Civic confusion

Tuesday was the day Primary elections were held in the great state of California, and there's nothing like it anywhere else.

I have to say that the method of marking ballots here is passing strange. First of all: paper ballots, no voting machines. In a state that considers itself the vortex of technological innovation. 

And the ballots? No filling in a circle, or—God forbid—punching out a hole with a slender metal prong. (“You’ll poke yer eye out, kid!”. Plus, the two most terrifying words in all of electoral history: hanging chads.) No—we have to connect the front end and the back end of an arrow-like thingie.

But not just any old way—a very specific, singular way, as you can see from this instruction sheet.

Now, I find this quite interesting. For one thing, all the sample candidates are all dead white males. I’m assuming that George Washington, Ben Franklin and Andrew Jackson need no introduction. John B. Weller was the fifth governor of California; can’t imagine how that qualifies to sit in the same company as Washington, Jackson or Franklin. William M. Gwin was one of our first Congressmen; but I imagine his gold-mine wealth propelled both that career and his placement on this sheet.

I always think of John C. Frémont as one of the dreadful political generals of the Union army who held high commands with disastrous results during the early years of the War Between the States. (Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” ran Frémont ragged in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, which in turn frightened the daylights out of the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C.) But he was one of our first U.S. Senators, and a founder of the Republican Party, so what’re ya gonna do?

Anyhow, evidently in our entire 164 years of statehood, there has been no woman and no person of color in the Golden State who has done anything as remarkable as Frémont, Gwin or Weller that would spark the Office of the Secretary of State (which manages election stuff) to use his/her name as an example here.

But the little instruction sheet is overly optimistic, in my opinion. Because I’m pretty sure that people who can’t figure out the right-turn-on-red thing will not be able to pick the correct marking method from among all the options that this thing gives you on marking your ballot. 

Now that I think of it, this may be the reason California does not use voting machines, either.