Vote by mail rocks! Mail it in early and forget about all the politics!
Sweet. I'm going to request permanent vote by mail -
Mentioned elsewhere, I guess I just miss the process of the whole in-person voting. It never takes long here. We see neighbors and talk about (the weather - yeah, right!
). But with mail in, it's sort of anticlimactic.
I was a bit concerned when I saw a spot on TV about how they were dealing with the votes. We have to sign the outside of the envelope - what could possibly go wrong with having your signature and legal address "out there" in the same place? - but I digress. Supposedly, the signature gets checked to an on-file signature. But in the spot, a worker was simply tearing open the envelopes and discarding them while placing the ballot into a bin (all in the correct orientation for subsequent reading, I guess.) IF someone was checking signatures, it surely was not during what I saw. I'm just going to assume the signature check was done earlier. I'll believe it if you will.
The in person voting (from my past years here) is friendly as you would expect in the Islands. The voter rolls are checked, you sign a form, your signature and ID are checked right there, you are handed a ballot and proceed to a private desk. When finished, you hand your ballot to a nice poll worker who - at that time - run it through a reader. The "used" ballot is then placed in a locked sturdy box - in case of issues, I suppose.
My point, in the old days: You got to see the sausage being made. Amazingly, it made me want more sausage. I'm not so sure now - not a political statement as there are no politics here - except within the one party. The only reason to vote is the (sometimes) plethora of 'initiatives' which get 'snuck' in. (Do you favor giving the legislature or county gummint the right to blah, blah, blah AT their discretion - without hearings, blah blah blah?) etc.
I absolutely see the advantages of mail-in voting. I'll hold my reservations to myself as they would be interpreted as political. I guess I just miss the process - then again, I claim membership in the dinosaur party. We used to be the Luddites but that name was changed about the same time as the Whigs ceased to be a party.