Published September 28, 2020
Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Well, that’s when balloting is supposed to end. Early voting has already begun in some states. The election is underway. For me, Election Day — or voting day, to be more precise — will be Saturday, October 17. That’s the day I expect to have my ballot in hand, ready to fill out.
I’m making it my own little national holiday here in Carly Nation, my studio-apartment world since March. I already know who will get my vote in each race on the ballot. I’ve been studying since the primary, and in some cases, for years. In one race, it’s as much a vote against someone as a vote for someone, and the vote-against part was a foregone conclusion more than four years ago.
Anyway, it’s official: I can take October 17 off work as requested. Therefore, ritual upon ritual that day will end with me going to the drop-off box a few blocks west of me downtown and dropping in my completed ballot to be counted. As that will be 17 days before Election Day, that gives the elections office plenty of time to contact me if there is a question about my ballot or if my signature doesn’t appear to match the one on file. (It’s not as if the latter is out of the question; muscle memory has played havoc with the writing of my own name since it changed legally in June 2018).
I love mail-in voting, or drop-box voting, as I sometimes call it. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest in August 2010, I have voted by mail or drop box in every election. From 2010 to 2012, I cast my ballot in Oregon, another vote-by-mail state. Since then, I’ve enjoyed the honor and the privilege of voting that way in the state of Washington.
Dating to at least April, a lot of news organizations have taken an interest in the election process here in Washington amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, has been busy explaining how it’s done, and why it’s much safer than a lot of red-state rhetoric would have you believe. The New Yorker interviewed her for a story earlier this month, and in May she wrote an opinion piece for USA Today.
In that piece she wrote: It is my hope that by sharing Washington’s experience running hundreds of mail-in elections with other states will help reassure those who question expanded absentee and mail-in voting.
It won’t be easy.
As Crosscut reported in April, the system here in Washington wasn’t an overnight success. And as Wyman told The Seattle Times in April, misinformation abounds. I would go a step further and call much of it disinformation, a deliberate attempt to mislead and raise fears.
It frustrates me to hear of places where voting is stuck in the past. Washington’s history with elections has evolved, and for the better. The easier we make it for eligible voters to participate, the more our elections are a reflection of who we are. Sadly, some states have been doing the opposite, making it more difficult, and doing so with the same pinpoint targeting that’s used in gerrymandering to shape election outcomes.
John Oliver talked in detail on the broad subject of voting in February 2016, debunking the talking points you’ve heard ad nauseum about the ID requirements — and getting real about the effects of such laws no matter how white people gussy them up to make them seem like gosh-darn “common sense” measures.
Five ballots in South Carolina couldn’t be accounted for — out of 1,365,480 ballots cast — but sure, we need to be certain that zombies aren’t voting (a legislator actually voiced concerns about that). Instead of fixing the problem of legitimate voter suppression, states turned to what Oliver calls “the biggest overreaction to a manageable problem since Sleeping Beauty’s father ordered all the spinning wheels in the lands to be burned.”
He cites an investigation that found there were 31 instances of voter-impersonation fraud out of more than a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014. Overreaction, indeed.
As Wyman, our secretary of state, told NPR, an investigation here in the state of Washington revealed that 0.004 percent of voters tried to vote fraudulently, 142 people out of 3.2 million ballots cast.
Third Saturday in October
Some people worry that this could be the last fair election in the United States for decades, maybe forever. Some counter by saying that we’ve already had that election. What I do know is that on the third Saturday in October, I will take my ballot to the nearby collection box, drop it in and feel thankful that I live in a state progressive enough to make the process easy for me.
If I wanted to, I could mail it. The state provides a self-addressed, prepaid envelope for that reason, but of course, the U.S. Postal Service — like nearly every federal agency under Trump — has been compromised, in this case to the point that I do not trust it with such important freight.
I will take photos of my ballot, sign it, drop it in the box with my own hands and record the moment for posterity. The specifics of my own private national holiday are still in the works, but I know that I will long remember them. And three Tuesdays later, I will watch, hoping. I have requested that day off work as well.
So I have two Election Days approaching.
Whether you usually have to vote on your lunch break, take a bus or several buses to the nearest polling place, stand in line until well after dark, or at the crack of dawn, I hope that you will one day get to experience voting the way we do it in Washington. And not because of a pandemic, but because it’s more accessible to people who so often feel like they don’t matter to the powers that be.
Photo of a presidential primary ballot being dropped off in Seattle in March at one of King County’s designated collection boxes by Anna Hoychuk/via Shutterstock.