Doing Our Part

Kim, Oliver , and I went down to City Hall to vote today.

It’s an important election here in Wisconsin, which you can tell by the fact that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting to buy it. He’s sunk over twenty million dollars into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race – the equivalent of about ten bucks to you and me, but a significant amount of coin for what is supposed to be a nonpartisan judicial race – in order to buy a seat for the right-wing candidate and return the court to where it was a few years ago: a reliable rubber stamp for whatever Teabagger nonsense the brutally gerrymandered Wisconsin legislature cared to propose in defiance of morality, common sense, and (surprisingly often) the desires of their own voters, many of whom are not nearly as far out on the edges of right-wing extremism as their purported representatives are.

There’s also a statewide race for the Superintendent of Public Education – a post formerly held by the current governor, and a race which features the current incumbent Jill Underly running against a paid lobbyist for private schools. The challenger tried to lie about that in a recent softball interview with one of those pet “news” outlets on the right but couldn’t even keep up that pretense for ten seconds (literally) before backtracking and declaring that yes, indeed, she was exactly the paid lobbyist everyone knows she is and therefore not an appropriate person to lead the state’s public schools since she’s been working to destroy them for a while now.

We also had some City Council races and some slots open for the local school board, and those are also critical because it’s at that level that the world is run. My general tactic for those races is to go to the local GOP website, find out who they endorse, and then cross those people off my list because honestly a two-pound bag of carrots would do a better job of promoting the public interest than anyone the Republican Party favors these days. Having done that I then have to choose from whoever remains, which is a bit more challenging, granted, but not all that hard once you get down to doing a bit of research.

The actual election isn’t until a week from now, but the State of Wisconsin opens things up for in-person early voting a week or two in advance and it’s easier just to do that than deal with the crowds that will appear on election day. Not that election day crowds are a bad thing unless you’re actively working toward the death of American democracy in which case Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has a job opening for you. It’s just easier this way.

Honestly, I suspect this may be the last free election I ever get to vote in, given the accelerating path of the United States toward Fascist dictatorship. Can’t miss out on that, now, can we?

It’s a pretty painless process, for all that. You go to the City Hall and find your way to the big room where the volunteers running the voting are stashed. You provide proof that you have paid your unconstitutional poll tax and possess the state-sanctioned qualifications of a voter, and they check you off their list, though for some reason they can never find me the first time and I have to suggest alternate ways to look me up until they do – apparently this is something that happened the first time I registered to vote here in Our Little Town back in the mid-90s and is now uncorrectable. They hand you a big cardstock ballot, the kind that can’t be hacked by some feral teenager working for DOGE. You take it to one of the little privacy stations and fill it out, put it in an envelope, and then you take it to the volunteer at the other end of the room from where you got it and they seal the envelope, have you sign it, and wish you a good day.

Sometimes you get a sticker, and today was one of those days.

With any luck, Justice Susan Crawford will be seated on the Court soon and there will be at least a chance that Wisconsin can resist the general tide of authoritarianism that is engulfing this nation. Given my general history in elections and the express hostility to free and fair elections that has become standard on the American right these days I’m not all that confident of that, but you do what you can when you can with what you’ve got.

I did my part.