With the election on Tuesday being a local level event, it feels like the most low-key, quiet election I can think of. It's quite nice. I've seen lots of social media drama about the Fitchburg election, but nothing about Lowell's.
The last local election had a steady stream of people stopping by the house to chat and leave a piece of literature. I felt popular and slightly important. This year, if I didn't already know there was an election on Tuesday, I wouldn't be able to tell there is an election. I still haven’t seen a sample ballot and don’t know how many offices are even up for election.
There are signs downtown in storefront windows, but I don't know which ones apply to me and I'm usually walking too fast to pay attention to them anyway. My neighborhood has hardly any yard signs, there have been only a handful of postcard mailers, and nobody has knocked on the door to attempt to woo my vote.
For local leadership we have a city council, mayor, and a city manager, but the voters don’t choose the mayor. The city council votes for the mayor from the council membership. That is a process I don’t understand, but I’ve met our current mayor several times at non-profit events and I really like him.
There was one mailer
from the current city councilor for my district but I can’t tell if it’s just a
“hey, remember me, I’m your councilor” reminder or if there is a challenger. If there is a challenger, I've gotta say, they're doing a really crappy job of making their interest known and the incumbent has my vote purely on familiarity and effort.
Tuesday could be fun. It usually takes longer to drive, park, and get into the building where I vote than to actually cast the ballot. I don’t expect anything different this week, unless there are some of those lengthy and confusing questions that usually require a legal degree to understand. We’ll see.
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