I eventually decided to call the elections office of the county for an explanation of the new mail-in ballot status. I became even more suspicious when the kind assistant director said that not all precincts in our town will be voting by mail. It turns out that it's more than somewhat based on local politics.
A few years ago two forces appeared locally. There has been a movement to split towns, cities and school districts into voting districts so that all citizens would be fairly represented. In some communities it took lawsuits, others happened as another item on the docket. Our community seemed to favor unification of the school districts as a high priority and in the process of the unification, new district lines were drawn for seven school board members. There was some weird that resulted.
In one case two board members were living next to each other. In the next election one no longer was on the board. There were other cases of more than one member in the same district as well as a few instances of an elementary board member living near a high school board member. When the election dust settled the schools were unified, to the betterment of education, and there are now seven school board members. Some representing some gerrymandered looking districts.
How does this lead to mail-in voting? Each of these new school board districts had to become a new voting precinct, and to qualify for a physical voting precinct there must be 250 registered voters in said precinct. The precinct I live in is one block from the core downtown of our town and at that point is a small sliver of a pizza, but it eventually becomes a large chuck of orange groves and bovine pasture outside of town up into the foothills nearby. In the spring we easily have more cows than people living in District 3.
As I looked at the district map I realized that having seven member areas we had to have seven precincts and some of the precincts will have less voting people than others, even though on paper the same number of inhabitants live in each precinct. Then I started doing some basic Math.
The town I live in has a few more than11,000 residents, and the surrounding rural area has at least another 3,000 people. Of those 14,000 let's says 50% of them are underage and not allowed to vote, so we're at 7,000 potential voters, or 1,000 per precinct. I was told that possibly 2 of the 7 precincts have the required 250 registered voters. So (2 @ > 250 = 500 voters ) + (5 @ < 250 = < 1,250) = < 1,750 registered voters out of 14,000 + or -. Less than 25 % of people deems it important to vote.
One doesn't have to wonder whyAmerica is failing.
