Midterm elections generally do not see as high of turnouts as presidential elections, and in DC many of our political races are determined in the primary election. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to hear so many people say that they are not planning to vote on Tuesday. So in this week’s unofficial poll, tell me: are you planning to vote on or before Tuesday?
27
Oct
2010
The question is, will I vote about voting?
As a voter, I love the convenience of early voting.
However, as an activist in a set of local ANC races, I want to point out something. I won’t call it unfair, but I do think it is an unintended and implicit bias.
I am trying to get younger people to vote for reform candidates to unseat incumbents in ANC 6b. Many of the incumbents are older and retired, and 2 out 3 of the challengers I try to lobby for are younger and have families to boot.
Early voting is easier for a campaign to staff if the candidate and his/her most dedicated volunteers are not also young career professionals trying balance family obligations.
Unfortunately, it is also precisely this kind of last-minute lobbying that might swing an ANC race, since many people show up to vote without really knowing what an ANC is (who can blame them?).
We might want to think about this. I don’t know what we can do about it exactly, but for those of us who actually think that younger people need to be more enfranchised in the decision-making on Capitol Hill, it really places an extra burden on us to make sure we are educated before we go to the polls.
So–thanks again to THIH for running candidate bios in our local ANC races.