So I did my civic and moral duty yesterday by voting at the Thomasville Public Library. The TPL is one of the early voting locations for Davidson county which is a deep red area of NC to the tune of about 70-30ish for the fundies. I went in the afternoon in the hopes that the lines would be reasonable and was able to get in and vote in about 50 mins. The mask wearing percentage by the people in line surprised me at about 80% wearing masks. General mask wearing here is very lax, around 50-50 inside with little to no enforcement, so seeing the higher participation by the people in line seemed hopeful. There was however the inevitable moment when a pickup rode by with one of T-villes yokels yelling “You know who to vote for..Trump 2020 ...WooHoo Hell Yah” This got a snicker from a few of the people around me, but definitely wasn’t met with the enthusiastic reply you would expect in this neck of the woods.
The process was pretty straight forward which involved signing a paper verifying your information and being handed a ballot to feed into the machine. They gave us Q-tips for use with the touchscreen which again surprised me as they are all about “freedom” around here. Total time to vote was probably 5ish mins and only took that long because I decided to go back and vote for an unopposed republican just to be sure my ballot was fully completed. Once done, the machine spits out the completed ballot which I deposited into the scanner after verifying my choices.
My other adventure while in line was being met by one of the candidates for school board passing out cards for her and another candidate. I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that campaigning at an election site is either illegal or just bad style. There is a sign when you pull up that says “No Campaigning Beyond This Point” I had initially intended to leave this unmarked as I was unaware of the candidates and didn’t want to give a vote to some DeVos type by guessing. However, this interaction gave me the vibe of someone who felt the rules didn’t apply to them(sound familiar), so by eliminating them from the choices I was able to cast my vote for school board. There is a high probability the other choices were equally awful, but that’s life in the blood red hell known as Thomasville NC.
All things considered it went well and gave me some additional hope for next Tuesday (fingers crossed)
