I read with disappointment your Sunday editorial regarding the alleged waste that is poll-type voting. It only served the country for over 200 years and made Illinois that much harder to steal from Nixon. If 1960 had been all-mail, it would have been easier for Richard Daley to figure out what was required to put Illinois into Kennedy’s column.
I’m only being partially facetious. It’s audacious to deride the county for sticking with poll voting considering the recent travesty in the administration of absentee ballots all across Washington. There’s not a voter that can definitively claim that we rightfully elected Christine Gregoire last November.
This state can’t even agree that a photo ID is the basic minimum to cast a vote. Why in the world would I mail my vote when Sam Reed has already demonstrated his office can’t credibly do the job? We can spend millions on walls to protect people from freeway noise. We can’t spend a million to maintain minimal confidence in the foundational mechanism of our representative democracy?
I’ve read a lot of logic-intolerant positions from this editorial staff in the last few months, but this last editorial position is as dangerous as it is short-sighted and completely out of step with the events of the last year: Katrina demonstrated that the person you just voted for may be the person that decides who gets rescued, and who dies in the mud. Voting is deadly serious business and your local leaders – mayor, county executive and governor – are the ones with the most control over your daily life. A million to maintain verifiable poll-type voting is the least we could spend to ensure that process has the barest minimum confidence of the county’s citizens.
Matthew Kelly
Everett
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