Life on the E-Campaign Trail: Why Didn't You Vote?

Since I was hired to work on one of the LAUSD campaigns as an e-mail marketer, I have been keeping my mouth shut on this blog about it. And I am not going to sit here and tell you why you should vote for my candidate in the runoff election or am I really going to talk about "life on the e-campaign trail," but I am going to tell you that this election was quite lame.

You Didn't Even Know
I'll start off with a story. On Tuesday, a man walked into his election polling location at 6:30 p.m. at Sunset and Vermont. He was the 36th person to vote since 7 a.m.

Raise your hand if you did not even know there was an election Tuesday. Hand Slap. Raise your hand if you found out about it the night of or the day after? Hand Slap. This was not a sexy election. No mayor, no governor or no president to quibble over. It was unopposed city council candidates and LAUSD board members.

Yet still, "education is supposed to be the number one issue in the minds of every thinking person in the English speaking world," host Warren Olney said on KCRW's Which Way, L.A.? on Tuesday night.

Voting Virginity
Unlike the November elections where the County of Los Angeles runs the show, this election was run out of the City. I love my city hall and usually find the county to be the unorganized one. So maybe it was just pure genius of timing, but thank god I received a note in the mail on Monday telling me that my polling place location had changed. What if the mail man was slow and got it to me the day later? Sure, I could look online, but when I checked, it still gave me my old location.

The change of location note gave me an address, the room and even the color of the table to check in. However, it failed to market the easiest way to identify the location. It was a city library.

Upon arrival at 9:35 a.m., 2 hours, 35 minutes into the election, my roommate and I found the place to be a bit chaotic. The volunteers could not even find me a pen with ease. "You opened at 7 a.m. right?" I asked. "Well, we were here at 7 a.m.," she smiled with an exasperated feigned grin, "But we just opened five-minutes ago."

It felt like this was the first time the city had run an election day.