The Voters Have Spoken
And this voter is dead tired after a 12-hour shift covering Tuesday’s elections.
It’s now about 2:20 as in the morning and I should be in bed but I’ve just returned home and taken care of “cat stuff” before sitting down to check my e-mail and I’m all wound up and I can’t sleep so what the hey let’s post our election results.
Whew, that was a mouthful.
Congratulations to all the winning candidates – who I might add I picked as winners in my predictions Tuesday morning. Four for four, but who’s counting?
Joe Gray was elected as the new town supervisor for the town of Massena. Congratulations, Joe. I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job for the town. And thanks, Gary Edwards, for your fine service over the past four years.
As anticipated, Al Nicola and Chuck Raiti will continue their terms as town councilmen.
And in the highly contested – and highly contentious – race for the 23rd Congressional District, Doug Hoffman threw in the towel after he fell 4,337 votes behind Bill Owens. Even all those renegade Republicans who threw their support to him after their Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava dropped out couldn’t save Doug.
And the world is a much better place today.
The losers? Well, only one big one – the new voting machines.
Even at this hour, we still don’t have all the results from around St. Lawrence County because some of those new-fangled machines went nutso during the day.
They were supposed to make life so much easier – and in a way they did. Take a Sharpie – how much is that company getting paid to be the official pen of New York’s ballots? – and fill in a block next to your candidate of choice.
Then you take that sheet of paper over to the electronic scanner and stick it in and if all goes well you get this nice little message that says, “Your vote counts.”
And if not, well, it throws it back at ya and you get to do it all over again.
Well, here’s the problem for some people. Now that you’re not behind a curtained booth anymore, your ballot’s out there for public consumption as you’re walking from the point where you’ve filled it out to the electronic scanner. So now, people say, everybody knows you wrote in Morris the Cat. And they don’t like it one bit.
The other problem was that Tuesday’s ballot had two propositions, which I completely forgot to vote on because they were on the back of the sheet. I was so impressed that I had completed the first side correctly that I completely forgot to turn it over.
And even if I did, I doubt I could have read the tiny 8 point type that told me what I was voting on – even with adjusted bifocals.
For some reason the election ballot gurus, whoever they are, decided to leave a chunk of creative white space on the front of the ballot that could have been used for the propositions. But they chose to leave it blank and put the propositions on the back. And I wonder how many people like me completely forgot about it.
Not that the propositions really mattered in the grand scheme of life, but it would have been nice to have actually voted on them.
The election inspectors kept a laundry list of their concerns. Those were among the many. Hopefully things will improve by the next election.
And maybe we’ll actually have all of St. Lawrence County’s results by then – if we’re lucky.
Here is a little fodder for your next trip to the polls. Stop at the table set up with sample ballots on your way in as there will be someone there to help you to make sure you are a little more familiar with the ballot you are about to cast. In my district in Raymondville there was someone by a table with a sample ballot who explained the process we were about to go through and also mentioned that there were propositions on the back to be considered. We had already experienced the new ballots and the new machines as we voted in the primary with them. As for the propositions being on the back of the ballot I would agree when you say that they could and should have been on the front. Do you know who made that decision? It would be nice to know for future reference or who it would be we could complain to. Kudos to the group who worked the polling place in Raymondville.