Vote by mail

I was wondering, does anyone go to the polls to vote anymore?

I don't know if this is a geographic thing or a generational thing, but I've been discovering over the course of the past few weeks, via conversations about the elections with various people, that everyone I seem to know votes by mail-in-ballot. (Well, either that, or some cannot vote at all.)

Granted, my sample size is small and probably skewed (20-30 or so people who mostly range in age from mid-20s to early 40s, all of who live in this area) , so it's really not representative of the entire population, but it's also odd that I have not run into a single person who actually goes to the polls to vote. I mean, isn't this how the rest of the country votes? (Someone out there still goes to the polls to vote the traditional way, right?)

I used to vote this way in NJ, b/c back when I lived there, you didn't really have a choice. One had to have some sort of extenuating circumstances to be eligible for absentee voting, which was annoying, b/c one year it conflicted with my class/work schedule. Since then, it seems that NJ has relaxed its restrictions.

But in CA, you don't have to provide any reasons to be eligible to vote via absentee ballot. You just fill out a form, and unless you reverse your request, a ballot automatically gets mailed to you, come election time, no questions asked. It's actually wonderfully convenient. I've been a vote-by-mailer for several years, and it's nice to be able to fill out my ballot in piecemeal, as I make up my mind about certain things (For example, for this election, props 4 and 8 were filled out right away.), and from the comfort of my own living room.

Curious whether this is an anomaly or representative of a larger trend, I did some poking around on the internet to see what vote-by-mail percentages were like in other states. In California, slightly less than half of us cast ballots by mail for the 2006 election. In Oregon, everyone votes by mail, and in Washington (state), according to this article, 95 percent of the votes for the August primary election were cast by mail.

I've only looked up west coast states, but the interesting thing about this is that it might affect the way candidates campaign. Again, I'm not necessarily claiming that there is a correlation, but compared to the rest of the nation (particularly the east coast and that area by Ohio), both presidential candidates have spent minimal (or no) money on campaign ads here on the left coast.

I suspect it also changes the manner of voting, though I can only offer anecdotal evidence to support this. In my case, for example, casting ballots has typically been a group endeavor. A group of us usually get together, read through the various propositions, and if the wording is convoluted enough and we are feeling sufficiently apathetic (which is the case 70-80 percent of the time, and before you give me a hard time for not taking my voting privileges seriously enough, please note that we have sixteen ballot measures we have to vote on, in addition to all of the candidates, assembly people, council people we must vote on. So nyeh.), we vote based on who endorses or opposes the proposition. We don't always vote the same way, but there is a sort of group-effort mentality to voting.

To wit:
Anzu: These 3 propositions about school spending, what's this about? Do any of them help the schools?
Ch: It says here that the _________ Teacher's Federation supports it.
Ala: Oh, that's the fake teacher's association. You don't want to vote in the same direction they do, b/c it hurts teachers.

Or:
Anzu: 4 freaking propositions about Indian gaming. They all sound the same to me. I'm totally indifferent. How are you voting?
Ala: I don't know enough about this issue, so I'm going to vote in favor of brown people, because I'm brown.
Anzu: Hmm. I'm indifferent, and brown too, I guess, but in order to cancel out your vote, I think I will vote no on all of these.

Ok, I'm being slightly facetious, but for measures I'm indifferent about or can't be bothered to read the fine print for, this sort of voting by consensus happens more often than not.

I don't miss going to the polls much, but it does make voting somewhat anti-climactic, since many of us have long voted by the time the rest of the nation is abuzz with election day hype, particularly in the last few days leading up to the election.