I turned in my mail-in ballot, along with my wife’s, Saturday. Our vote process started before the pandemic; receive a vote-by-mail ballot, fill it out, then drop it off at an early voting station. Before 2020 we only applied once for mail ballots, and they arrived in plenty of time for us to fill them out and return them. Then sometime in the early 2020s the Republicans changed the rules (voter suppression) so that we have to regularly re-apply for a mail ballot. Why? No practical explanation was every given.

We both voted straight Democratic:

• Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President
• Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for Senate to replace Rick Scott
• Maxwell A. Frost (District 10)
• as well as a full slate of state and local candidates, all Democratic.

And then there were the state constitution amendments and questions (note that the questions apply only to Orange County Florida so they won’t be listed):

• Amendment 1 — partisan school board elections — NO
• Amendment 2 — right to hunt and fish — NO
• Amendment 3 — adult personal use of marijuana — YES
• Amendment 4 — right to abortion — YES
• Amendment 5 — homestead property tax exemption — NO
• Amendment 6 — repeal of public campaign financing — NO

Note that every amendment with a ‘NO’ was the Maga Republicans trying to game the system for their benefit alone. The rich trying to get richer.

While everyone is saying that this election is the most important election ever because of Trump, we’re at this uncomfortable spot because we’ve been lackadaisical about voting for decades, with the Republicans hollowing out state legislatures around the country using gerrymandering in particular to gain a political power lock far in excess of their numbers. Florida is different in that a lot of retirees with money have moved into Florida and skewed the political base towards the Republicans. That wouldn’t be so bad if Florida’s governor wasn’t so Maga and so incredibly incompetent.

That might be changing soon. Reports are coming out that a lot of people who have been suffering from the effects of hurricanes since Ian, and in particular the back-to-back hurricanes of Helene and Milton, are getting fed up with the real effects of climate change/global warming, to whit the increased ferocity and frequency of hurricanes hitting the state. Even when a hurricane such as Helene only goes past the state, the damage is horrific, especially to coastal communities.

Now all I have to do is sit back, track my ballot within the system, and ignore all the trolling and mis-information both foreign and domestic.