Prior to Donald Trump, I’d been largely apathetic about voting and politics in general. I don’t love politicians. Does anyone? And I felt like it didn’t really make a difference whether I voted or not.
When Trump ran the first time, like a lot of people, I thought it was mostly a joke and didn’t take it seriously. When he started to get farther along, I did actually register to vote again so that I could vote against him. This was while we were still in Arizona.
We moved to Indianapolis in September, a couple months before the November election. And I didn’t get it together in time to register to vote. I actually tried, but in order to get an Indiana driver’s license, I also had to get my birth certificate changed.
It’s this frustrating requirement that has to do with the Real ID Act, where your name has to match exactly on your documents. So my social security card, my birth certificate, and my passport all had my name listed slightly differently. It was a long, complicated process to get my birth certificate changed, but I did it. I just didn’t do it before election time and couldn’t find another way to vote during the Trump/Clinton election.
I remember waking up that morning and the first thing I did was ask Siri who was the President. When Siri responded that Donald Trump was, I remember feeling like I was having a total ‘twilight zone’ moment. I checked the internet a few times, but yeah, it was true.
Of course there were so many people who saw him as a real threat from the start. But I was honestly just too privileged and too checked out. After Trump got elected, and over the course of those four years, I promised never to opt out like that again when it came to voting.
I made sure to vote in the Biden/Trump election while we were still in Indy.
We moved back to Arizona and started to see ads from Mark Kelly all the time on tv which prompted us to google if there was an election coming up. And yes, the primaries were coming up. So we hurried to register to vote in Arizona prior to that voting deadline. We got our AZ licenses and registered at the DMV at the same time.
We received our mail in ballots and completed those together. Here are the voting resources I used to make those selections:
- The Working Families Party website. This is a site I got from the @raisingimagination IG. You can select your state and see which politicians they endorse. This site helped with most of the ballot options, but in some of the categories, there wasn’t an endorsed candidate. For us in AZ, there wasn’t an endorsement for the governor. So we had to look to other resources to help make a choice.
- Vote USA website. This site provided a list of all our candidate options in our district. You just type in your address, select the election, and it pulls up everyone. From there, you can go to the candidates’ websites or social pages to do further research.
- The @so.informed IG account. I love this account for the helpful voting resources and updates on politics and other current issues. This particular post recommends using Ballotpedia.org, Votesmart.org, OpenSecrets.org, and Congress.gov to help make voting decisions.
- The States Project website
I’ll be honest. I don’t feel super confident when I vote. I often feel like I don’t know enough about the candidates or I don’t trust them to truly care or be able to make significant changes. But ultimately, it’s our responsibility to care about this. And we should try.
Plus, it feels much more empowering to do some research and make an attempt at an informed vote.
(Please feel free to share any other helpful voting resources in the comments and click here for more topics on learning/unlearning.)