Did you vote? I did (maybe).

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life, Politics, Rants

I moved to a new house not that long ago. A cou­ple of weeks back, my wife and I went to the DMV and updated our driver’s licenses. While we were there, we both requested that the DMV update our voter reg­is­tra­tions. Approx­i­mately one week ago, my wife got a card in the mail con­firm­ing her voter reg­is­tra­tion had been updated. I got… noth­ing. Well, that’s not entirely true. I got busy fight­ing with HR and the insur­ance com­pany try­ing to get my health insur­ance cards1.

Then today rolls around. On a break at work, I start check­ing the Inter­net to find out where I’m sup­posed to go and vote tonight. While I’m doing that I run across a link allow­ing Iowa vot­ers to check their voter reg­is­tra­tion. I try it out and find that my voter reg­is­tra­tion did NOT get updated. Grrrr. Tonight after din­ner (roughly 6:15PM), Ariesna and I head over to the polling place to vote. I tell the per­son inside the door that I need the pro­vi­sional bal­lot. She tells me to tell some­body else after I’ve signed in. I sign in, get in line and then tell the poll­worker who has the book of names. She looks con­fused and refers me over to my 3rd poll­worker of the evening.

Again, I get to wait around for my chance to talk to her. I explain my sit­u­a­tion, includ­ing the bit about already talk­ing the county auditor’s office. Her eyes look a bit glazed over and she seemed pretty con­fused. She mum­bles some­thing and then brings me some paper­work to fill out. Then she goes to try help 3–4 other peo­ple, dis­ap­pears for a while and even­tu­ally comes back to take my paper­work. I hand it over and she dis­ap­pears again. I hear some­body men­tion that the phone in the polling place doesn’t work, so appar­ently she’s run­ning around the build­ing to another room to call the county auditor’s office. Of course, if she could have kept track of what I’d said she wouldn’t have had to do that.… Even­tu­ally she comes back, gives me one of the pro­vi­sional bal­lots and lets me vote. Wheee!

Next year, I’m so totally going to sign up for the absen­tee bal­lot. It’s just so much eas­ier than deal­ing with under­staffed (one of the other poll­work­ers men­tioned they’d all been there since 6AM) & under­trained peo­ple at the polls.

1 So far, I’m still wait­ing. *sigh*

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About Mark McKibben

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

7 November 2006 | 9:52PM | Comments (3)

3 Comments

  1. Player says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 10:30 am

    Free­dom isn’t free, it costs a buck-o-five! I was won­der­ing how you were going to vote. Woke up this morn­ing and found out that Leach was kicked out. I’m all for kick­ing out mul­ti­ple term politi­cians, but from the look of things, their replace­ments are usu­ally for­mer polit­i­cal office hold­ers, so it isn’t like new peo­ple are really being elected. Kind of defeats the purpose.

    The most inter­est­ing edi­to­r­ial I read about the 2006-Vote was about the large num­ber of bal­lot ini­tia­tives, where vot­ers have to decide on things like ban­ning gay mar­riage, or allow­ing a new school tax, and so on. The ori­gins of democ­racy are usu­ally traced back to Greece, where pol­i­tics was decided by a rock. Each per­son would pick a rock and place their vote depend­ing on the issue. One rock, one vote. Today, we still prac­tice this where each con­gress­man has one vote. By plac­ing more issues on the bal­lot, essen­tially politi­cians are ask­ing vot­ers to do their job. The idea of not being able to raise taxes with­out hav­ing it approved by voter bal­lot is just a stu­pid idea. Gov­ern­ments have to gov­ern, and the politi­cians appointed to office need to be respon­si­ble and do their job and gov­ern, that’s why they were elected in the first place! If we keep adding to voter bal­lots, then we might as well give the rock to the voter and no longer pay elected offi­cials any salary at all.

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  2. Ken says:
    November 11th, 2006 at 11:42 am

    Hmm. I don’t know the specifics of bal­lot ini­tia­tives. I have a hypoth­e­sis that, like so many ideas that get con­t­a­m­i­nated by politi­cians, bal­lot ini­tia­tives are a good idea, imple­mented poorly.

    The idea that the peo­ple them­selves can choose to enact a law is not fun­da­men­tally flawed, so long as it’s a super­ma­jor­ity that favors the law. The ratio­nale being that, with a super­ma­jor­ity, you can vote in an amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion, so you might as well be able to pass a law.

    But to have a sim­ple major­ity dic­tate law — yeah, that’s mob-rule.

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  3. Player says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 1:06 pm

    Pol­i­tics is a lot like mar­riage. If you work on your rela­tion­ship and put effort into the life you are build­ing together, then you can sur­vive the ups and downs of life. If you ignore your rela­tion­ship and put lit­tle effort into fix­ing it then you have con­stant argu­ments and even­tu­ally the mar­riage falls apart. While cou­ples may need to ask out­siders for their advice, ulti­mately it comes down to what the two peo­ple in the mar­riage decide to do. Gov­ern­ment should inquire what people’s opin­ions are, but it is their ulti­mate respon­si­bil­ity to make sure gov­ern­ment pro­gresses and not falls apart. In the Bush era, things fell apart all the time: Iraq, Kat­rina, con­gress­men chas­ing teenagers, etc… Bush should have actu­ally put away his pride and learned to work with every­one. Instead he chose to do what he wanted and he built a huge mess. How­ever Con­gress is also at fault for not press­ing the Pres­i­dent to come to the table.

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