There’s a hell of a lot to blog about, but it’s been a long day, it’s late, and I’m tired. So I’m just going to briefly mention a man I met at the rally today.
We’ve heard a lot about the 723 ballots that haven’t been counted because signatures were not scanned into the King County Elections computers. But what seems to have been forgotten is that these ballots were cast by real people… people like Jack Oxford, one of the 723 citizens who cast their ballots believing that every vote counts, only to find that theirs did not.
You may have seen Jack on the news, asking Dino Rossi not to take away his right to vote. Jack’s not a politician or an activist or a blogger, he’s just an ordinary taxpayer forced into the extraordinary situation of publicly pleading for his vote to count. He is also a veteran, who risked his life defending the basic democratic rights that Dino Rossi is now going to court to deny him.
If all we’re talking about is absentee ballots, and signature cards, and chain-of-custody, and canvassing and recanvassing and abstract stuff like that, it becomes easy to talk with authority about disenfranchising a disembodied voter because of a clerical error or a technicality. But unless we remember that each one of these ballots represents a real person expressing their most fundamental democratic right, we don’t know jack.