Go vote!

It’s Election Day. Have you voted yet? Please do!

The big election here today is for mayor. Two candidates and neither run on party platforms. It is a city issues race all the way. One candidate says he’s all that and more, but doesn’t go into much detail on what all that is, but it’ll be good for the city. The other has outlined her positions and plans in great detail. She’s not shocking or radical, just plans to get some things done—instead of talking about them for the next few years. Mainly it’s about the waterfront, which is still given over to feral cats and rats, while local pols wring their hands and initiate study after study after study about potential development and use. Badly needed, which nearly everyone in this town understands. But, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on all the studies, they still don’t DO anything. The candidates are kind of like the difference between day and night. Neither is an incumbent (the current mayor isn’t running again), but both have been involved in city politics for several years. It has been a lively campaign season here. The all that and more guy seems to be ahead in the local polls, by a hair, so it leads me to think that people are perfectly content to vote on generalities that sound safe and don’t require much thought or action. That’s my cynical view of the day.

A little while ago, the lad went to vote for the first time. He’s been an active participant in one of the candidate’s races, with picture in the paper and the whole shebang. Late this morning, one of her campaign people called and left a message for him about where to go to pick up the signs on posts to hold up and where to go. He and a buddy were also hoping to be allowed to photograph each other at the polling place as part of their civics project. We weren’t sure if a camera would be allowed, but circumstances allowed. The police officer on duty is our neighbor and vouched for the lad. The polling place manager also knew him and said it would be fine as long as there were no other people in the surrounding voting booths at the time. They waited for a few minutes and then she ushered them over. She came back to me and said this was fantastic. She loves seeing young people involved in local politics. Makes her hopeful for the future, she said. It was lots of fun.

I was a little surprised at his involvement this year. It started with the first mayoral candidate debate. Attendance was a civics class assignment with the teacher sitting in the back row ticking off the names of his students as they walked in. But the issues of the debate caught up the lad and a couple of his friends and they’ve been involved ever since. A couple on the safe guy’s campaign and the lad and a couple friends on the other candidate’s campaign. They’ve been working like troopers to get the high school vote out this year—and their parents.

Candidate awareness is the key, obviously. The kids figured if they could get the newspaper involved with their efforts—and the newspaper loves doing stories about local kids, it sells papers!—more people would pay attention. It seems to have had a positive effect. As the polling place manager told me this afternoon—all politics are really local. It all starts on the home turf.