Thinking About Voting

Image courtesy of Stockvault.

In about two and a half weeks, I’ll be voting in Alabama’s primary. Since I’ve been avoiding politics as much as I’m able in the past months, I realize now that I have some homework to do regarding this upcoming election. There’s a bunch of candidates out there. Most of them in my area are garbage or incumbents running unopposed.

Since I’m mostly interested in the Democratic candidacy there, I’m going to pick a Democratic ballot. This will exclude me from the GOP races where candidates are running unopposed. On some level it should disturb me, since I wouldn’t be able to vote for a theoretically moderate GOP candidate. However, this is Alabama, and the GOP doesn’t make moderate candidates down here.

For example, take the GOP senate race. One candidate is running on how much he loves Donald Trump, a Yankee businessman. That same candidate also has run local ads attacking none other than Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback. The next candidate just ran an ad that claimed he’s the only person able to stop the liberals from attacking religious liberties. A third candidate is Roy Moore (again). None of these people are moderate or could be confused for someone who’s moderate. There’s no possible way for a moderate to try to vote for a less extreme candidate.

What this actually means is that my biggest decision will be who to vote for on the Democratic primary ticket. Right now there are about five vote-getting contenders: Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Warren, and Biden. Bloomberg is a potential sixth candidate, and I’ve seen ads for him all over the place. I want to limit my selection process to these candidates.

I can at first glance take Biden and Bloomberg off the list. Biden isn’t okay because of his tenure as VP. I didn’t like how he stuck his foot in his mouth, and I don’t think he’s a peacemaker. Bloomberg appears to be a similar candidate. I didn’t like his use of stop and frisk, and I don’t like his vague campaign promises. In short, both are poor style-over-substance candidates.

The other thing I wanted to mention right now are the campaign websites. Sanders and Klobuchar have the best websites right now. I can look through the candidates’ statements about their own platforms in their own words. Warren’s site makes me have to click through dozens of requests for cash. Buttigieg won’t let me look at his site without giving him my email address. Mayor Pete isn’t making it easy to vote for him.

I’ll probably post some more about stuff I find out about candidates. I’m trying to stay away from trending hashtags or flavor of the minute campaigns to get candidates to do whatever. After the last five years of Trump (candidate and President), I don’t pay attention to outrage anymore. As a result, if I find anything from social media (including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.) I’m going to do my best to treat it as fake until I can get verification from at least two different sources.