 65, which neither of us are, and then said she would “mark the records” and hung up. If they don’t care what we old fogies think, why would they care how we vote?

The mailbox is almost as bad. We get four or five mailings every day from various candidates, and we drop those directly into the recycling bin without taking them into the house. One candidate annoys me particularly. The man is a physician, and he voted to allow an increase in the lead in the paint used on children’s toys. I didn’t know they still used lead paint! Vote to ban the stuff, not increase it! The average ten year old knows better than that. He also brags about how much he does for the military, both active and retired, but a quick search of his voting record shows that is not the case. Does he think we are all that stupid?

Yeesh.

C’mon November 6th!

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Early Voting

27 Oct

The Squire and I went yesterday afternoon to cast our ballots. Rather than go to our regular place we were directed to a Community Center, about 5 miles in the opposite direction. Actually, we were quite pleased at the change. There were about twenty five voting booths, rather than the five they had at our usual polling place, and five or six scanners instead of only one.  The door to the gym was in the center of the hallway but the line stretched from one side of the building to the other, made a U turn and came back to the middle. One lady had brought a book, and stepped forward in line without missing a word. My kind of people.

As we were signing in the man on the other side of me reached for his wallet and asked if he needed to show any ID. The clerk chuckled and shook her head. “This isn’t Georgia, sir.” We gave our name and when the clerk had it on the screen, we had to tell her our birthdate and address, so it was pretty easy to prove who you were.

One of the docents (I love that word!) was a young woman wearing a hijab, who still had an accent. I smiled and told her we were glad to see her here, and she replied she was glad to be able to help. “And I voted yesterday!” At least some people take their civic duty seriously.  As if I had any room to talk. I’ll have to see how I can help next time around.

When we picked up our ballots I asked the woman how it was going. She said they had had 1200 voters on Thursday and it looked as if it would be a lot more than that by the end of the day. If it was this busy at 3:00 or 3:30, it was going to be a mob when the “after work on Friday crowd” showed up.

I simply cannot imagine trying to have everybody vote on one day! Dear Heavens!

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Lesser of Two Evils

4 Nov

The Squire and I trotted out this morning to vote, and were very pleasantly surprised at the turnout. Lots of cars on the parking lot, and even a few on the streets.  Most of the time, I’ve seen livelier morgues.

Several years ago there was a tremendous dust-up because most of the bond votes (borrowing money for schools, roads, etc.) were written in such obscure legalese people had no idea if they were voting yea or nay. The last couple of elections, these things have been written in plain English, so at least you know what you’re doing.

The governor’s race is a mess. One candidate presumably hired a bunch of political friends  to roll out the Affordable Care Act, and it was  bolloxed royally. Had to be redone nearly from scratch, cost the earth, and nobody was happy. The other candidate has an absolutely abysmal voting record.  He seems to have forgotten that Roe vs. Wade was settled decades ago, and is trying to make abortions almost impossible to get in this state. Mind you, I’m not in favor of them, but I don’t have to answer for it on Judgment Day, and what you do is your business and not mine.  This fellow has also voted to increase the amount of lead allowed in the paint of children’s toys, and I DO have a problem with that. And the list goes on.

Since the schools were closed, the Girl Scout Troop had a cookie stand in the lobby, so the day was not a total loss. At least I got a box of Caramel Delites out of the day.

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