Blue Mountain Winter: Election Day

The town I live in is a majority not-Republican place; not so much pro-Democratic exactly, since a lot of us are wary of anything that feels too organized. Except for the Ducks football games, maybe. Anyway, it's the kind of town where Lucy Vinis, the progressive candidate in the supposedly non-partison mayoral race, won the primary back in the spring by such a large margin that today's run-off vote is merely a formality.

In Oregon, we have mail-in + drop-off ballots, and that's convenient and I wish the whole country had the means to make voting easier, and less like a chore. But. I do miss the experience of getting out there with everyone else. I'm seeing pictures from other states of whole crowds of people walking together, singing songs and laughing, as they all go to an early voting polling place, like it was a rally on the move, a demonstration march for a cause they all believed in. And I wish I was there with them.

In our family, we do vote earlier, seal the ballot envelopes, and sign them. Then, instead of mailing them in, we wait until Election Day to take the ballots to the drop-off location. In a good way, this feels like being part of something beyond our individual selves, part of a larger experience, our national rite of participatory democracy.

Here's some fun videos that I meant to put up on the blog during the last few months, but didn't get around to. Still entertaining, though.

James Corden and Denis Leary, as Hillary and Bill: