rocking the toddler vote

Gabe and I walked to our polling location on Tuesday to cast our vote. We both walked, which was a notable occasion since those 3 blocks were the farthest Gabe has ever walked. It took 45 minutes, but still, it was exciting. He tried to go inside every house we passed, and if there happened to be people outside putting out trash or getting into their cars, well, that deserved 5 minutes of waving and yelling at them and waiting patiently until they left.

I'd come prepared with crackers in case the voting took too long for Gabe's patience, but the process took less than 5 minutes. I did notice, however, that when they looked up my address, Josh wasn't listed. At first I thought maybe it was because he categorizes himself as Independent, but that wasn't it because all parties were listed on the sheet. The polling people told me to have him come down that evening to sort it out and probably they could find him on the "Inactive" sheet and he'd still be able to vote.

Now, for the last month, Josh has been saying that he needs to sit down and review the candidates to better make a decision about who he'd like to vote for. In the meantime, I've done my own campaigning about who I think he should vote for, which isn't fair, but whatever. I'm pushy.

I called him at work after I voted to let him know about not being on the voting list, and he said he'd go down after work. Again, he casually mentioned that he needed to review the campaign websites to decide his vote, ON SUPER TUESDAY. So he's had months, and still hasn't decided.
Whatever, I just let the comment slide because I didn't want him to get annoyed with my harping.

I have a class on Tuesday nights, so when he got home, we airkissed as I ran out of the house. Josh loaded Gabe into the stroller, because another 3 block walk would have been too much and went to the polling location to straighten out the registered/not registered issue and vote.

When I returned that night, I harassed him about who he'd voted for, and he didn't want to tell me! I kept leaning on him and finally he admitted it. Who did he vote for?

HE ABSTAINED. Abstained! From voting! He went down there, registered himself, corrected the error, asked for a ballot, took it over to the voting booth, and then filled in the bubble that asked if you'd like to abstain! He says it doesn't really matter to him who wins, and that he didn't want to make an uneducated vote since he never had time to do the full research on the candidates.

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to claw my eyes out. I'm letting it go, though, because if not, he'll never talk to me about politics again. Sigh.