Today is Election Day! Voted for all things good against all things bad. The polling place is next to a pond where there used to be ducks, then they started chasing them away because they shit on the paths, then they let them back in, and now they’re gone again. Didn’t find anything about ducks on the ballot. But I did learn something interesting.
There’s one name on the ballot for mayor of our Leesburg. It’s Kelly Burk, the incumbent mayor, running for a sixth term, and running completely unopposed, in a city of almost 50 thousand people. For city council, there are three candidates for three seats. So they could’ve skipped printing the entire local ballot. It’s enough for the number of votes in favor to be greater than the number of times someone else’s name is written in by hand. Funny thing is, 2024 was the first time in her career she ran unopposed — before that, she’d won three-way races twice. She’s 73, and overall everyone likes her.
But it gets even more interesting. There’s a town near us called Hamilton, and by the deadline no one at all had filed to run for mayor 🙂 That’s normal in small towns. In Minnesota in 2016, they counted more than 250 elected offices that not a single candidate had signed up for. And in the town of Rothsay, the mayor was elected seven times in a row as a write-in — he was never once a candidate. While googling the topic just now, I found that in Minnesota, in Lakeland Shores in 2020, a guy named Tim Hatten asked his wife and neighbor on election morning to write in his name. He got three votes — and he was on the city council. Another resident got two votes, and eight others got one each. Tim learned that he’d won from a journalist.
But it turns out people are actually very active about writing in names by hand. Strom Thurmond got into the U.S. Senate that way in 1954 (63% write-in votes), as did Lisa Murkowski in 2010 — after she lost the Republican primary. in Buffalo, in 2021, Mayor Byron Brown lost the primary, ran as a write-in — and more than 60% of voters wrote in his name.
Moving on. For the House of Representatives, we have a Democrat, a Republican, and one independent — a middle school teacher, father of two, former realtor. I don’t know what the Republican is hoping for — they haven’t won a Senate election in our state since 2002.
There are also questions on the ballot about allocating money and amending the state constitution. Well, in case anyone didn’t know, the U.S. has a federal constitution, and each state also has its own clarifications, which are also a constitution. One of the questions is about rainbow marriage, the second is about voting rights after prison. Virginia is the only state where a convicted person loses the right to vote for life, and only the governor can restore it, personally.
By the way, Election Day isn’t a day off. States decide for themselves whether to make it a holiday or not. Ours, along with about a dozen other states, decided to do so. But that doesn’t mean anything except that government offices and the DMV are closed (though in Washington, those two are a very large chunk) Private employers aren’t required to close; only government employees get the day off. So everyone is working as usual. But the history of this holiday is wonderful: in 2020 Virginia made Election Day a holiday, and to keep the number of holidays from growing, removed Lee-Jackson Day from the calendar — the birthday of Confederate generals Lee and Jackson, which had been celebrated since 1889. They traded the Confederates for voters, an even swap.
