Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

Well, I have voted.  Again.

We do that here in Wisconsin nowadays.  It’s become our favorite sport.  We’ve had five elections already this year – primaries and recalls for state senators and for Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) as well as the presidential primary that nobody remembers because it was irrelevant by the time it happened.  November will be our seventh election.

This current election, our sixth, is the primary for federal, state and local offices for November’s general.  We get to choose from a welter of people running for Congress, the State Legislature, and various county offices (Recorder of Deeds!).  Sometimes you have to wonder why so many offices are elected, but such is life in the wake of Jacksonian egalitarianism.

We had to vote early, because the actual election will take place on a day when we will be out of town, so Kim and I took the girls over to the County Courthouse here in Our Little Town.  It was my first experience with early voting.

It turned out to be not so complicated after all.

They ask your name and some identifying details, and then hand you a ballot.  You go over to the little table over in the corner – one of the same ones they use on election day – and fill it in.  Then you seal it in an envelope that you’ve already signed at the window, and hand it back.  Easy.

Voting should be easy.

It’s a shame that there is a strong movement in this country – localized to a single political party who shall remain nameless because every time I so much as pronounce their initials I get an uncontrollable urge to have their leadership arrested for subversion and frankly my blood pressure doesn’t need that these days – to place unconstitutional and immoral obstructions in front of voters.  They claim it is to prevent voter fraud, which is funny since nobody has ever found any significant voter fraud in the US in the last fifty years. 

Our own state attorney general – a member in good standing of the offending nameless political party and a man so nakedly partisan that it’s almost refreshing – spent two years and tens of thousands of tax-payer dollars investigating this issue and came up with nothing, and if he can’t find something to advance his own political cause you can bet it doesn’t exist.  The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – my home state – has admitted in court, under oath, that the problem doesn’t exist despite having passed a Wisconsin-style Voter Suppression Act that was supposedly designed to address that problem. 

Not that this makes any difference to those pushing such laws.  They already knew that.

So I vote. 

Again.