Sunday, September 13, 2020

Mailing it in

For a minute there, I was getting a little worried.

Kim and I had filled out our request forms for our absentee ballots for the upcoming general election about a month ago, and put them in the mail. The actual ballots, if we met all the requirements, were supposed to be mailed to us anytime after Sept. 4.

Our absentee ballots have arrived.
 This was just before the upheaval in the United States Postal System which, nationwide, seems to be experiencing delays in delivery, no thanks to arrogant President Trump sycophant Louis DeJoy, the newly-appointed Postmaster General, under whose leadership removed hundreds of sorting machines across the country, cut back workers' overtime and otherwise instituted other "cost cutting measures" just two months before the election.

The timing of this overhaul is egregious and smells of an attempt at voter suppression, especially coming as it does after Trump's unbased and endless railing about fraud related to mail-in (absentee) voting. Especially in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even if everything was corrected and put back the way it was, the damage has already been done if the original aim was to sow distrust in the voting system. You have to have faith in the system, despite all the QAnons, the foreign interventionists, the social media interruptus and other conspiracy theory advocates. If you don't have faith in the voting system – perhaps the most sacred of our institutions and which seems to be under continuous assault – then the republic is probably lost.

Just ask Ben Franklin.

Anyway, Sept. 4 arrived and left without the ballots in our mail box. So did the next few days. I was getting worried. The reason we're considering voting by mail – a reliable system of voting dating back 156 years ago to the Civil War, when Union soldiers voted by mail overwhelming from combat zones to re-elect Abraham Lincoln – is the pandemic. But also to avoid long lines at the polls in what is shaping up to be one of the most crucial elections in American history.

Despite our reservations to physically vote at the poll, Kim and I also made plans to vote early, long lines and pandemic be damned, just in case our mail-in ballots never arrived.

But on Thursday, Sept. 10, our ballots were waiting for us in the mail box. They were postmarked Sept. 9, which indicates to me, at least, that our local post office is handling the crunch. Or is prepared to.

I'm still getting my bills, after all, so there's that.

The ballot itself looks something like an Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) exam, where you fill in little circles next to the name of the candidate you want to vote for with a black pen. When the ballot is filled out, you put it in the enclosed envelope that came with the package, and sign the envelope in the space provided.

There are bar codes on the ballot and bar codes on the return envelope, which gives me a sense of security.

Then you either mail the envelope, or you can return it directly by hand, in person, to the Board of Elections. Given that the post office is less than a mile from our house, and the BOE is less than two miles, I'll probably just hand deliver it to the BOE once early voting begins.

My first time to vote in a general election was 1972, and I was excited. I've voted in every election since. I had faith in the system then. I have faith in it now.

So keep the faith, my brothers and sisters, and vote.






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