Whew! Hubby and I just voted our Washington State 2022 Primary Ballot. Our Senator, Patty Murray, is up for re-election. I’ve always voted for her in the past, but she has been our senator for decades, and that’s enough. We had a total of 17 other candidates to choose from in our Top Two primary. 

The 17 others include people who “prefer” the Socialist Workers Party, some other Democrats, some Republicans, a JFK Republican, the Independent Party (I think these are just independents; if we have an Independent Party, this is the first I’ve heard of it.) and no party preference.  Their candidate statements sounded goofy, interesting, and hmmm. I finally chose an independent who thinks our two party system is part of our problem right now, a sentiment I share. My choice won’t win. 

Our current Representative is Pramila Jayapal. She’s a very progressive Democrat, and I’m peeved with her over a couple of things, but most important, I don’t see her helping the Democrats come together. She’s quite determined to keep pulling the party as far left as possible, beyond what I’m comfortable with. So I exercised my option to vote for someone else. My choice won’t win this race either.

Next on the ballot were candidates for Secretary of State, the office that runs our elections. I regret not voting for Kim Wyman (R) in 2020. I was just fed up with Trump supporters in the Republican Party. Even though Wyman had done a superb job managing statewide elections for many years, including designing our state-wide mail ballot provisions, I just couldn’t vote for any Rs. She won nevertheless, but Biden chose her to work on election issues in DC. Our Democratic governor appointed a well-qualified Democrat to replace her, and he’s fine. I’m even less inclined to vote for any Rs right now unless they’re willing to state that they are “Never Trumpers,” which none of them did. So I could vote for a qualified Democratic incumbent or an independent, and I’m going to leave you guessing on this one.

Last but not least, we had three state legislative positions to vote on. Not one of our district reps had an opponent from any party this year. I often don’t vote if there is no contest, but I did vote for one this year, just because she is so smart and so reasonable and I just wanted to give her an “attagirl.” 

One disappointment is that so few women were running in these primaries! Yes, we have female incumbents in several spots, but just three of 18 senate candidates were women! One of eight candidates for Secretary of State is female. One of four for US Representative. What’s up with that? Why are men so willing to engage in these losing battles to unseat an incumbent? Are women too nice? Are we intimidated by the experience of the incumbent? 

I love our mail-ballot system! I love sitting at the dining table with all the materials in front of me, taking my time to read statements, and endorsements if there are any, talking with my husband if we have pros and cons to share. It’s a great system and I wonder why the whole world (or at least the whole country) isn’t doing it. We put our phone numbers on the ballots so it will be easy for the election staffers to call us if our signatures don’t match what’s on file. 

The people who think it would be easy to rig vote-by-mail systems must be very naive about how elections actually work. Here in Washington, we have so many districts for everything from school board to cemetery districts, to rural fire districts, to levee districts, to port districts, and more, each with boundaries that are independent of all the other districts. An amateur could not possibly create fake ballots that put an individual voter in all the right districts. 

One thing I wonder: if any of the election deniers win their contests this year, why should we believe that they really won – if our system is so easy to corrupt?