Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The Backwoods State

Arkansas has a reputation of being behind the times, backwards, backwoodsy, redneck state. My little sister lives in John McCain's home state. People sometimes get these states mixed up because of their abbreviations, AR for us and AZ for McCain's, but most people likely think of AZ as progressive.

Patsy told me of a conversation she had with the AZ sister about trying to find out where to go vote in AZ. She knew where she went to vote if she waited till Nov. 4, but she did not know where to go vote early. Sister made 3 phone calls before someone told her where to go. The first two people she talked to told her she could not vote until Nov. 4. I do not know where Sister called that she could not get them to tell her where to go, but I knew in my county the county clerk is in charge of voting. I called there and they told me where to go in less than a minute.

I have been hearing ads on the radio about voting and going to a certain website to find out about voting, so I thought probably Sister who lives in the progressive A state probably had a state website that would tell her where to go, when the real people failed in their duty. I searched and found the AZ state website, and found the www.az.gov. In AR the Sec of State handles voting stuff, so I tried the Sec of State link from the AZ gov site. I searched and searched for at least 2 or 3 minutes, but I never did find anything on the AZ.gov website that said you could vote early or anything that would tell me where to go. It did say to call your County Recorder office, so maybe if I know Sister's county I could have eventually found the voting place, but nowhere did I find anything that said anything about voting early. They say McCain is behind the times concerning computers and the net. Maybe Patsy needs to get an outreach job from AR to AZ to teach all the old retired people out there about computers.

Now, for AR the backwoods state. As I said, I had heard on the radio about a website on voting, so I went to www.arkansas.gov and looked for something to tell me where to go. I hunted around for a minute or two with little success. The was a link on the page that said something about our Sec of State, Charley Daniels and voting, so I clicked on it. There was all sorts of information on that page that said early voting would be held in each county's courthouse and if you wanted to know if there was another voting place, call your county clerk. Then there was a link to search and see if you are registered. I tried that and found I was registered. From there, there was a button to click on to see where to vote (polling place). I clicked it and it said the Meth. Church in GF, which I already knew. But that is on Nov. 4th. If you want to vote early in Carroll Co., you go to the county court house.

I really could not believe that Sister called a government phone number and the person answering the phone did not even know she could vote early. I was dismayed that I did not find anything on the gov website about early voting.

The moral of this story is, if you are lost and need someone to tell you where to go, don't call the government in AZ. I wonder if AK has information about where to go vote on their government website.

1 comment:

Sister--Helen said...

I called the number MSNBC gives out 866 -our-vote....Finally I did get on the web site of Helen Purcell county assessor....and there was a number to call... Now when you call a number dealing with Government in AZ there are about a dozen prompts and a 30 minute wait...But I was determined so az Patsy sats, I did the deed ...I found out the address but it is a government building and while driving there I was a little concerned exactly where in the building it would be...I did not need to worry when I got there I saw signs as big as be...and a line as long as half a city block!