So, as I've occasionally commented on before, Washington State elections are purely by mail these days. This makes it easier to vote. All you have to do is take the voter's pamphlet that comes in the mail, read over the candidates' statements of qualifications and endorsements, mark your choices on the official ballot sheet, and mail it in. There's even time to go online and see which candidates have their own websites or look at the flyers different campaigns have put out; sometimes I vote against a candidate based on the toxicity of his or her supporters.
But no system is perfect, and democracy as practiced here sometimes has its absurd aspects. For example. the most recent voter pamphlet, arriving today, listing all the candidates and their pitches reveals that this election only has three races. All judicial, and all unopposed. The state seems to have made the deliberate decision to hold elections often, presumably to get people used to voting often, I worry that having a stream of little elections dilutes the impact having one or two big election wd have.
Here's hoping Washington has an engaged but undramatic election(s) over this next year
--John R.
That's strange, as the trend here is to combine elections as much as possible, to increase turnout (most of our voting is now also by mail) and to cut costs. For instance, our city changed its council terms from odd-numbered year elections to even-numbered ones, to combine them with state & federal elections, and reverted to allowing the council to fill vacancies in its ranks (which had been eliminated as undemocratic) when the vacancy occurs too early to combine a replacement vote with a regular election, instead of holding an expensive special election.
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