Montgomery County voters who want to vote in person, but cast their ballots before Election Day, are heading to early voting centers like this one in Rockville starting today. Early voting here in Maryland runs through Monday, November 2, 2020, from 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM daily.
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| Executive Office Building early voting site in Rockville |
You can see the early voting locations and the current wait time at each on the Board of Elections website. Around noon today, the current wait time at the Executive Office Building voting site in Rockville was the longest at a whopping 90 minutes. Jane Lawton Community Center in Chevy Chase and Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department were shown with 45 minute waits. The wait time at the Silver Spring Civic Center and Wheaton Recreation Center, conversely, was zero minutes at noon.
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| Early voting sites with the longest wait times on the first day of early voting |
One other tricky hurdle for voters besides the lines is matter of the ballot questions. Voters wishing to support the citizen questions on the ballot that would prevent the Montgomery County Council from voting to exceed the annual cap on property taxes, and change the structure of that County Council to nine smaller districts (and eliminate the four At-Large seats) will want to vote "Yes" on Questions B and D.
Questions A and C are questions with similar wording the Council itself placed on the ballot. But if A and C are approved, they will cancel out Questions B and D, and neither change sought by the citizens who signed petitions would take place in that event.
An alternative perspective on Propositions A & C vs. B & D: B & D are being championed by failed (unelected) Republican candidates who have repeatedly been unable to win local elections, because their views are out of step with the majority of the county's population. Sure, they were able to spend money to get enough signatures for the propositions to get on the ballot, but that hardly makes them representative of the "county's citizens". Propositions A & C were at least developed by elected county leaders who should be representing the county's voters. I believe they are. A & C address some of the reasonable ideas citizens want, but are more reasonable and less extreme than B & D. A & C would expand and increase local representation on the Council while retaining some at-large representatives to provide important county-wide perspectives; and C would put reasonable limits on county budgets and property taxes without forcing complicated draconian constraints that benefit specific special interests and could hurt the Council's ability to provide essential services including ones related to the pandemic.
ReplyDelete1:25: I disagree for several reasons.
ReplyDeleteFirst, anyone can look at the list of petition signatories for both B and D, and verify that the majority of them are Democrats or independents.
Second, I'm not aware of any "failed Republican candidate" among the organizers of Question D, and Robin Ficker is the only candidate associated with the Question B effort, and he's not a failure - he not only was elected in the past, but has successfully gotten multiple ballot questions of his approved by voters.
Third, while each citizen question represents nearly 20,000 residents who signed those petitions, they only pass when a majority of voters approve them. So B and D results will represent 100% the will of the people.
Finally, at least some Republicans like myself have not lost elections because our views "are out of step with the majority of the county's population." In fact, the Seventh State blog said I was running "to the left of the incumbents" in many respects. I've been on the right side of every major controversy in the County for over a decade. Transportation, schools, fiscal responsibility, public safety, and other issues are non-partisan.
No Republican has fairly lost a County election since 2002. Howard Denis, Connie Morella and Nancy Dacek were ousted by the cartel gerrymandering their districts, not on their own merits. As of 2018, things were so bad that there were no general election Council debates, and not a single sentence written about the general election Council races in the Washington Post. You'll note the Post recently has provided extensive coverage of the D.C. Council races in the Metro section. The disparity in coverage proves the failure to cover MoCo races was intentional as part of their backroom partnership with the MoCo Cartel.
And let's not forget the voter and election fraud in 2018, which can be verified by anyone who reviews the anomalous voting results at dozens of precincts countywide in the At-Large Council races.