So, if I end up being George, meh. (I’d prefer something like OnceACodeMonkey or GrandHighPanjandrum, but okay.
Voted. My precinct has 2300 registered, but at 1810 (6:10PM civilian time) mine was ballot #205.
I got in a conversation with a poll worker about primary runoffs and how they can be quite critical. She didn’t remember the 1986 Alabama primary runoff, which became quite contentious due to what was called “cross-over voting”, wherein supposedly (I have no certain knowledge of it happening) an awful lot of Republican primary voters cast ballots for Charlie Graddick (incumbent Attorney General) versus Bill Baxley (incumbent Lieutenant Governor) in the Democratic runoff. Graddick won the runoff (by 0.94%), but Baxley’s people protested and the State Supreme Court ordered the Alabama Democratic Party to award the nomination to Baxley. The award was perfectly legal, of course, but it angered an awful lot of people.
The outcome of the controversy was the election of Guy Hunt (Republican) in the general, likely by virtue of a whole bunch of Graddick supporters voting for Hunt, who was the first R governor in Alabama since 1874. At the time (and maybe still today), Democrats who voted in the primary signed something like a “loyalty oath” wherein they promised to support the party’s nominee in the general election, so I’m still unclear as to why the outcome was not challenged more strongly than it was. (By the way, again to my knowledge, Republican primary voters in Alabama have never been required to sign that kind of “loyalty oath”.)
Oddly though, today I was handed a slip by the intake worker after my photo ID was scanned and accepted. This slip, annotated “REPUBLICAN”, was the token by which the next poll workers knew which ballot to give me. It has been my recollection that in the past a worker would ask me which ballot I wanted in both the primary and the runoff; I never “crossed over” or tried to, simply because, you know… The party identification slip was the reason the worker and I went over this history, as she said she had no memory of that 1986 dustup.
By the way, in that same general election, Alabama voters elected Democrat Richard Shelby to replace Republican Jeremiah Denton in the US Senate. Denton was elected in 1980, the first R Senator from Alabama since 1879. (Shelby switched to the Republican Party in 1994.) As I said, I hate Alabama politics.