I have begun to make it a consistent practice of voting
early. My primary motivation for doing so was that, over the last year or so,
my polling place has become a comedy of errors. The staff has received so
little training that their ineptitude is embarrassing, probably to the poll
workers themselves as well as the impatient voters. Whether it involves
checking the rolls or dealing with mechanical recalcitrance from the machine
that is supposed to accept the completed ballot securely, my polling station is
a paragon of disorder; and that was the case even before touch-screen voting
machines were added to the mix. Since I am such a short walk from City Hall and
the exercise is good for me, going over there to cast my vote early has always
been pretty much a no-brainer.
However, this leads me to a somewhat ambivalent position
over how much money I make candidates waste. Between the junk crammed into my
modest mailbox and the density of robocalls, I realize that a fair amount of money
is going up in smoke because those engines of distribution have no way of
knowing that I have already voted. The one interesting thing is that almost
none of that waste has involved the Presidential election, perhaps because mine
is not one of those hypercritical “swing” states. Rather, the media assault is
all about local issues, both ballot initiatives and the Supervisor for my
district.
The funny thing is that I received at least a month’s worth
of advertising from Supervisor candidates for District 5 before I learned that,
due to redistricting, I was now in District 5. Supervisor elections
alternate between odd and even numbered districts. I used to be in District 6, a
point which I made on my Examiner.com site when I announced
the San Francisco Arts Town Hall, which was held last
August. This seemed necessary to declare my objectivity in reporting on an
event at which my own vote was not at stake.
It was only after I had reported on the Town Hall that I
discovered that my vote was at stake. Indeed, District 5 had the largest
number of competing candidates who accepted the invitation to address members
of the arts community on the question of support for the arts. The Town Hall
turned out to be a rather gratuitous affair, the high point of which was the
discovery that all of the District
7 candidates had not the foggiest notion of any arts activities in that
District (some of which were rather
impressive). Ironically, I singled out exactly one candidate from the whole
evening of mindless speechifying who was capable of putting a reality check on
the table; and she turned out to be a District 5 candidate. (She was also
running against a candidate with a strong progressive reputation whose
performance at the Town Hall was significantly less than clueless.) As a
result, even where local issues were concerned, I had the necessary information
to vote early.
Will any of this make a difference? I suspect not. Votes are
not cast on the basis of issues. All forms of advertising are calculated to
penetrate the limbic system so thoroughly as to block out any activity from the
cerebral cortex. Most voters will probably put less thought into the choice
they make than they will in buying an SUV (which they may not even need); and
the “product” they receive through the polling place (regardless of the level
of government) will likely be even more unreliable than any hulking
gas-guzzler!
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