Election Day 2006
Today was older son's first time voting. We took our travelers with to the polls. Older son was a little disappointed with his experience today. He registered to vote about 4 to 6 weeks ago and had his temporary card with him. He was suppose to get his voters card in two weeks from the time he registered. Needless to say he never received his regular card. Today at the polls they did not have his name in the book as being a registered voter. Luckily he had his card showing he had registered so they had to let him vote. They said when you have a problem like this for some reason you can only vote for federal races which only had one race and nothing else. He didn't even know who the two people were. So he never had the chance to vote for all the races he cared about. I thought when they said federal races they meant everything besides local issues. He did not tell me this until we were in the car. When they said he could only vote for federal races, I had no idea he would not have a vote on most of the election. Had I known I would have definitely looked into it more right there. It doesn't seem right. I will have to make some calls to make sure he is "official" for the presidential election. He did vote and I did take pictures :) Now I guess he has to wait until the 2008 presidential election to have his full vote counted.
Older son tells me that most of his friends aren't even registered to vote! I was shocked. I told him he should try and encourage everyone to become registered voter and voice their opinion. It doesn't matter how you vote for as long as you vote. We all have our views and we should all respect that.
The rest of the day we were home. Younger son had a music lesson today and tomorrow he was challenged for his seat in band by the chair next to him. Right now he is second trumpet first seat. If he wins the challenge he will retain his seat and the person can not rechallenge him for a certain time period. If he loses he can rechallenge to get his seat back. His teacher has encouraged him if he wins tomorrow to then challenge the first trumpet third seat so he can play first trumpet for the concert in January. He gets nervous before challenges, I'll have to let you know how he does.
posted by The Travelers Journal @ 7:44 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Good for you guys for voting! It blows my mind, the number of people who don't bother. Funny, they tend to be the ones who complain the most, too. :-P
Too bad the paperwork thing didn't go through on time for Older Son. Frustrating.
So do you guys have voting machines, like I've been reading about in the papers? Or do you have paper ballots?
We had both. Older son and I used voting machines. We are the votes that have not been counted yet for our races because the machines would not transmit. They claim the votes are counted, but just have to be put through the data base of votes. Our neighbor used the regular paper ballots. Here is a link to our counties voting problems http://www.suntimes.com/index.html
So not only did older son not get to vote for the races he wanted, only 51% of the suburbs of Cook County were counted so far.
The story seems to be gone already from the front page in that link, but I've been reading about it elsewhere.
There are people who are saying that, in this day and age, internet voting should be allowed here in Canada. I hope that never happens! It would be impossible to guarentee any type of security! I don't think people understand just how easy it is for technology to go wrong!
I'm happy with our old fashioned paper ballots and people system, full of redundancy. Yeah, it might be inconvenient to go to a polling station, but even when it *is* convenient, almost 60% of Canadians don't bother to vote federally. The system isn't perfect (no system ever could be), but it's hard to circumvent, and when it does happen, it's very limited. On the other hand one hacker could mess up millions of votes.
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