Richard and I have been on permanent absentee ballot status for the past few years now, ever since we were working for that company that had us traveling all over the state, to the point where we could never guarentee we might actually be home to vote in a polling booth. The past few times we’ve had to vote, however, we’ve been a trifle lazy about getting them mailed, and so have ended up dropping them off in person on the actual voting day. This year was no exception. Richard filled his out last night, but I didn’t finish mine until this morning. I dropped my ballot off at the closest polling place to our house, and as I walked out, much to my surprise, I was asked if I would be willing to take part in an exit poll. Why anyone thought our little podunk town was worthy of exit polling, I will never know, but I cheerfully agreed because I am all about manipulating the statistics any chance I can get.
I have decided that we really ought to declare the day after election day End of Election Spam Day, and make it a national holiday, complete with the ceremonial burning of the lawn signs, and shredding of the election fliers, and most important of all, erasing of all those horrible recoded election spam messages on answering machines across the country. Really, do people actually ever pay attention to any of that stuff? No, wait, let me answer that one myself. There was exactly one piece of election spam in our mailbox that I not only paid attention to, I actually saved it so Richard could read it too. It made us laugh so hard that we both immediately decided to vote *for* the person the flier was so rabidly against, because it was for a local city council election, and the guy in question is admittedly an annoying loon, but really, sometimes the loons should be encouraged, if only to give us something to laugh about. And really, these past few election cycles there’s been precious little to laugh about.
This is a NaBloPoMo entry
I only wish we could vote permanent absentee ballot in our state. I only got to vote absentee this year because I was disabled (due to abdominal surgery on Oct 30th) and unable to make it to the polling place. I just faxed the request, waited for the ballot in the mail, took my time marking it and mailed it back the day after I came home from the hospital.
My husband had to rush after work to vote before 7 pm, then ended up using the paper ballot because the lines to the computer voting machines were too long. I have a feeling we used the same ballot. So what was the difference?
The bad thing about being home to recover from Nov. 4th thru 7th was fielding all the recorded election spam calls. We have a No Call rule in our state, but it doesn’t affect the survey takers, nonprofit organizations and politicians. Too bad they’re more annoying than the telemarketers selling the newspaper.