Rants & Raves

Well, another Election Day has come and gone. Mike Bloomberg is our mayor again. I knew he would be, since Fernando Ferrer’s campaign consisted of saying what Mikey’s doing wrong, not what Ferrer could do right. In other words, he was a wimp. I voted for Seth Blum, running in the Education Party. I figured I would vote for someone I believed in rather than vote against someone.

Or should I say, try to vote? Here’s some background. I diligently registered to vote when I was 18. I was in school in California, so I filled out a form that my mom had sent me (the only ones left in the library were in Spanish, so luckily I knew enough to fill it out.) I had asked for an absentee form, and received, in California, a form letter saying that I would be voting across the street from my parents’ house in New York. I asked again for an absentee form the year after and got the same result, so I decided, since I wasn’t too into NY politics anyway, I would wait until I got home to start my civic duty.

I voted the year I got home with no problems, since I was still living with my parents. I moved to Queens and foolishly gave up my vote, even though it seemed that I would have been fine, because I really didn’t care who was our next mayor (it was between Mark Green and Mike Bloomberg – the former was public advocate and the latter was a businessman who could get us out of the 9/11 depression. Each seemed equally good.) The next year was fine. I moved again and couldn’t vote because they didn’t register my address change. Moved yet again (to where I am now) and made doubly sure that the address change went through. I was able to vote with no problem.

This year I received a voter form saying where I was supposed to vote and I also received the Voter Guide. Guess what? I had to fill out an affidavit form. The woman behind the desk was very helpful and guided me through the process, even though I told her “Gone through the drill before.” So I called the voting hotline last night, before the polls closed, and told them that my name wasn’t even in the sign in book. I voted at the same place before with no problem, so WTF? (I was very polite, and didn’t curse at the operator, aren’t you proud of me?) He told me that they don’t print the books, Xerox does. Apparently this happens a lot.

So my question is, isn’t the file the Voting Board sends Xerox a simple, albeit massive, mail merge file? This is what I do to pay the rent – merge big database files with a form letter (or form, or card, etc.) If I was able to get all the literature I was expecting from the Voting Board, how come that didn’t translate into the voting registration books? And if there are so many mistakes, shouldn’t the Board go after Xerox and demand some accountability?

So the next step is to e-mail the newly re-elected mayor as well as the public advocate and demand that something happen. If I don’t get a response from either of them in the next couple of weeks, I’ll start calling people. But why do I have to do this? There are some people who have never voted because they don’t believe it can do anything (what’s one vote?) After so many extremely close elections in the past couple of years, how is that excuse valid anymore? I actually WANT to vote. Apparently, only 15% of New York voted. With so many people staying at home, wouldn’t you think that NYC would want the ones who want to vote to be able to?

*sigh* Wish me luck.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 7:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.