With the threat to American voting rights these past couple of years, I have been fretting for months. Fretting whether I was "really" still registered even though I haven't missed a vote in 20 years. Fretting about whether my Early Voting ballot would arrive in my mailbox and arrive on time, and whether, once dropped in the mail, would be received at the Country Registrar and be counted.
This is part of the genius of the War on Voting. You don't actually have to disenfranchise people to get them not to vote. Here I am, in sunny wonderful California, where our State and County offices are not run my incompetent RWNJs and I was nervous! Imagine how a guy or a gal in Ohio or Florida, maybe with a misdemeanor on their record, maybe with some unpaid traffic tickets, must feel, thinking they "might" have to produce their ID to a government official in order to exercise their franchise. It doesn't matter if a person might actually be prevented from voting, or might actually get busted on a warrant or whatever - they don't even have to mess with the state in which a given voter resides! - the cloud is there, and that's all it takes to suppress a vote.
Equal Protection my ass.
Anyways, I have voted and am assured my vote was counted. Dive below the swirly if you have a minute and I'll show you ...
So check it out: my ballot on the day I mailed it two weeks ago ...
Ready for mailing ...
The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters has a
handy dandy website where you can track the status of your Vote By Mail Ballot - the stub even has a barcode you can scan. Here is the status page confirming my ballot was received and counted.
You'll notice they have the correct date of the election - California, amirite?! Also, the status of the ballot is indicated as well. This is important: I have always trusted that my ballot was counted, but I could never be certain. I know have at least as much certainty as if I had voted in person. Which, still not 100%, but let's not dwell.
Also, if there were some issue - maybe I neglected to put the ballot in the envelope, or did not mark the ballot correctly, or did not sign the back, or there were some issue that resulted in the ballot not being counted, there is a process for curing the mistakes.
My point is, my County has its act together. My State has its act together. I suspect the majority of counties and states in this great land have their respective acts together. The big story this cycle has been the willfully destructive purges of rolls and intentionally discriminatory ID laws and they are a national shame. But there is no excuse for the horror stories of neglect and abuse of the rights of voters and the failure to follow the voting rules, such as they are, in the several and respective states.
There is no excuse, but there is an explanation: The Man doesn't want you to vote, DFH.
Equal Protection Under the Law is in The U.S. Constitution, somewhere in there between the 13th and 15th Amendments, but when it comes to voting Equal Protection is paid lip service: every State should be as organized and efficient as California, and every County should be as organized and efficient as Santa Clara. If the voter fraud concern trolls really wanted to "true the vote," they would just take our system - or the system of [insert name of kickass Blue State here] - and make it a national model. They (whoever "They" are, and I think it is the same "They") certainly seem to be able to get model legislation when it comes to making voter registration onerous, or for that matter regulating ladyparts. But making the voting process actually, you know, work? Crickets.
Anyways, preaching to the choir here.
But I voted, and my vote counts. And we are running up the score in Cali, baby.
Forward!