Wake up people! It’s D-Day. Today is your last chance to register to vote on the EC Bylaws, and Thursday the 26th (yes, that’s the day after tomorrow) the last day to actually cast your vote.
I voted on Friday before posting my ‘things you need to know before you vote’ blog. I voted before posting the article for two reasons: firstly, just to make sure the system was working; and secondly, to be in the appropriately self-righteous frame of mind to bash you all over the heads with everything I could dig up that might help you decide how to cast your own votes. As I pointed out in my Friday post, you don’t vote, you don’t whine afterward. The stats for voters in the 2011 Canadian election are around 61%. I don’t for a moment hold out the faintest hope that the EC bylaw elections will come anywhere near that percentage, but geez it sure would be nice to break a thousand, which would be about a 15% improvement on 2012 when the bylaws were brought to their knees by a negatively incited bunch of British Columbians and Albertans.
In case your mouse hand is too exhausted from clicking on the link to my blog to go looking for the place to register for the bylaw vote, I’ll make it easy for you. Just one more click, here.
I considered sharing with you how I decided to vote, but then I thought better of it. See, all the talking and typing I did to learn as much objective information as I could and then put it out there for you to read was done in the spirit of good journalism. To then tell you how I voted and potentially influence your decision would be to cancel out all that effort at being fair and balanced. And I’m delighted to say that the feedback I’ve had indicates I was successful, since I received praise from both the ‘yay’ and the ‘nay’ camps. Not that everyone agreed with everything I wrote of course, but they did tell me I had managed to sift through and find the important nuggets on both sides.
Once the voting period ends, I will tell you how I voted. I believe that just like charity, transparency starts at home. I can tell you this about my vote though. I went back and forth several times on how I would vote during the days I researched the issues. It was not an easy decision, and my vote did not satisfy all my values. It couldn’t. There is no right vote here. You have to consider what matters most to you, and then follow the path on which those values lead you.
Now, having voted and done everything I can to encourage the rest of you to do the same, I’m off to California to see my beloved Theo, who is having his first winter in the sunshine.
Theo and Bridget at their CDI jog debut in Burbank last week
