Funny about Money

Yesterday I shipped off this year’s mail-in ballot. What a HUGE passel of things and people to vote on…most of them people and things no one ever heard of. Several extreme propositions appeared on the ballot, among them one that would take away firefighters’ and police officers’ defined pension plan and one that, if passed, will raise our property taxes into the stratosphere.

This fall we revisited the mystification that is the Superior Court judge vote.

In Arizona, big-city Superior Court judges are appointed through a merit system. However, every couple of years the citizenry has to vote on whether to retain those who are on the bench. This, of course, is completely wacky: unless you’re a lawyer, a Superior Court judge yourself, or an employee of the Superior Court, you have no way of knowing which of these folks is competent and which not.

The voter pamphlet contains exactly nothing about the judges: who they are, how long they’ve been on the bench, what their background is, what they claim to stand for…what??????? As I sat there staring at the page-long list of names, I finally recalled that there’s a judicial review system in Arizona. Googled that up and found that of the several dozen sitting judges, not one, not two, but three of them have failing scores. As in “does not meet basic qualifications.”

Wow!

Most people, I think, would either vote for all the candidates or not vote at all, thereby insuring that three incompetent judges would stay in place for at least another two years. Who would know you could look these folks up online and find their rankings on one page? There’s no clue in the voter pamphlet.

The mail-in ballot is such a convenience! In addition to giving you weeks in which to mull over your vote, you get to fill it out while sitting in the comfort and privacy of your dining-room table — with your computer in front of you as you look up the candidates and issues. The only nuisance is having to physically drive the ballot to a post office, since one wouldn’t dare leave it out for the  postal carrier to pick up from one’s own mailbox. Too much theft.

I got on the mail-in ballot list some years ago — once you’re on, you’re on, and they keep sending the things forever — after they moved our district’s polling station from a centrally located church to a very shaky gangland neighborhood in the war zone to the north of us. That year, I went to track the place down and found myself driving into one of those areas where you reflexively check to be sure your car doors are locked. The polling station stood about eight or ten blocks down the street from an apartment building where two small children playing on the sidewalk were shot by gang-bangers firing at each other. It’s smack in the middle of a meth gang’s territory, a place where I wouldn’t get out of the car on a bet, much less stand in line out in the open.

So, after laying my life on the proverbial line to vote that year, I arranged to have mail-in ballots sent to me. The result is that I vote in a lot more elections than I would have — all of them, including various small referendums that wouldn’t be enough to get me out of the house.

I expect that benefit will soon be taken away from us, though. A certain major political party is working hard to disenfranchise voters who are not in its demographic. Mail-in ballots benefit the unfriendly ilk of students (such as my neighbor’s son, the honors engineering major who come November lives on the ASU campus), minimum-wage workers who will have their pay docked or be fired if they show up at work saying they had to stand in line at the polling place for an hour (not unheard-of here), disabled people who depend on federal and state benefits that said Party would like to eliminate, and snowbirds who claim Arizona as their primary residence but who come from and spend the summers in “blue” states and so might be inclined to vote in undesirable ways.

They gerrymandered our local district to break up a block of affluent, educated voters who incline to favor moderate candidates and to oppose the extremist agenda so often manifested in the wacko propositions that appear in almost every referendum. Another strategy has been to disqualify thousands of mail-in ballots for negligible reasons — so one has no idea whether one’s mail-in vote is counted at all.

Not that Arizona has enough “liberals” (read “former Goldwater Republicans who now look middle-of-the-road”) to make much difference…but the ruling party has unequivocally shown it wants to make sure we have no voice at all. They’re very good at that.

Where federal and some state candidates are concerned, I felt frustrated to find myself voting the party line, something I have never done in the past and do now only because one of the parties is infested with bizarre extremists. I used to pride myself on studying each candidate and voting on the individual’s merits, not on her or his political party. But today I fear that even a man or woman of good will who manages to get on the ballot as a member of that party will be pressured to conform to the extremists’ demands for “ideological purity,” so that it really doesn’t matter who’s running — any vote for a member of that party is, alas, a vote against common sense and for obstructionism, mean-mindedness, economic inequity, and  duplicity.

I don’t like it. Matter of fact, I hate it. When a vote for a potentially good leader amounts to a vote for something you can’t support, and a vote for a potentially mediocre leader amounts to to a vote against something you can’t support, what we have is a dangerously distorted political system that no longer functions to drive what we as Americans imagine our country stands for.