Don’t jump on me: I’m registered to vote but I’m not affiliated with any party. I’m not big on groups, political or otherwise. I nearly forgot that, because of lone-ranger stance, I couldn’t vote in the city’s primary election today.
Although I do have two observations: nearly none of my city-dwelling coworkers were even aware there was an election today, which the unnervingly prolific New York Times writer Sewell Chan has been driving home in a series of snarkily titled blog entries (e.g. see “Election? What Election? Oh, That Election” and “The 2007 New York City Election. Really.”). In fact, Chan’s notes were among the few I could turn up when researching the election online.
Which leads me to point two: if I had been allowed to vote in this election, how was I expected to get information on any of the candidates? I’d think in this age of everything-in-the-world-on-the-Internet there’d at least be a nonpartisan page with links to the candidates or even a list of their bios.
Maybe it’s out there and I missed it. The city does have a poorly designed website from which I scrutinized an exhaustive PDF list of all of the city’s candidates. But the only information it includes is what seat they’re running for and their address. Party-registered voters in my district, for instance, had the opportunity today to select seven out of 21 candidates for “Delegate to Judicial Convention.” What’s that, first off? And what’s all these people’s stories? They all live in my neighborhood and one even lives on my street; maybe I’m expected to stop by and talk with them about it. I’m certainly not going to make my decision based on the flyers and postcards people have been thrusting at me outside the subway station for the past two weeks.