Saturday, October 26, 2019

Voted

I usually blog about my voting experience directly after the election, but I've had an extremely busy week so I'm not getting to it until now.

Voting went literally as quickly as humanly possible. I walked out the door straight to the polling place  (pausing only to pet two friendly dogs who proactively greeted me).  There was no line at the door, there was no line at the table for my poll, I cast my vote immediately and walked straight home. No more than 10 minutes elapsed between locking my door on the way out of the apartment and unlocking the door on the way back in.

I saw more than the usual amount of signs this time around, in the usual proportions. On the weekend before the election, a fringe candidate in my riding put up a bunch of signs on lampposts - some at the perfect height to smack pedestrians in the face, others so high up that the property owners would need a ladder to remove them. The next day, I noticed that many of the face-height signs were battered and torn.

I got one flyer each from my Liberal, NDP and Conservative candidates. The Liberal and NDP flyers were the usual boilerplate. The Conservative flyer managed to assume both that I'm wealthier than I actually am and that I have a harder time making ends meet than I actually do. It also failed to mention the candidate's name.

The Conservative candidate also had a branded SUV that they kept parking just outside the riding (probably because my neighbourhood marks the boundary of three ridings and street parking is scarce.) I can't tell if this was an advertising measure or if that was just their campaign vehicle. (Do candidates in transit-intensive urban neighbourhoods have campaign vehicles?)

One thing I do appreciate is that my Liberal candidate's campaign office configured their phone service so that a name showed up on call display. I find that fewer and fewer callers are doing that lately, and I particularly appreciate knowing who's calling when it's for a legitimate reason. I don't know if any of the other campaigns called me. I didn't get any voicemail messages from them or see any of their names on call display, and I don't answer the phone to unknown numbers.

No comments: