All eyes, ears, heads, shoulders, knees and toes were on Kentucky for the primary election
Did you know award winning actress Reese Witherspoon is actually one of the leading voices for voting rights in Kentucky?
Or that musician, singer, songwriter, and actress Sheryl Crow once chained herself to the governor’s mansion in protest of limited polling places for Kentucky’s primary election?
Or that filmmaker and director Ava DuVernay singlehandedly stopped Kentucky from not having an election altogether?
If you didn’t know any of that then you must not have had #AllEyesOnKentucky, and I mean come on what kinda chump are you if you didn’t? This was the biggest attempt of voter suppression in modern history, according to some schmuck who lives in Los Angeles.
Kentucky voted yesterday and if you live in the state then odds are you probably knew that already, or hopefully you did.
If you live anywhere else in the world then you found out about the election a couple days ago and immediately became convinced that Mitch McConnell had so thoroughly screwed the election that he wiped everyone’s minds one was even happening.
I hate having to go to bat for electoralism because it’s so damned flawed and awful and ultimately brings about no substantive change, but what grinds my gears even more is the paternalistic attitude out of state people, especially those of the liberal persuasion, take towards this not too shabby commonwealth of ours.
The #AllEyesOnKentucky trend at its best was people concerned that voters were going to be severely limited in their ability to vote; at its worst the trend was a bunch of complete dunderheads looking down on Kentucky assuming the people here lack any sort of political/personal agency.
In summary, it was annoying as hell and one of the biggest cringefests I’ve been privy enough to witness on the Twitter dot com.
Most everything shared by celebrities and other well meaning, but ultimately annoying liberals, was either patently false or lacked the full context which isn’t surprising given the trend originated on Twitter.
Multiple things were true about Kentucky’s primary election:
Due to COVID-19, the primary was delayed for about a month
The plan for the election was reached in an agreement by the Democratic governor and Republican Secretary of State
The number of polling places across the state was reduced from 3,700 to under 200 (which was a big concern for the very populous Jefferson and Fayette counties)
Mail-in voting was expanded and pushed in a way that has never been done before (current estimates suggest 75% of people who voted this election did so over mail)
Most counties offered early in-person voting for several weeks before June 23 (this was not uniform across the board and a lot of these had to be scheduled by appointment)
The turnout for this election will end up being around 1 million people, which is the highest turnout for a primary in over a decade.
But, but even with all of these patently on its face good things combined, voter suppression is always an extremely likely (guaranteed) possibility.
Mail-in ballots, for example, aren’t a perfect system and many, many, many people who requested one simply never got one. If you’re not willing to jump through the hurdles to figure out what happened to your ballot, or take the step of voting in-person during a pandemic, then you’re just outta luck.
The state took a lot of steps to get the word out about the changes to this year’s elections by sending every registered voter a postcard outlining options for this year, but that’s not a perfect system. I don’t remember getting a postcard so I’m lucky I knew about the voting options already.
While people were encouraged to mail in their ballots for weeks or vote early in-person, you still had people voting on Election Day.
Now it’s not an individual’s responsibility to question why someone chooses a certain voting method over another but it’s the state’s responsibility to ensure that whatever option someone chooses is accessible and viable to them.
Having one polling place in the state’s largest counties was not an accessible option. Even with the high numbers of people in those counties who had requested, or already mailed back, a ballot it’s still not accessible to have a single voting station.
Voter suppression in any form is an intentional feature of every election that’s ever happened, in my opinion, because elections by nature are but a tiny concession of power from the ruling class. Those in power don’t actually want the greatest number of people to vote, they have never and never will.
Once you start at the assumption that every election, no matter how well intentioned or planned out, has the feature of suppression baked into it then it becomes increasingly easy to see why so many people don’t give a shit about voting and why voting is practically useless when it comes to actually getting anything done.
Enough of that tangent, voting in the Bluegrass State went…not as awful as it could have gone yesterday. Lines and wait times were pretty long in Lexington, despite the number of people who came out to vote in-person were low, and things in Louisville were going pretty smoothly up until the last hour or so.
Things got admittedly Bad in Louisville as the polls were getting ready to close at 6 p.m. (this is the time the polls have always closed in Kentucky for my readers in Manhattan too lazy to check). The result was the above video and several others showing would-be voters pounding on the doors of the expo center.
There was some bullshit about who constituted as being “in line” for the polls once 6 p.m. rolled around and it was decided that people in this lobby area weren’t but I’m not a judge so I can’t say why. Speaking of judges, one ruled that the polls were to stay open until 6:30 p.m., so the people out there were ultimately permitted to vote.
What was really a big clusterfuck was all the people who were waiting in line to park at the expo center so they could get in line to vote. Those people didn’t count as being in line for the polls, so they were told to buzz off. Again I’m just an idiot and not a Very Important judge so I can’t say why they wouldn’t count.
Lexington’s long wait times and the cars waiting in Louisville were undoubtedly the biggest debacles of yesterday’s primary.
The bright spot to come outta the primary is it showed us where the blinders were in this election and what can be done to make November’s election better. This is assuming that the options rolled out for the primary, again implemented largely because of COVID-19, are kept for November.
Given the current trend across the country of pretending the pandemic is over I’m not convinced the same concessions made for this election by Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state will be kept around if they can brush off the pandemic.
Now I wanna circle back to the entire reason I wrote this to begin with, the annoying paternalism of all these celebrities and well meaning liberals.
If you were just casually browsing Twitter one day and you didn’t know any better, like many of these people didn’t, you’d come to the assumption that Kentucky was actually requiring you to cut off your ring finger and fill out your ballot with your blood.
#AllEyesOnKentucky is the perfect Twitter trend for people to bandwagon on: popularized by celebrities and other well meaning people so it has to be legit, allows people the satisfaction of feeling like they’re doing something productive, giving folks a stamp on their Moscow Mitch Bad card and, above all else, gives people that sweet, sweet feeling of superiority over the rubes of Kentucky.
To me that’s what the whole trend boils down to: giving people a chance to become the hero and lead the hillbillies out of the dark. To lead us away from the evil grips of Mitch McConnell who we just keep stupidly voting for because we’re stupid and not because the Democrats who run against him have always shit the bed.
In the minds of the California beachgoers and New York pizza eaters, Kentucky is a state full of idiots lacking any common sense or political agency. Us feckless Mountain Dew drinkers don’t know how to make decisions or what’s going on in our backyards, so somebody has to set the record straight for us.
I’ve experienced this kind of well-meaning paternalism from out of state people before when I tell them I’m from Kentucky, hell I’ve experienced it from people in Kentucky when I tell them I’m from Appalachia.
But the thing to remember about these celebrities and other liberal #resistance folks from the Twitter is that they don’t actually give a shit about us or even about voting for that matter!
New York also had a primary election yesterday with people waiting in long lines and experiencing many of the same problems Kentucky faced. There wasn’t a #AllEyesOnNewYork trending though and you don’t see that trending because the common consensus in the liberal and celebrity induced mindset is New York = Good and Kentucky = Bad. This very scientific calculation is true because ????? I’m not a judge so again I can’t say why.
I don’t even know if it crossed the All Eyes’ crowd mind to consider that tweeting things about how the election would be an unmitigated disaster, instead of the mostly mitigated disaster it was, could also be called a form of voter suppression.
Look what I’m saying is that a whole lot of people showed their ass online for no legitimate reason because it was the happening thing to do, it was annoying and I hated it.
These people will most likely move on once the final election results are released and then come back again a couple days before the November election. Maybe someone should tell them about our new Voter ID law before November so they can catch up before they tweet.
Anyway, see you when the results are tallied and here’s hoping Charles Booker wins.