Since I’ve been old enough to vote, I’ve always had folk around who wanted me to help them with their ballots. Back in the 60s and 70s, it was mostly older neighbors who would walk over and talk about the elections. They knew I worked at City Hall and was very familiar with the names on their ballots. For quite a while there, it was several older nuns in the neighborhood, who just didn’t feel they knew enough to make good choices without my explanations.
Nowadays, the group tends to be much younger people, non-newspaper reading friends, unfamiliar with the whole process, but particularly not sure which judge is which party – and, of course, in Ohio, we don’t list the political parties of judges. We list the parties of everyone else, but not our jurists and wanna be jurists.
So I just tell them who is which party, what the various ballot issues mean as far as I’m concerned, the key facts and figures as I see them. I don’t know how they vote, of course – they could be automatically voting the opposite way on anyone whose record I feel good about. But it’s interesting how many folk will ask.