Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I just went downtown and dropped my postal/early ballot in a dropbox outside the main library, and am feeling accomplished. This is a bit later than I'd intended, but in plenty of time; Election Day is next Tuesday, Nov. 8th.

Part of why I didn't do this sooner is I was trying to decide how to vote on one of our ballot questions, which is about how many store liquor licenses one company can have. I thought it over, decided that I didn't have an opinion, and abstained on that.

I voted yes on the other three ballot questions -- for a higher state income tax rate on annual income over $1 million; new rules for dental insurance (I wasn't sure, but it seemed like a good idea); and to keep the new state law giving driver's licenses to otherwise-qualified drivers regardless of immigration status.

Unsurprisingly, I voted for all the Democratic candidates, including a couple of incumbents with no opposing candidates. One of those is my state senator, who I actively like; we were in his district in Belmont as well.

Things I found mildly surprising: there are five candidates for state auditor, more than for any other office, including a Workers' Party candidate; and there are two candidates for state treasurer, but neither is a Republican.

If you voted by mail in Massachusetts, you can check whether the state has received your ballot at https://www.sec.state.ma.us/wheredoivotema/track/trackmyballot.aspx

Mine shows as "accepted" and that it arrived on August 17 (they sent it to me on the 10th).

(I found this while wondering how to use the in-person early voting if I had asked for and been sent a postal ballot.)

Tomorrow, October 17, is the Massachusetts voter registration deadline for the upcoming election. You can check your registration status, and if necessary register/update your registration, online. (I got a text message reminder about this from the ACLU, and an emailed one from Freedom for All Massachusetts, today, but I suspect the people who most need the reminder aren't on all those email and text lists because you're busy with other things or don't want that many political texts and emails.)

I voted this morning.

I voted because, well, it would feel wrong to skip an election merely because there wasn't anything significant on the ballot. In Manhattan, we had a handful of uncontested judgeships (one "vote for up to four" with a total of four candidates, and one "vote for up to three" with a total of three candidates) and the statewide ballot question, an extremely minor amendment to the state constitution. So I pulled the lever marked "yes," voting in favor of letting the town of Long Lake, in Hamilton County, trade twelve acres of town land, approved by the state legislature, for a specific acre of state-owned land they want to drill wells in. The one acre in question is a state-owned piece of the Adirondack State Park, which means they can't do this without amending the state constitution [1]. If this passes, there will presumably be text about this minor real estate trade in the New York constitution for years or decades.

[1] Our state constitution specifies that several million acres of the Adirondacks are "forever wild." It's a complicated mosaic of public and private lands, not a compact, contiguous [2] area.

[2] That phrasing is specified for congressional and state legislature districts. My father once drew his own map, from the description in the redistricting bill, rather than trusting the one the state legislature had published. Then he let them know they needed to rewrite the legislation, because they'd specified a figure eight.

People ask how they can support us.

It's very simple.

Vote.

I don't care who you vote for, I just care that you do. Our deaths, our injuries, our sacrifices, are all payment for that concept of giving people a voice. We've given you a gift. We've paid for it already. We are here, and we will be here till the job is done. Yet there are people who say that the process is stupid, flawed, unnecessary. They may be right. But we're here for a reason, and every one hwo doesn't vote negates that reason just a bit.

People ask how they can support us.

Vote.

My ballot was not blood-stained, but that's because a truckload of them probably got blown up. I was using a generic ballot, not even the one I was sent. In order for us to vote, someone gave up their life. The Iraqis haven't seen a real election in thirty years. It's a brand new right for them, and some of them are willing to die for it. —ginmar, US Army Reserve, in Iraq

If you live in a place that has elections, please vote when you have the opportunity: it may not change things, but not voting certainly won't.

In particular, if you're an American citizen, please vote on 2 November, both for President and for Congress and (if relevant this time around) Senate. And any local races that you care about (if they're asking you to choose between three people you know nothing about for Third Assistant Dog-catcher, I'm not going to try to convince you that it matters).

Some friendly people are running a sweepstakes to encourage people to vote. If you click on this link, you get a chance to enter, and I get an entry for the referrer prize. They also have a link to Rock the Vote's voter registration Web page, if you're eligible (if you're a US citizen, age 18 as of election day, and not a convicted felon, you can vote; felons can vote in some states but not others).

Yes, I'm supporting John Kerry (largely because I believe it's very important to re-defeat Bush), but I am doing so in part because I believe that democracy matters, so please register and vote, whether you agree with me, or think Dubya is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I have now eaten clementines in every season of the year.

Instead of bringing my lunch to work today, I walked over to one of the two reachable shopping centers, had a sandwich at a deli, and then went to the supermarket for fruit. I was thinking plums, peaches, maybe grapes. I got some plums, some of those little Italian prunes.
They had all of those. But as I was looking over the prunes, I saw crates of clementines. $8.99 for five pounds, which I would call high in December, but it's 14 September, not clementine season.

More precisely, not clementine season in this hemisphere: we usually get clementines from Morocco, Spain, maybe California. These are from South Africa. Fine, sweet, and juicy, and I'm glad to have them. I've only eaten three so far, in part because I had a hero for lunch and didn't even have room to finish it.

I stopped off on the way home from work to vote in a primary election. I literally interrupted the poll workers' knitting: that's how quiet it was. I "got on line" (there was no line), walked into the booth, slid the handle to the right, used the toggle switch to select my candidate, slid it back to the left, and was done. The poll worker commented on how fast it had been, and I pointed out that when there's only one position and three candidates, it doesn't take long.

I have never seen such a short/simple ballot on one of Mr. Edison's voting machines: in my district, the only primary is for Congress, for the Democratic nomination. The other incumbents have no primary challengers, and the other parties have no primaries. (I gather there are a few primaries elsewhere in the state that are seriously contested: I voted more because I was raised to do so than because I think Charlie Rangel has any chance of losing this primary--or the general election for that matter.) I was voter 25 in my election district; normally, I'd get number 21 at 8 a.m.