For me it was great! But I don’t think you ought to do it.
Naah….that’s going too far. Maybe it’ll be okay for you.
But maybe not.
But don’t take me too seriously. I’m simply having a little fun whipsawing you. I promise I’m not really malevolent. I can just be a bit mischievous at times. But now that I’ve had my fun, I’ll speak a bit more seriously.
And my ambivalence about early voting has some basis in rationality. I’ll explain.
I wouldn’t have done it except that I want to visit my Mom for her birthday and I can’t do that plus be at home on November 6.
I live in Illinois. For all of the faults of the State of Ilinois………….argghh, don’t get me started!……….they at least don’t seem to be trying to suppress the vote or indulge in other election fuckery. Richard J Daley notwithstanding.
The County Clerk’s office was well-staffed. There were no lines and no waiting. The staff were more than polite. They were effusive in their good cheer. They genuinely seemed to be grateful for the opportunity to help us vote. There was no talk about voter ID. I didn’t expect any, actually, but it’s a sign of our rotten times when I found myself grateful over not experiencing shenanigans that I didn’t expect anyway. They checked our signatures against the signatures from when we registered. My registration signature is now just about exactly 30 years old. I guess they could still tell that it’s mine. they didn’t question it anyway.
My daughter came along. She hasn’t lived at home in years. Yet they did have just a bit of trouble finding her registration since she hadn’t bothered to change her address. (She swears to me that she really thought she had done so. But today wasn’t the first fish story I’ve ever heard from my kids.) But when they’d figured out what was wrong they didn’t boot her out over some stupid ‘exact match’ rule. They didn’t make her fill out some ‘provisional’ ballot or anything like that. They simply fixed the error. The whole thing took her hardly any more time than it took my wife and I.
That’s the sort of service we expect from a democracy that does things right. Those of you who are old enough will remember a time when everyone in America, and the rest of the world, expected exactly this from America. We’ve reached the point that it’s refreshing when it does occur. Let’s all remember to thank the conservatives for that, okay? (It’s also true, of course, that America also had Jim Crow antics during those halcyon days I just alluded to, isn’t it? So maybe we shouldn’t be too self-congratulatory. But just when we were steering away from stuff like that, the conservatives started packing the rudder until we’re soon to crash into the rocks. So screw them!)
They offered us a choice between paper ballots and voting machine. I took a step back when they mentioned a machine, but they quickly mentioned that the machine would print us a paper ballot on completion. I still chose the paper ballot. (Remember how in the aftermath of the 2000 election so many red legislatures crammed voting machines down the throats of their states, acting as though it was some sort of emergency? Remember how people would step forward and say, “Wait a minute….we ought to have some kind of paper trail...”? The answers were always, “No! Can’t be done! We gotta move on this! We’re saving you from those awful punch card ballots”. Let’s all remember this on November 6 and moving forward, right?)
All in all, it was a good experience. Even heartwarming. I’m more fond of my county bureaucrats than I was yesterday.
Still, there are risks.
(Ooops. I just realized that one of their ink pens is still in my pocket. Not on purpose, I promise. But...back to nuts and bolts issues.)
When we’ve voted in the past at our actual precincts on election day, those votes were tallied at the end of the day by a small handful of people who were verifying each other’s count and watching each other for possible dirty tricks. The ballots and tallies were then handed to the next step up the ladder by people who were, again, watching to make sure nobody made an error or something worse than that. That’s good.
My County Clerk’s office must handle different ballots from different precincts all over the county. If one ballot gets misplaced into the wrong precinct, I fear there’s a good chance that ballot won’t count at all. It could very well fall through the cracks. I believe I’ve heard that the County Clerk’s office won’t be involved in tallying the votes at all. I’m speculating that this means that they’ll hand over these early votes to the various precincts for tallying on election night. That’s actually okay with me. But it does mean that these ballots will sit around for days just calling to those types of jerk who’d love to monkey with election results. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to somehow let the voters know just what the mechanics of counting these early votes really are? And I guess they’ll vary by jurisdiction, too.
That probably covers all of my worries over early voting in my own precinct and county. But there’s other stuff to worry about. Consider the reports we’re hearing from Texas in which voters who struck a straight blue ticket find that the machine is trying to give their Senate vote to old droopy face Cruz. It’s not the first time we’ve heard of machines flipping votes from blue to red. Unless it’s a conspiracy of lies funded by Soros, then we’ve got hackers, probably ‘inside’ hackers such as Georgia’s Secretary of State, actually weighting the votes in their direction.
(The fact that it could happen in favor of blue yet does not seem to happen says something about the relative decency of the two sides, doesn’t it?)
Oh, well…..at the top I seemed to be pondering whether or not to recommend early voting. But I have no standing to do that, of course. The point was more to just put out some foods for thought.
Overall I count it as a positive experience. Especially when I consider that it allowed me to also take care of a practical yet non-election related issue.
It does seem to me as though I’ve put my vote at some greater risk of error or malign usage. But probably not very much. As long as I live in a precinct, county and state that I trust (on this issue) then I have no regrets over it.