Voting Day

Oregon is a mail-in ballot state. Today, May 20th, was the official date of the primaries, but we received our ballots about May 2. We have four registered voters in the house; we live in one of the neighborhoods selected by the local campaigns to concentrate upon for door-to-door activism (I'd guess because it's upper middle class, and more likely to vote). Calls every night, asking for our vote; knocks on the door every day, asking for our vote. Mayor, State Senator, Secretary of State... we have lots of local turnover this year.

Strangest to me is that they want you to commit to their candidate, in person, talking to them, right then and there. That is, they ask, "Have you heard of Jeff Merkley? He's running for the Democratic nomination for State Senator. With the nomination, he'll be able to win against the incumbent, Republican Gordon Smith, more handily than his opponent, Steve Novick, could. His father was a janitor, so he knows the working class. Will you vote for Jeff Merkley? Will you tell me now that you will vote for Jeff Merkley?" I've never encountered this before, this pressing for you to pledge your vote.

It's good psychology, following the hypothesis that pledging your word will lead you to actually vote for the candidate later, but it irritates me. Particularly when, if you're not willing to pledge right then and there, they ask why and try to tell you why you're wrong.

The problem with a three week voting period is that the activists came out in droves (and the flyers arrived in the mail) about midway through the month. We had all already voted (you get reminder calls until your ballot is received, and with four of us in the house, the calls are frequent).

We got tired of swatting the people off the porch, and posted the sign above. It's true, sad to say -- we can't remember who we voted for in all the races. One of us referred to this as her "diversity and minority" election, meaning that when all else was equal, she went with the more diverse or minority candidate. I voted based on how I felt about a candidate at that moment.

With the ballot comes a "voter's pamphlet", outlaying the campaign pitch of each candidate (in theory of all of them; however, in several races, only a subset of candidates were covered). It read as if each candidate wrote their own entry - some were out of their depth. I would stop reading when any warning bells sounded, as for instance, when one candidate for City Council answered the category Prior Government Experience: The same as any other private citizen suffering under the fascism of the current city council.

We had thought the voting process would be to sit at the dinner table, read the pamphlet, make the decision and fill in the little dot next to the name we'd chosen. However, the campaign statements were nearly all identical, and often equally valid. They would list the right hot-button issues, promise they'd do something about it, but rarely said anything concrete about how. Of course, the statements had to be about 1000 words, and half of that had to be spent listing all the people who'd endorsed them, so there was no room to go into specifics (some rare few did, however). So the decision in the end was often based on those endorsements and on the balance of issues the candidates at least mentioned (one candidate was all health care and nurses' union -- a fine issue, but too narrow for my vote), and maybe on whether the cat walked across the ballot when I was filling it in. I honestly don't remember who I voted for, in most races. True secret balloting -- not even the voter knows who she voted for.

This is bad voting. Oregon voting was at an all-time high for this primary, by the way. 40% of eligible voters sent in their ballots. How many of these were people like me, throwing darts? Should only those people who have studied the campaigns vote? Would that not lead to even more incestuous power systems, because only those with the time and the interest would be involved -- and I suspect those with enough time and interest to follow all of the races of having too much to gain from them already.