At lunch-hour today, went to early-vote at the Cook County Administration Building.*
Voted for Clinton and for Dems for U.S. Senate (Duckworth), U.S. House, and Illinois Senate and House. Voted mostly Dems but a couple of Republicans for other offices. [For example, voted GOP for Comptroller, the only statewide State office on the ballot. She can’t do too much harm. :)] Skipped a couple of offices where I didn’t want to vote for the incumbent but there was no challenger. Thankfully the bar associations were nigh-unanimous on the judicial retention ballot so I could just keep hitting “yes” over and over again until I reached the last screen.
Voted yes on all three referenda:
State constitutional amendment to dedicate transportation funds for transportation only,
County referendum on abolishing the elected Recorder of Deeds and folding its duties into the County Clerk.
Advisory referendum on requiring 40 days paid sick leave. I presume it’s advisory because it’s listed as a county vote but the ballot question is whether the State should adopt such a law.
*The only Chicago voting site for suburban Cook County residents. For those who vote there, it’s still in the basement but they moved it next to the Secretary of State office. A worker at the door of the old polling room will [del]challenge[/del] ask where you’re going if you reflexively try to go there. :smack:
Just went to the County Registrar of Voters and cast my ballot. Easy as pie, and hardly any line at all. Four people ahead of me.
A predictably straight Democratic/Liberal ballot. The only deviation from this is that I voted not to legalize recreational marijuana. I don’t like to participate in a “states’ rights” issue. The Federal government needs to legalize it first.
(Also, I just don’t like marijuana. I don’t want people around me smoking it.)
(Also, it’s certainly going to pass anyway, so what the heck, it’s a protest vote.)
So the Indoor Clean Air (anti-smoking) Act will prevent that.
But wait, don’t these new laws prohibit the public consumption of marijuana? So it’s legal, but you can’t smoke it indoors, and you can’t smoke it out in public. So where can you smoke it?
I registered and absentee-voted. I live in Japan, but my last US address is in CA. By coincidence, I’m in CA this week for work, so I faxed in my votes for Hillary, pot and getting rid of the death penalty in CA from CA.
Had no idea that was even still around. I figured California would be one of the first to get rid of it. Maybe that would be interesting to discuss in the thread about the issues/referendums.
So, due to a personal situation, I just now got my ballot finally shipped off. The stamps I got were old trucks. They had no value on them (not even on the book itself). But I looked up the current first class rate and found they were 47 cents, and thus I needed three of them. (The ballot told me that it was $1.20, even though they paid $1.15. Still, I’d need 3 stamps either way.)
I’ll admit I’ve never liked that they make you pay postage. It’d bother me less if you could still go drop your vote off, but you can’t do that. (You could in 2008.) So, in effect, you are paying a small fee to be able to vote from home. And that bugs me.
(You can only drop it off if you picked it up from the office. I assume it’s a bookkeeping thing. Still, making people go there means you pay for the trip, albeit less than you pay for postage. unless your car just has horrible mileage. Of course, you need a car if you’re any real distance away.)
You have to remember that until the 1990s California was a moderately conservative state in many respects, often voting Republican in statewide elections, for example.
Capital punishment was very popular in California until fairly recently.
I’ve lived in California for 40 years and the shift in the politics of the state over that period has been striking.
In Alameda County you can drop off your ballot, postage-free, at any one of the designated ballot boxes which are at certain locations around the county. There’s one at the Union City city hall, which is where I took mine the other day.
The death penalty was reinstated in California in 1973 (after a 1972 court decision suspending it). Since then there have been only 13 executions, the last in 2006.
Compare Texas, with 538 executions since 1976.
We do have a bunch of people on death row, but executions are extremely rare.
I’m surprised you have to pay postage. (Not that I don’t believe you. I do, I’m just surprised they make you pay.) Where I live, the postage is paid by the county recorder’s office, and they provide you with a business reply envelope for your ballot.
Mailed mine today (Florida). I would have done it the same day except I had to do a little research on the city council candidates first. Party affiliation unfortunately means everything at the federal level these days, so that settled those votes.
The state rep for this district is a hard-line teabagger, so he gots to go, no matter who the other guy is. I did something I’ve never done before and voted for The Other Guy automatically, because he has to be better.
Why the hell is County Soil Conservation Commission Supervisor an elected position? At least each of the slots had someone running who’s made it his life’s work and has all the credentials. Good luck, fellas.
On the amendments: No on the utilities’ solar-suppressing amendment (a clever lie that’s been well exposed), yes on legalizing medical pot, yes on exempting disabled first responders from property tax, yes on adding protections to the homestead law.
This is my first time voting in Colorado, and I’m very impressed with how they do it. Everyone who is registered to vote (and that was as easy as saying “yes” when I got my drivers’ license at the DMV) is mailed a ballot. As a consequence, only about 5% of voters actually go to the polls on election day, and Colorado has one of the highest voter turnouts in the country. You can either add postage and mail the ballot back, or you can drop it off at a secure box; since I pass one such box when I walk the dogs, I’m going to drop mine off later this weekend.
As for a selection of my votes:
I happily voted for Clinton/Kaine, and I also voted for a Democrat for the senate and the house. I voted against retaining any judges (since I’m a curmudgeon, and they are usually overwhelmingly retained). And I voted to raise the minimum wage (to $12 by 2020), institute state-wide single payer healthcare (“ColoradoCare”), and allow for euthanasia. Among my no votes was one against a measure to raise cigarette taxes, since I don’t agree with making specific taxes a permanent part of the constitution.
Yeah, that’s how I think it should work. I can only think that Arkansas is too poor or something.
Also, I neglected to mention last time, but the casino bill and the tort reform bill got removed from the ballot. The casino bill didn’t disclose that certain kinds of betting were still illegal on the federal level, and the tort reform because it didn’t define what “non-economic damages” meant.
Early voting started on Thursday here in NC, so I went in today to vote. According to the local news, business has been brisk so far. I didn’t have to wait, but the site I go to packed as many booths into the two rooms they use for early voting as they could, and almost all of them were in use.
Interesting factoid for NC: about 40 percent of the ballots cast are in early voting now, so it’s clearly important to folks here, and attempts to limit it by the state legislature have been met with a mostly negative reaction.
Another factoid I didn’t know until this morning, as an aside to the denial of service attack on Dyn which happened yesterday: 31 states allow overseas citizens (mainly military, but some civilians as well) cast their ballots online. Alaska allows all citizens to do so. Concern has been raised about what might happen if outside forces try to mess with that process on Election Day.
Thankfully the bar associations were nigh-unanimous on the judicial retention ballot so I could just keep hitting “yes” over and over again until I reached the last screen. 
