Eccentric Flower:199809/how we vote here
From Eccentric Flower
«September 1998 «Eccentric Flower
 |
fifteen september ninety eight noon how we vote here I voted this morning. My polling place is a senior citizens' home, staffed exclusively by residents of same. Somerville does not use voting machines. First you give your address, then your name, to the people with the registry book. They check off the box that says you showed up. If it's a primary and you're a Democrat, they give you a pink ballot; if you're a Republican, they give you a blue ballot. I don't know how the independent candidates get classified. I'm officially Undecided because Louisiana has an open primary and I think all other systems suck. Maybe I want to vote for the Republican this time; maybe the Democrat. Party-only primaries are a good way to perpetuate these two stale parties and a bad way to pursue real democracy. At least as Undecided I get to choose which party to be on a primary-by-primary basis. You take your ballot and the little sleeve they give you to hide it. You stand at a semi-enclosed wooden carrel and mark your choices in an optical-reader endorsed manner with a black felt-tip pen that lies, without a cap, in the carrel. You put the ballot in the sleeve and go to the person with an identical registry book. Address first, then name. He checks the box that says you voted. You slide the ballot out of its sleeve into a slot in the Tabulator, the pinnacle of nineteen-sixties technology, which eats it noisily. In Louisiana even the poor parishes had voting machines. I doubt that Somerville uses this archaic and easily defraudible method of voting (note that I never had to prove my identity) because the town is poor; I suspect they do it because it's always worked, and if it works, they don't change to something better. That's the New England Way Of Doing Things. It's sometimes good, sometimes bad. In Cambridge it's bad. They tally ballots by hand there, and are desperately trying to modernize the system - last time there was a major election it took them nearly a week to report official results.
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