I just completed my absentee ballot for this year’s election here in New York City’s 45th assembly district. As with the linked article, I, too, have a dearth of choices. For two of the races (judgeships), there was only one candidate, while for the State Supreme Court, there were seven candidates for the six seats (five of them were endorsed by all three parties represented on the ballot [Democratic, Republican, and Conservative], one is Democratic-only, and the other Republican and Conservative only). And in the City Council race, there is the incumbent (registered Democrat) running as a Democrat, Republican, and Conservative, while his opponent (registered Republican) is running as an independent.

For the unopposed judgeships, I wrote in votes for “None of the Above,” as I did for five of the six seats on the Supreme Court (I only voted for the Democratic-only candidate). For the City Council, the incumbent couldn’t be bothered to tell us his top issues, nor to answer the questions about his positions on the major topics, while his challenger strikes me as too religiously doctrinaire, so I wrote in myself.

Why am I posting this, along with that article link? Because I agree with it emphatically… and I can’t think of any simple way to get us out of the mess. We have the vote… but we’ve given the two major parties so much power over all the features of our government that they’ve made our vote completely meaningless. While political gerrymandering is less of an artificial impediment here in New York City (there’s no feasible way I can imagine to make the districts competitive between the parties, when the overwhelming majority of registered voters are all in one party), it also results in the extremists who can’t even talk with the other side, which is the dysfunction we’ve been seeing in Washington. So I’m voting “none of the above” in protest of the system. As absentee ballots, they won’t be noticed; as write-in votes, they’ll be recorded as “write-in votes,” and no one will even bother to read whose name I wrote in. I think I’m just shouting at the wind, but it does make me feel marginally better. Then again, climate change will probably kill us before the political extremists can truly ruin the world, so there’s that.