Tomorrow, June 5, 2018, is the last day to submit a ballot for the California primaries. I voted on May 15, 2018. I filled in the circles on the ballots, I inserted the ballots into pink envelopes, I sealed the envelopes, and then I signed the envelopes. I dropped it off at City Hall on May 16, 2018. Done!
I haven’t voted at a polling place in years, but this time was different. Every registered voter in our county, about 740,000 of us, received their ballots in the mail last month. We will all vote by mail in future elections as well. This may seem strange to folks in some states that seem to limit voter registration and voting itself.
The governor signed a bill in 2016 that allows 14 counties to hold mail-only elections in 2018. The rest of the counties will follow in 2020. It makes sense. By 2016, over 51% of voters in California voted by mail anyway. Conducting elections is expensive. It requires large staffs at each of the hundreds of voter precincts in each county. Vote-by-mail only requires 53 drop-off points in Sacramento County. If one feels the need, a few voting centers opened for a few days ago, where one can actually vote in person.
We used to stand in line to vote. The clerk checked off our names, verified our address, and we signed our name next to our printed name in the Registrar’s book. Then we went to a booth to fill out the ballot. We put the completed ballot in a locked box with the slit in the top. We stood in line, we did our civic duty, and we felt good about it.
I remember voting on a large mechanical voting machine a few times that let you push one lever to cast all your votes for one party. They called it voting the party line. Does the party mean all that much anymore? The local paper just reported that there are more people in California registered as no party preference than there are registered Republicans. The county estimates that the vote-by-mail system will save about four million dollars for this primary alone, about nine dollars per registered voter. The whole idea is to make voting easier, make it more convenient, and to encourage more people to vote. We have come a long way.
When I cast my first vote, I was required to have paid my poll tax, a levy on every citizen of the state who was over 21 years old. I think it was $10 or $12, but still … In the South, the poll tax was a way to keep non-whites from voting. The courts ruled it unconstitutional a couple of years later.
Voting is still a state function. If you are an 18-year-old US citizen, you should be able to register to vote with no barriers to the process. If you have an address in the county and state in which you want to vote, you should be able to register to vote with no barriers. If you are a registered voter and have a government-issued photo ID, you should be able to vote with no barriers. Proclamations that requiring a government photo ID to register to vote, or to actually vote, is a deterrent to actually registering or voting is pure tommyrot.
The least we should require at the voting station is an ID to match the registration. Some say the poor cannot afford an ID. If they don’t have an ID, they can’t sign up for Social Security benefits, food stamps, they can't drive or open a bank account; why not to vote. Getting an acceptable ID is pretty easy and cheap and in many states, free.
Registering to vote should be easy. In our state and some others, you are automatically registered to vote when you apply for a driver’s license or state ID, (you can decline if you want) or you can register online. In fact, in California, you can register in any of ten languages.[i] People in many parts of the country may find that odd, but in Florida, you can register in Creole.[ii] In California, about 800,000 people speak Tagalog as a first language at home, more than the population of some states. Nearly 100,000 people speak Khmer at home. In some parts of the state, over 70% of the people speak Spanish. In LA there are 244 recognized languages used on the streets every day. I’m a bit torn about this. I think people should vote in English.
To become a US citizen, a person must sit through an interview and take a civics test in English, unless they have been in the country for a long time and are over 55 years of age. I don’t think 55 years old is very old, anymore! Generally, registration forms and ballots are printed in English in most states.
I find it a bit disconcerting that in California, the home of modern technology, we can’t vote on our phones, tablets, or computers. Then again, the Russians might like that. Just maybe a vote-by-mail paper ballot, in a sealed pink envelope, is the way to go.
I like the vote-by-mail system. You can read about the candidate’s biography if he or she paid to have it included. You don’t need a “sample ballot” to take into the voting booth with you because you can’t remember for whom you wanted to vote. You can discuss proposition pros and cons before you vote. Mostly I like it because it is easy, it lets me vote when I want to and Mr. Putin will never know which circle I filled in.
Tomorrow we will know who won the primaries, and that’s another story!
