Election Day
Anyone else vote in person on Tuesday? When I walked into our polling place, the poll volunteers were the only people there. One of them exclaimed, “Look! A voter!”, and they were all over me with helpfulness. I thought they were going to buy me dinner.
Turnout in Washington was a little bit lighter for this primary because, for the first time, we are required to declare a party affiliation in order to vote in partisan contests, and we can’t cross over from race to race like we used to. The political parties pushed this change through last year. They’ve always resented not having control over who selects, or rubberstamps, their candidates, but they made a lot of people mad in the process. That, combined with the increasing propensity for folks to use absentee ballots, seems to be impinging on the quaint and sociable practice of exercising one’s franchise in a local polling place.
