It seemed early, and you may have felt the same dysphoria we did when the announcement flew around last week. “Early Voting Begins in Piedmont!”

As you are aware, Election Day 2022 is not until 08 November, or 40 days from this time zone on the Eastern Seaboard. For whatever reason, the Commonwealth government produced by previous elections decided that early voting should permit nearly fifty of them. There had been some discussion about attempting to be “the first” in the country last Friday when the season officially began. And therein was the mild controversy about the simple act of exercising the franchise while minimizing pain and inconvenience.

We are in favor of that, though of course the easiest means of so doing would have been via a mail-in ballot, never having had to get up from the powered recliner chairs in the Great Room at Refuge Farm. You probably have heard that was controversial in the last General Election. There were some strange events that circulated around that time of pandemic and electoral politics. Election proceedings were changed in means that did not conform with existing law. Some states mailed out ballots to everyone on the voting lists, which included many people who were technically not eligible. Those who had passed away since registration are in that column, which caused a fair amount of unease and is the reason we are generally suspicious of any ballot that does not include visual confirmation of photographic ID and continuous sustained respiration. It seems only fair.

The process we have always followed in Virginia is to use the “Absentee in Person” voting option that has been around for several years. It was intended to provide a secure means of casting a ballot by participating at the County Registrar’s Office, producing a valid photo ID, being issued a ballot, feeding it into a scanner located in a large room adjacent, returning the ink pen (not a Sharpie) and being offered a little “I Voted Today” decal to wear on the breast of our shirts. Given the extra days, we feel it meets the necessary ballot security standards and is superior to the mail-in process since each ballot is associated with a living registered voter.

Problem lies in the matter of getting to the polls, the nature of crowds and waiting lines, and the agony of waiting in lines to complete a process that is inconvenient. Yesterday had been a target day for an attempt to meet franchise requirements. On Tuesday, we looked up the phone number to have a means to ask if the office was crowded and how long the wait might be. We didn’t call immediately, since there was a scheduled visit from the Wound Nurse that required being on the farm property a good chunk of the afternoon.

There was no conflict on the calendar was open yesterday. A small group of us could see no conflict and got ready to go without an advance call. Success was completely dependent on how many other citizens used our criteria for participation. We agreed that if there was a line by the door we would skip it, perhaps venturing on to the Chick-Fil-A outlet down the road.

To our mild surprise, there was no line apparent. Parking the truck was easy. Unlimbering the walker with the folding seat from the bed was a bit of a challenge, but provided the means to be seated when necessary if we became stuck in a line. We rolled up the street from the truck in a stately procession and operated the power door to the County Revenue Office. It was close to lunch, and the first floor service lobby had mild activity though no one was waiting in the hall near the elevator bank. There appeared to be no knot of eager or hysterical voters between our small party, so we pushed the button to summon the car.

It was a deliberative process as usual. If this were the only Election Day with dozens or hundreds of people in line, it would have been a bottleneck. Of course, if this were actually The Day, we would have been at the Baptist Church out in rural Stevensberg near the farm with no elevator requirement at all. But for this convenience on this day we almost tumbled out of the car at the second floor, ignoring the little sign that claimed only two passengers were permitted per trip. We wheeled assertively toward the glass-fronted service desk and requested a ballot from the young man behind the counter, complying with the sign that advised us to have our ID’s ready. He nodded and checked the driver’s license numbers on the voter registration roll on his counter, and asked each of us to confirm our identity. He then handed each of us with a ballot a black pen encased in plastic.

We did so without incident, noting that the staff to handle our handful of ballots outnumbered the voters. That was a proportion we liked. We wheeled into the room next door to actually mark the ballot, actually using the walker as a convenient seat for the deliberate process of carefully marking the one little circle of three that were the only choices.

We do not choose to share who we voted for, but it was a remarkably simple process. There was the incumbent Blue candidate. There as the challenging Red candidate, and a “Write In” circle with a blank line to apply a name of our choosing. We don’t know if any of us wrote in the Chairman, which would have shown company loyalty. The other three bent over to carefully fill in one of the three circles. It was done with precision and took less than a minute. We rose nearly in a synchronous manner to advance to the scanning machine near the exit door. We fed them into the machine, face up as the instructions directed us. The exit supervisor advised us to deposit our single-use pens in a box, handed us a sticky decal emblazoned with the words “I Voted Today!” and waved generally in the direction of the elevator door.

That was it. Maybe five minutes, start to finish. Now we can ignore everything else for a little more than a month. Voting this early will avoid someone else voting in our stead, and we are done until they decide to get around to counting them. That is, of course, the only important part in this, since we demonstrated we were alive and the ID matched the general principle that we were both alive and registered.

So, once back on the pavement with no one in line behind us, we felt good. “Mission Accomplished.”

There were another couple short stops to make- getting a stock of cash money an important one- but that was it.
We drove back to The Farm after a stop at the bank machine. Now, we have no need to be wakeful and watching. Well, we will be watching for irregularities. We have no idea if the blip on the machine will ever be matched up with the ballot, or counted that way. We do know that our names will be unlikely to be recycled, or at least we think so. We are as compliant as possible, and without the trip to the Registrars, having the prospect of a line and discomfort to deal with hanging out there in the future some place.

We have a few people in the Fire Ring who are deliberately not voting. Their reasons are logical and consistent, since they feel that marking one of the three blank circles implies our confidence in any of them actually doing what the television tells us they really and truly believe. Not voting is a vote, of sorts. As the real election day eventually comes to pass, it is possible they will find out that someone helped them out and voted for them.

Their choice for the former though not the latter may be counted, and that doesn’t even requirement respiration. But we do the best we can, you know? Now we can just delete the unread messages in the morning queue instead of having to actually read them. And there was no line.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com