One Utah

I have two friends that worked as poll workers this election season. There wasn’t any funny business at either of their precincts, but there are some interesting stories they had to tell.

The first friend worked at a polling location in downtown Salt Lake City. He told me that only 15% of that precinct’s registered voters came out to vote. He mentioned that the poor showing was not a good example of “democracy in action”. While thinking about his experience, I wondered what would have happened if 90% of that precinct had voted. Salt Lake City is a liberal stronghold in the state. If other Salt Lake City polling locations had similar turn out rates and generally have a population more liberal than the rest of the state, could we have changed some outcomes? Would these absent voters been enough to turn things around for Pete Ashdown? Would Sim Gill have won his race?

Strangely, the same phrase “democracy in action,” was used earlier Tuesday at work by a co-worker in a conversation about voting. He was asked if he had voted, and he replied that he accepted the political reality of Utah and found that Utah was not a good example of “democracy in action” and given the political reality of Utah, he had better things to do with his time than vote. Judging by my first friend’s experience, there were probably several others who felt the same way. The irony here is that if more of those people had taken the effort to vote, it may have changed things enough that we could shatter the collective perception that progressives don’t have a chance in this state. The results of this election will simply re-inforce that idea to those who didn’t vote and it will be the same the next election, so on and so forth.

My suggestion to those who feel hopeless about voting in this state, is to sign up for a perpetual “vote by mail” ballot which will be mailed each election season. No effort has to be expended on Election Day, and you can treat your mailed ballot as an investment in a future where Utah is more sane, than as a vote to win a particular election.

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My other poll worker friend is a blogger on LiveJournal, and I just got through reading her account of the day. One aspect stood out for me:

“I can’t believe more people aren’t understanding how HUGE an issue the “Personal Choice” snafu was! For those unaware, the way the next button is positioned, along with the lack of ability to skip by the straight party page easily caused many voters to accidentally vote for the Personal Choice party. As a pollworker, I can tell you that I was helping confused people backtrack in the process and fix their mistakes AT LEAST 2CE/HOUR! At high voter turnout times it was much higher than that. And these were not all elderly people, many of them were fairly computer literate people. This wasn’t an unknown issue, I know of at LEAST two people (including my TST) who informed county of the potential of this to cause problems. Neither of these people apparently were taken seriously though because they weren’t “computer people”. Yes, and neither are most of the voters. All one has to do is look at the abnormally high rates of people who voted Personal Choice in Salt Lake County to see what an issue it caused. If you weren’t diligently reviewing your votes, you could accidentally misvote because of that issue very easily! I suspect it may have even altered the outcome of my local state house race. I’ll be curious to see if any protests are made about it.”

I had noticed the unusually high numbers for the Personal Choice Party, which surpassed many of the other 3rd parties. I think this could definitely have been a problem. I’ll be curious as well to see how this will get resolved.

This entry was posted Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 11:39 pm and is filed under This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.