Carol and I are getting ready to cast our vote in the upcoming election. Early voting starts today at Cohasset Town Hall, and we wanted to be ready. So we sat in the kitchen and did some research on the candidates and the ballot questions.
We no longer have a real newspaper in Cohasset. There’s the Coastal Mariner, but it’s a typical Gannet local paper, with very little actual local news. There’s the online Cohasset Anchor, which has some good lifestyle stories but it’s not a place I’d look for hard news on local elections. As for the regional newspapers, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger used to be an OK source for local news, but it’s yet another Gannet paper where staff has been cut to the point where there’s not much local coverage any more. As for the Boston Globe, they pretty much ignore southeastern Massachusetts.
So we turned to the League of Women Voters for information about state and local elections. We went to https://www.vote411.org/ and entered our address. Up popped a list of every candidate for every race. We looked at the Massachusetts Information for Voters booklet, which is mailed to everyone in Massachusetts and contains comprehensive information about the five ballot measures we vote on this year.
In this post, while I’ll offer some opinions about the election, more importantly I’m going to reflect on democracy and the democratic process. And my first reflection is this — we hear a great deal about the presidential election, both in the news, on social media, and in face-to-face interactions. This emphasis on the presidential election makes it seem like we’re voting for emperor or king. But U.S. democracy encompasses far more than Harris vs. Trump (and before you complain, I listed those two candidates in alphabetical order). In fact, the overemphasis on the presidential election is harming our democracy. So let’s talk about all those other elections.
We started by looking at the candidates for the U.S. Senate. The League of Women Voters sends out these standard questions for all Senate candidates to answer:
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