Scott voted for the first time this afternoon. His internship supervisor at the Court sent him off to vote, and he swung by to pick me up so that I could vote with him. After we showed our i.d. and signed in, he began filling in the ovals as we sat next to each other. I blame it on Scott. As many of you know, I'm a Yellow Dog Democrat. Well, I am to the extent that I will refuse to vote at all if I can't in good faith vote for the Democrat. The only other time other than today was when Jimmy Carter was running for re-election. I didn't vote in that election.
I had already decided that I couldn't vote for Secretary of State Democratic candidate Nancy Worley who was running for re-election. Scott whispered, "I'm going to write in a candidate." "Who are you going to put?" I quizzed. "I don't know," he said. And that dear gentle readers is how I came to write in the name, "Borat" for Alabama Secretary of State and Scott wrote in the name of a classmate. So if you happen to see the results from the Cloverdale Community Center and see a couple of strange write-in names, chalk it up to us.
13 comments:
I'm just about as staunch a Republican as you are a Democrat, my friend, so I fear we cancel each other's votes out. But I did vote for one Democrat, so I don't ever vote a straight party ticket. I got the urge to write in a candidate on one, but I don't remember now who it was. I just didn't vote for that one at all.
When we first moved to our little town, we were among the few who ever voted in the Republican primaries. We took quite a bit of razzing. But Reagan changed all that. Now, almost all the local officials run as Republicans, if they expect to be elected. That's what living near Birmingham does for politics, I guess.
Rosemary,
Montgomery County went Democrat for most officers. The Secretary of State office wasn't one of them.
As I said, I won't vote for someone strictly because he or she is a Democrat. However, I think my loyalty goes back to seeing how a Democrat, FDR, pulled the country out of the Great Depression. My family has always been working class. My granddaddy and grandma worked in the cotton mill. As a young girl, my mother picked cotton in Arizona and was one of those Okies Steinbeck wrote about.
Philosophically I feel like the Democrats are better for the little guy and the Republicans are better for big business. I am one of these Democrats who is anxious to see the parties work together. I think we will see more of this now that the Democrats have regained House control. I can't see how very much positive has happened in the last four years as far as dealing with some really serious problems facing our country.
We are all in this boat together, though. You can bet I'll be tough on the Democratic leadership too.
Nancy "I used to be a beauty queen and now I hate young pretty women and think they couldn't possibly be smart" Worley personally offended me many, many times- in fact I had a picture of her beach house washing into the sea on my bulliten board for several years to remind me that sometimes bad things do happen to bad people! Borat for Sexcretary of State! Bwwahhhh!
(There is no spell check on here so please excuse...)
Oh, and yay Democrats!
Sheila, just for the record, I consider myself just an American independent voter. I think the mostly two-party system (especially so in Alabama with its overly restrictive ballot access law which was written in an effort to keep it that way) prevents minor party candidates who often have new and sometimes better ideas on the issues from being heard by the populace --- to our loss. I vote for OR AGAINST candidates because of their qualifications and positions on the issues that need to be addressed. For that reason I never vote a straight party ballot.
Yesterday I wrote in one name not on the ballot as a protest vote against our ballot access law and because I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either of the candidates listed (and the outcome wasn’t in doubt, anyway). I voted for some Democrats and some Republicans, and I didn’t vote at all on about 25 items on the ballot. Some of those I left blank because I had no real preference between the two candidates, but most of them were because I felt that I really didn’t know enough about the candidates to cast an informed vote. On the amendments, if it was a local issue, such as the ones pertaining to Prichard and Macon County, I didn’t vote because they should have been left up to only the voters in the areas affected and I had no business sticking my nose into their business. If our antiquated constitution didn’t require such amendments to be voted on statewide they wouldn’t even have been on the ballot, and they shouldn’t be, to my way of thinking.
I guess all of the reasons mentioned above and more is why I’ve spent thousands of hours over nearly the last three years in an effort to help make Alabama the 25th Initiative and Referendum state (see my website @ www.doctoriq.com which is devoted to that end).
Humorously, one of my neighbors said that they didn’t for some unexplained reason like our unopposed candidate for the state legislature so they wrote in my name for House District
st. yves,
Thanks for visiting. When Nancy bought that big SUV, I thought "how wasteful!" Then I heard about the lawyers and others she got rid of. What finally did it for me was talking with a former election official from down south who told even more war tales. Good riddance!
Don,
You are the voter the Dems and Repubs are after. You actually think instead of rely on habit. I'm the same way though if I don't know much about a candidate. I won't vote. Same way about the amendments which I skipped this year.
Good luck with your I & R work. It sounds like a good idea. At some point, we are going to have to get serious about changing the things that need to be changed and quit just puttin up.
Prop 2 was very important, and I'm glad that it passed. It requires counties to collect at least 10 mills on property taxes.
This will help boost education, particularly in the poorer counties.
Jay, that is pretty amazing that the Prop 2 passed given how most folks in Alabama feel about the "t" word. If what Governor Riley says about Alabama's economy booming, I hope some of the riches filter down to our poor Black Belt counties. I think if some taxpayers had the opportunity to visit some of the schools in this area of the state, they'd hang their heads in shame.
Yes. Much credit is due to Alabama Arise's efforts. They're getting better and better each year! Kimble Forrester, director, is an amazing and tireless worker.
Sheila, of course both major parties are always after the approximately one third of voters who consider themselves independents and who often determine the outcome of elections, but we are stubborn people who will continue to maintain our independence from political parties and vote for individuals rather than a party.
The vote on Amendment 2 was a foregone conclusion before the polls even opened as far as I was concerned. When voters in 101 school districts can vote to increase taxes on property owners in 30 other districts without raising their own taxes you have to know they will vote for it.
I believe that it’s a misconception to think that because it passed the schools in those 30 districts will receive more funding than they did before. It only means that more of the funding will come from property taxes and the local governments will divert the sales tax portion of prior funding to other uses, good or bad, but it would be a cold day in hell before they reduced those sales taxes. Thus, voters all across the state voted to raise taxes on citizens in those 30 school districts whether those people wanted it done or not. Does that seem fair? I think not, and that’s the reason I voted against that amendment, when I would have voted for it if it had been left up to just the people in those 30 districts to vote on it individually in each district. The millage rate in Elmore County will increase by 3 mills as a result of this vote, which isn’t much money, but I voted on the principle of fairness rather than just being totally against increasing my taxes. I did vote to double our fees to support our volunteer fire departments, and was pleased that a majority of Elmore County voters did also.
Oh, and about Initiative and Referendum: I strongly feel that it’s the key that can be used to unlock the door to REAL reform and Accountability legislation that our legislators refuse to deal with responsibly. I’d love to see more and more people jump on the wagon with me and others in fighting for it.
Don, you informed yourself way more than I did as to the amendments. My son said he didn't vote on them either since he didn't understand what they were about. Wouldn't it be something if people wouldn't vote, give their opinion or chime in unless they knew what they were talking or voting about?
Sheila, give your son a high five from me for not voting on something he didn't have an informed opinion about. Yes, it would be great if everyone did the same as he did. Uninformed voters skew the results.
What would be even better is that if we had a constitution that allowed local government control of purely local issues and didn't require the entire state to vote on them.
I can't understand why Montgomery County voters turned down the chance to have even a limited amount of home rule Tuesday.
High Five!
If we don't inform ourselves, we shouldn't just pick any old choice. How stupid! Good points.
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