Land of Oz

Voting

I went to vote in a local election today. At first thought, it's not a big thing - however when you think about it, it's pretty cool. I have a chance to let the government know what I want. It doesn't mean they'll listen, but I get the chance. However, while there, I had a couple of thoughts.

The first thing is that the power to vote isn't the power. It's who counts the votes that has the power. After all, all you know for sure how anyone voted is yourself. If "they" tell you that 3,452 voted for something and 12,893 voted against, how do you know? It's not like they're going to let you look at all the ballots. In fact, now a days, you're lucky if there's even ballots to look at. It's kind of hard to verify bits in a database.

The second thing is about the voters. In our decrepit city, there's isn't a lot of action for most votes. Today, for a pretty hot topic, there were 11,175 votes - from a city of 62,000 (42,000 over 18). Anyway, there were about 6 people in front of me voting. I didn't pay too much attention to the first ones, but out of the three in front of me, two needed help voting. Now that is scary. This isn't something complicated. There was one item to be voted on - yes or no. To vote, you make a line with a pencil through the arrow pointing to yes or no and then slide the ballot into an electronic reader slot. That's it - and two people needed help to do it. They seemed normal people, no obvious handicaps, but they needed help. One didn't know how to mark the ballot and the other couldn't figure out how to slide the paper into the slot. And those are the kind of people deciding my future.