I continue to vote – yet realistically it makes no difference. I read today that 21 house seats will determine which party runs Congress. None of those seats are in Montana. On the other hand, both parties in Montana have shown that they can, and do agree on reducing the possibility of voter input.
I cast my first ballot at Trego school. Despite being on the voter list, Edna Palmer kept insisting I was too young to vote. Hell, I was even on the ballot (at 21 I was much less cynical). Now, with a much larger population, Trego is no longer a place where I can vote – if I want to vote in person, instead of a half-mile walk to Trego School, I have a 20 mile drive to Eureka. So I vote by mail. In the last school board election, my wife’s ballot never arrived – when she called the election administrator, she was informed that she could vote, in the very local election, by driving to Libby. 180 mile round trip, because the legislators thought that reducing polling places and installing an election czar in the county seat would make a better system. Someone once told me that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The election administrator claimed that Renata’s ballot had been mailed out. I don’t know – there are two possible failure points – the office of the election administrator in Libby, and the post office system – where her ballot would travel from Libby to Missoula and be reposted back to Trego. The post office gets a lot of mail to my mailbox successfully. Whatever their flaws, the postal service has a better record of success than Lincoln County’s Election Administrators. The Election Administrator’s office has a long record of screwups in balloting – we’ve covered a lot of them in the Ear. Based on past performance, I suspect the problem occurred in Libby with a screw up from the Election Czar’s office.
I’m sure that our elected representatives have justified moving the polling places further and further, and moving us to mail-in ballots on the idea that it would be more efficient – ignoring the fact that a hereditary monarch is a much more efficient way of selecting a ruler (and I use that term deliberately).
If voting made a difference, both parties would try to keep you from voting. Come to think of it, they have.
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