Monday October 24th is the start of Early Voting for the 2016 General Election.
So yeah, I've made my positions on the candidates well-known. (I'm not kidding. That post is blowing up the charts...)
I've made my positions on the state amendments well-known.
Now here's the thing I need from you. Vote.
Preferably I'd like you to vote with a modicum of sobriety and massive dose of sanity: that is, DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN (unless the Democratic option is an honest-to-God disaster, I will grant you that). But you've got your vote and your voice and it's your responsibility to contribute to the civic discourse, and I figure a lot of you have already made up your minds. Still, I need to ask for the sanity bit.
Early voting is a good option to make sure you have a chance to get that vote in. The Election Day - Tuesday - is a rough day to get in to your precinct before or after you head off to work or deal with getting kids to school and all that. Precincts are sometimes difficult or out of the way for you to get to: Mostly close to home but nowhere near the route you take back and forth to work/school/places to go.
Granted, some states make it hard to use Early Voting: either by setting short number of days or hours you have a chance to go, or by keeping the number of locations to a minimum to force long lines of people willing to go early.
(This is also why more people are starting to go to Absentee/Ballot-by-Mail as an alternative)
Personally, I'm a traditionalist. I like the idea of voting on the day itself, and I plan ahead to make sure I can (lacking family responsibilities, I can get in early before heading to work). I was lucky most of my life I've been unusually close to my precincts (in New Port Richey it was a block across the street!). I think I voted early once - 2012 - on the General Election, mostly because I worried I would be busy that day. Did I blog about it...? Lemme check. Okay. I voted early on some Primaries... AHA! I voted early because of a Jury summons. It was the same jury summons that stuck me in a room with 150 people watching Pawn Stars for six straight hours (and they recycled the same episodes every two! I will NEVER watch that show again...).
This year is no different. Part of me wants the energy of the importance of my vote - getting up and putting my vote in to dump Trump for all time - to power me through the whole work day of "yeah yeah YEAH."
But I encourage people to get to vote when they can. I know how busy everybody else can get.
Just a reminder for people in my county, here are the locations for Early Voting. Most of Polk's major cities are hosting. Today's over with but there's Tuesday onward to Sunday November 6th. The polling places are open during the weekends, including TWO Sundays, so there's every reasonable time available to get this done. Otherwise, be like me and get the voting done on Tuesday November 8th.
Just to note I got my Sample Ballot in the mail. I need the reminder. We all do.
Your vote is your voice, and your vote is your power.
Get to it.
3 comments:
Already done. My state is a Democratic safe zone, but in its own way the popular vote matters too.
I just saw on your blog that you vote by mail.
Hope you still gather for election parties and picnicking at the county courthouse just for the traditions.
I have filled out my mail-in ballot and will mail it later today, hopefully. I like the mail-in much better, as I spent a few hours online while I filled out my ballot figuring out which judge to vote for and which transportation commissioner and which way to vote on the zillions of measures and initiatives we have this year. I know I could have done that with my sample ballot and taken it with me to the polling place, but this seems easier to me, and also now I have my ballot stubs (all four of them) which have ID numbers on them which I can use to check online and make sure they were counted.
-Doug in Oakland
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