today. I. voted. a rant.

Today, I voted. I have been an absentee voter for the past almost ten years. I decided to do it that way because it was just too easy to miss an election because of work or one of the million other things on my mind. Now I vote for every school board, initiative or whatever comes along. When I pay bills for the month of the election, I vote. A lot of people my age and younger don’t feel that their votes count. While there has been a lot of questionable (to put it mildly) behavior in the past national elections, after all of the blood my people shed just to get a ballot, we should all make a way to vote.
If you vote absentee, you don’t have to make it to the poll place on time. You don’t have to worry about someone changing the location (or announcing a locale change) of the polling place. You also don’t have to worry about a computer marking your vote for another candidate, because most absentee ballots are manual. There will always be dishonest politicians, but there is a lot less wiggle room with physical ballots. Just PLEASE take out the chads.

I need some of us to do better…
And while I’m on the subject of voting and political awareness, Americans in general need to do better. We need to teach our children how the electoral system works, how our local elections work and how to correspond with our lawmakers when we take issue with things that are going on in our cities, states and nation. Children also need to be taught how to research a candidate and not blindly follow campaign commercials because they make them feel good.
Most people don’t know who their local government officials are, save the mayor and maybe the superintendent of schools. They don’t have any idea of who is representing them in the senate or in the house of representatives nor do they know how to reach them in the event their best interests are being attacked.
For African Americans, the struggle continues. We don’t have the grandfather clause and literacy tests any more, but we do have political opponents who will make announcements on our radio stations that polling places have been changed when they haven’t. The least we can do is organize and apply conscious thought to our political activities and remember that what affects the least of us affects all of us.