Pardon me while I climb on my soapbox for a moment.
Regardless of your party affiliation - you should be registered to vote!!! I don't care if we agree when it comes to politics. You are entitled to your own opinion, as am I. I hate the crap that your vote cancels out my vote - if you don't vote, you haven't got a leg to stand on when you complain and cry the blues that you don't like the way things are being run.
Yesterday there was a special election held in my hometown. My mom asked my sister to take her to the polls so she could vote.
I talked to Mom today and she was complaining that when she went into the booth to vote, they had combined the two issues into one: she had only a single yay or nay vote. So she voted, and the fact that the issues were combined forced her to vote only one way and that changed the entire election for her.
Take a look at this: http://www.essexclerk.com/election/ElectionFrame.html
In a town of 48,000+ people, there are 27,964 registered voters.
In this election, only 2,278 people bothered to vote.
8.15% of the registered voters.
I find this COMPLETELY OFFENSIVE. Have you no civic pride, people? Don't you realize that your vote REALLY DOES COUNT? Here's the perfect example: both issues were defeated by 110 votes. 110!!!
If another 10,000 voters voted, the results could have gone in the opposite direction. Hell, if 111 more people had voted, we could have had a different result!!!
Aside from the fact that money for the high school and for the town's stadium was voted down, ONE of those issues might have passed if the Board of Elections hadn't combined them on the ballot. The advance ballot that was mailed to my mom clearly had them separated out, she said (admittedly I didn't see the ballot). This would have allowed her to vote for or against each individual expenditure and one of them might have passed! But by combining them, voters were forced to choose all or nothing. And obviously "nothing" won!
I will freely admit that I have not voted in every single special election since I turned 18. Sometimes I was out of state and quite frankly, at that young age, I didn't care about budgets and taxes. But since I grew up, since I realized that it's MY MONEY all these elections are spending, I haven't missed a one. NOT.A.ONE. Not in years and years and years.
And I won't miss one, either. I guess I'm not like those other 25,686 Bloomfield voters.
Yea, I'm talking to YOU!
I can promise we're registerd voters! LOL I had to laugh at my husband because even though there are no elections in the very near future? He has already put in the poll place in the GPS. Did you doubt that?? LOLOL
ReplyDeleteSee, precisely why people don't vote, they rig the vote to get whatever they want. A fair vote would have made it 2 separate votes for 2 separate issues. And the town needn't solicit for funds to knock down the condemned athletic stadium. If this house was condemned, the town would be banging on the door enforcing fine after fine making sure the owners fixed it no matter what the cost. But when town property is condemned, they want someone else to pay for it. The salaries some people get are so overinflated it isn't funny. They have money for HarvestFest, concerts, a gazillion unnecessary Belgian blocks to line our streets, but no money to knock down cement bleachers and put up cheap aluminum ones. To vote Yes would lead to more financial penalties on the residents, I'm sure.
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