This week was primary week in NY and KY, where I am and where I was. So let’s look at some voting info.
I voted Tuesday for the first time in New York. NY has gone to paper ballots, yay! Presumably that will make certain types of voting hacks impossible. I was the only voter in the gym at about 6 PM. There was increased voter participation, but there were also wildly increased absentee ballot requests (I didn’t do that in time). The vote volunteers told me that they’d had slow but steady participation all day. The voter scans the ballots after filling them out, so the computer can then quickly tally the results, but the ballots are kept if the results raise any questions. The scanner told me that mine was the 138th scan. I understand KY too used scannable paper ballots this year, as well as increased absentee ballot availability. The ballots are filled in with dark black pen, so one’s answers cannot be erased; if a mistake is made, instructions are to return them and take another; the volunteers destroy the wrong ones. Did others have that experience? Does anyone know if this method is possible to scam somehow (I fully expect *Rump and his minions to try)?
Before 1980, a smaller proportion of women voted than men. Since 1980, a larger proportion of women voted than men with an ever-widening gap, from 61.9% v. 61.5% in 1980, to 66.3% v. 64.6% in 1992 (President Bill Clinton’s first term IIRC, the highest participation for both), to 63.3% v. 59.3% in 2016, the last numbers reported. I was not able to find gender-based info for primaries or between years or now, but there were surges in voting interest this year, and presumably absentee ballots would allow a lot more women to vote, since childcare, eldercare, transportation, and other issues that more highly impact women might be resolved when we don’t need to leave home. I do plan to request absentee for November — not worried about them being stolen from my mailbox, like the Orange Dope suggests! We have never had anything stolen from the mailbox. And my 85+-year-old mother refused to go this past Tuesday, despite all the assurances that they would be as careful about infection as possible. My only concern is that if *Rump wins the in-person vote and then loses the absentee vote, he’ll claim fraud and this might make it easier for him to refuse to concede. Any thoughts on this dilemma in the Comments would be appreciated!
Here's an interesting history lesson on voting:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/… :
Women won the right to vote in 1920. Prior to that, they could vote on some issues such as schools (interestingly to me, KY was the first to allow such votes by women!). To do that, men invented voting machines that could be changed depending on the gender of the voter:
In 1899, Lenna R. Winslow of Columbus, Ohio, applied for a patent for a “Voting-Machine.” He had created a mechanical system that adjusted the ballot the voter would see based on whether that voter was a man or a woman. With a simple flip of a switch, “the mechanism is automatically set to restrict certain classes of voters by and during their entrance to the booth,” the patent application states.
(I double checked other sites, "Lenna" is indeed a man! So not a woman’s invention this time. Too bad!)
Back to the present: Election Results: Many races from primary elections this week are still too close to call, but there is increased participation by women running for office. Unfortunately, not nearly as much of an increase as we’d like to see! For more information as the counts progress over the next week or so, the Center for American Women and Politics looks to be a good source.