I was sitting there on Sunday morning....reading through the local news, and suddenly came to realize that there was going to be this localized Arlington election for the city council. One of the members had taken some position and vacated their city council position. The election was going to be held on Tuesday (yesterday). To be honest....it's mostly by my habit of reading the Washington Post on occasion, that I came to notice this election....otherwise, I wouldn't even have known about it.
So we had three candidates....a Republican, a Democrat, and a Green Party individual. The only key factor I could see was that the Green Party individual was standing up against several infrastructure projects which had been rushed up and passed by the council. So I made this decision to vote for the Green individual. Yeah, it's a bit odd....but then it's just a city council slot.
So I walked yesterday morning....about a mile over to the recreation center in the neighborhood, and voted. It was an odd episode because they had three desks set up to handle voters, but as far as I could see....no one was voting. By last night, the total number of votes cast for Arlington was around 16k votes.....which would have been around 12-percent of the registered voters of the county. It was for all practical purposes.....one of the lowest turn-outs in the county's history. The Green individual? Well....they lost in a big sort of way, but still pulled out a 1k votes. The Democratic candidate won, with just 900 votes to spare.
I'm guessing that of the 14k voters....probably over ten percent were like me....just accidentally finding out about the election at the last minute....which really says alot about democracy, and the fact that you can flip a coin on candidates and just pick someone without much thought about the situation.
