I’d like to get in, get on with it, get it over with, and get out. Get it?
Danny Kaye as Hubert Hawkins — “The Court Jester” (1955)
For the first time since I moved to my current Nerdery here in Greater Metropolitan East Raleigh, I have a new polling location for my precinct.
Apparently the Commons building on Carya Drive has closed so the precinct now votes at Rogers Lane Elementary School literally next door to the neighbourhood!
The location is decidedly more convenient even if the car park is a serpentine mess to try to navigate to a parking bay (and even more of a mess trying to exit to the exit that’s connected to the neighbourhood). The last time I was even at this school was four years ago teaching Nicholas how to drive on ice and snow in the car park which didn’t exactly go swimmingly.
One nice thing about a new precinct polling location is that it was incredibly unlikely that the political operatives that normally make voting an exercise in running the gauntlet of partisan hacks before one gets to the sanctuary of the “no electioneering” zone would actually be taking up their battle stations and I was not disappointed at their absence.
If our precinct stays the only one voting at this school, dealing with the hacks may be a thing of the past which if I’m honest leaves me with some mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I won’t miss being harangued on those polling days where I really want to put Danny Kaye’s advice to good use but the other part of me will miss having fun flummoxing the partisans (often with the simple question of “why?” when they try flogging their preferred candidates and/or party upon me) when I don’t have anywhere else in particular to be at that time.
I really had fun twisting John Tedesco’s tail when he was running to be Garner’s representative on the Wake County School Board (in spite of having no children of his own) championing the idea of neighbourhood schools as opposed to the socio-economic gerrymandering via busing the schools generally preferred to ensure that the rich communities got all of the prized students resources and southeast Raleigh and especially Garner became the dumping ground for all of the problems the district generally preferred to ignore.
When pressed on any articulable reasons he felt that neighbourhood schools were a good idea (one I happened to agree with), he couldn’t come up with anything more coherent than he “prayed about it a lot”.
I pointed out to him that we weren’t voting to elect Jehovah to the board and that it’d be nice if he could actually have some expertise in the policies he was pushing as part of his campaign.
It was somewhat depressing that he really couldn’t mount a coherent argument in front of an audience that was gathering near us as I was interrogating him. Even trying to prompt him to remember where the idea of neighbourhood schools had come from and had already been implemented (Charlotte/Mecklenburg County), the best argument for neighbourhood schools (problem areas would become readily apparent and require the board to actually solve the problems), and the likely results (test scores didn’t improve as was predicted) didn’t save him from looking less like a credible candidate with expertise and more like an imbecile that had only memorised the talking points without thinking through the broader implications.
That wasn’t my idea of a competent member of the school board but democracy as practised in this country tends to be an exercise in choosing the lesser of the evils rather than experts who can actually accomplish something and he ended up getting elected for a term anyway.
But all-in-all, the new polling place was not busy at all but the actual voting ended up taking about four times longer than usual.
It started off well enough giving my details and ID and confirming my lack of party affiliation at the first table where they confirm that their election book is up-to-date and correct and then hand you a paper that you take over to the next table where they’re supposed to hand you the actual ballot paper that you then mark as you please and feed into the scanner to be tabulated.
One surprising thing about primaries in the Tar Heel State is that unaffiliated/independent voters may choose which ballot they want to vote when they get to the ballot table. It’s even more shocking given the hyper-partisan composition of the NC State Board of Elections and recent moves to gerrymander our elections to overtly favour Republicans that the Republican Party still allows us independents to vote in their primary.
Being able to pick which political pool I want to pee in is the other major advantage to being unaffiliated with any political party but more recently seems to now be the only advantage as the purple nature of North Carolina has made relentless political advertising the norm (when it used to be a trickle at best) and decidedly tilted toward much more advertising coming from the Republicans trying to sell their agenda.
A lot of times, an independent choosing to vote a particular party’s primary may be a tactical vote or in my case just having fun explicitly voting against the candidate who has been carpet bombing me with advertising that prominently features an endorsement that is way more toxic than their marketing consultants is apparently telling the campaign.
If they want to waste their resources on mailers and advertising that at best has no effect upon my vote and more often than not is off-putting due to the negativity, who am I to stop them?
Normally when I get to the ballot table, the volunteers take a look at the paper I was given at the first desk and notice the lack of party affiliation and then ask me which ballot I want (there’s one for the Democrats, one for the Republicans, and a truly boring non-partisan one).
Imagine my surprise when the volunteer starts pulling the Democrat ballot from her pile so I point out to her that I’m actually unaffiliated and I get to choose which ballot I want. She points at the paper and says that it says I chose the Democratic primary even though I’d clearly identified as unaffiliated to the first lady who actually calls across the room and confirms that yes, I am unaffiliated and that I’d already said so when handing over my details.
The volunteer then calls over her supervisor and after a little more back and forth where the open primary rules are confirmed for her, I end up with the Republican ballot and then go off to have my fun casting a protest vote that’ll ultimately be meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
A quick markup session and into the scanner it goes (didn’t catch what number my vote was but it couldn’t have been terribly high though I’ll never beat the one time I was the first to vote in the precinct!).
I ended up ringing up the Wake County Board of Elections and asking them if I’d done anything wrong but that my recollection was that the ballot table volunteers were supposed to ask which ballot unaffiliated voters wanted. I don’t mind holding my hand up and admitting being wrong but he was kind enough to confirm that I had done my bit exactly as the procedures require and that he’d have a word with the precinct to remind them of the proper procedure to be followed.
I did make it clear that I was in no way complaining and I really didn’t want the volunteers to be sanctioned when they’re doing a job that they often don’t get enough thanks to do but the point of the call was primarily to see if I’d done anything out of order and to apologise if I had.
The gent on the other end of the phone was totally cool with that and promised it would just be a kind reminder so that other unaffiliated voters don’t have the same problem and then he let me know why my polling place was now much more conveniently located (the closure of the Commons building which I didn’t actually know had happened as the last time I voted in the general election was an early vote cast at the Wake Board of Elections site just off the New Hope Road).
As it turned out, the gent behind me as the ballot paper debate was happening was also unaffiliated and he was thankful that I was the guinea pig as it made his selecting his preferred ballot much easier.
So no worries and fair dinkum and now I can look forward to see if the ballot I voted gets a magical 0% success rate in terms of candidates that I voted for actually winning their races. I have a strong feeling that this ballot might well do it…stay tuned! 😉