I try to keep this blog relatively politically zone-free. But, with an election like this one, it is hard to not at least acknowledge it.
Here we are voting early on October 30th, the Friday before Halloween and election day. Being very cautious, we registered to vote by mail the last we of August. It is a pandemic, after all. Then, we after we after week, we waited for our voter registrations to clear. By the time we hit the 4th of October, when all early ballots in California were being mailed out, and we had still not cleared through the system, we began to get concerned.
At first, we contacted the nice people of Alameda County.. We were informed that they would 'check into it.' I sent a letter (email) off to our State Representative Eric Swalwell. I received back a nice form letter stating they don't actually read their email. A letter (again email) to California Governor Gavin Newsom. That form letter reply came with some contact numbers for Alameda County. See above.
I even sent an email of to the Democratic candidate for President, Joe Biden. My reply to that letter claimed that once the election was over they would try to address what ever problems we may have. Shockingly, I have not received any further contact from the President-elect about my voting issues.
The problem, we discovered, is we cannot use a P.O. box as an address to register to vote. AND, the state did not want to accept the address of the RV park we have resided in for 14 months as our permanent address. After contacting the city, and county and pretty much everyone we could think of several times a week all through October we thought we would not be allowed to VOTE. AAAHHHH!
Then, someone working at the voter registration office in Oakland came up with the brilliant idea of having us register our address as a street corner. Just like they do for anyone who is homeless. So, for the purpose of voting, we officially lived at the corner of 12th street and Valley. The corner where the RV park is located.
Two days later, way too later for a mail in ballot, we cast our ballots in person.
Election night started at our #homesweetrollinghome with a fine collection of icy cold drinky drinks. Anything to get through the end of this crazy election season. Little did we know the election was nowhere ending.
Early, early numbers
November 7th, 2020
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