Yes He Did

Adventures in Voting (What Did You Do With My Ballot Joel?)

I voted yesterday. That alone shouldn’t merit noting. Yet, this time it does. I have voted in every election since 1998. It was a midterm election and I remember being appalled by the fact that impeachment proceedings were being brought up against Clinton because he had gotten a blowjob. I’m not going to rehash that particular point because it was 10 years ago and I was right to be rattled out of my cage by what had proved to be an expensive distraction and absolute waste of time. Since moving overseas in 2005 I voted in the mid-term election and receive ballots for various school board elections and other propositions that pop up every now and then. If I had been following the issue, I vote. If not, I don’t. The point here is that each ballot that I have received has been with plenty of time for me to fill in my little circles and walk it back to the post office where I could then ease back knowing that I had done my civic duty.

This year, inexplicably (I say inexplicably because I actually called my county auditor’s office, that would be you Joel D. Miller, and was given very little information. But I’m getting ahead of myself here) I still have not received my ballot. Follow me back to September if you will.

In the first few weeks of September I had emailed the Linn County Auditor (Joel D. Miller) to inquire about the status on my registration. I never received a reply, but shortly thereafter I did receive my voter registration verification card in the mail. It wasn’t a response to my email as judging from the postmark date it had been sent before I had sent my email. It didn’t matter. My question had been answered.

By mid-October I had yet to receive my ballot and was beginning to grow concerned as several other people that I knew had received theirs and had already sent them back. On October 20th, two weeks and one day away from the election I called the Linn County Auditor’s (Joel D. Miller’s) office to get a sense of where my ballot was. The lady that answered the phone was exasperated by my question, which lead me to believe that I probably hadn’t been the only one with this question on this particular afternoon. She informed me that my ballot had been sent out that very day and would be put in the mail the next day, October 21st. I went on to ask why if I live overseas was my ballot being mailed two weeks before the election. She didn’t have an answer, but did suggest that it should be there within a week and a half. Should is the opportunative word here. Yes, it should have been in my hands before Election Day, but it wasn’t.

All overseas ballots need to be postmarked by November 3rd in order to be valid. I write this on November 4th (election night) and have yet to receive my ballot.
What I did learn about, thankfully on Saturday November 1st, was this, http://www.fvap.gov/, a web page that provides provisional ballots for those who do not receive their state’s ballots. I filled in the hastily printed ballot and scrambled to the post office yesterday evening to get it postmarked before the due date. I have no guarantee that my pseudo ballot will make it to Joel D. Miller’s office by November 10th (the last day for overseas ballots to be received). I can only hope, knowing that should it arrive on November 11th it will be tossed in the bin. That really shouldn’t have been my concern though. Part of Joel D. Miller’s job is to provide ballots for presidential elections. I have to wonder if Joel D. Miller wasn’t aware that there was a presidential election this year, perhaps it had slipped his mind. Regardless, Joel, where the hell is my ballot?