Excercising our right to vote, and the new ballot machine

In order to exercise our right to vote, my hubby and I woke up a tad earlier than usual to make it to the ballot before work.

When we arrived at our voting place and were welcomed by a few old ladies who told us where our distract’s voting station was. Lo’ and behold the complications…

At first the lady could not find my name. She found my husbands and was confused why it was not *my* name. Another lady quickly ran over, started helping out as well… my husband was set up with a ballot, a little manila folder that said “Private” (or something like that on it) and off he was to vote. Lucky for him, he looked at his ballot and realized they gave him the ballot from the *other* party!

Hubby says “You gave me the wrong ballot.”

The two ladies “What do you mean wrong ballot?”

Quickly another lady ran over and explained that you have to WATCH for which party the voter is coming from, you can’t just give out all the ballots from the SAME stack!

Quickly they had to rewrite everything onto the right parties information card.

Finally when you can vote, you have to go into this privacy booth, you put your ballot down, and what you see brings you back to HS. It’s each candidates name with little ovals next to them and you have to color them in! MULTIPLE CHOICE EXAM FOR YOUR ELECTION!

When you’re done coloring in the little ovals next to your candidates name you put your ballot back into the manila folder (to maintain privacy) and then you stand in line to wait for the scanner, hoping your ballot doesn’t fall out and give out who you voted for!

Of all the stupid things, you have to scan your ballot face UP! Why? Where’s the privacy?

Anyway, I dislike this new voting machine. I liked the old one way better!

PUtting Kiruv on ICe

I've been saying for years that commercial Kiruv is a complete and total waste of money. For years it was obvious that the frum community was in a huge "parnassa crisis" and the recession took it in for an even bigger economic down turn. And now, we have yeshiva's closing their doors (4 of them in Lakewood) and we have families who can barely afford to put food on the table.

While frum people are a bit slow in realizing *WHY* the community is in a crisis (if your men ain't working yet you're reproducing you shouldn't be surprised)... they're slowly coming up with ideas (mostly stupid ones) on how to keep money flowing... one of which is the kiruv thing... Well... ok... a letter writer on Matzav suggested that kiruv be put on ice for the time being.

The article suggests that no one really even knows if organization that do kiruv actually turn people frum.

:)

I'm personally on cloud 9. After all I've been saying for years YOU CANNOT MAKE SOMEONE FRUM. THE PERSON HAS TO BE OPEN TO IT. If the person is already open to it, you don't need to spend a ton of money on them, just INVITE THEM OVER TO YOUR HOUSE! IF they are *not* open to the idea of becoming frum, you can give them all the luxuries, they'll take advantage of them CUZ YOU'RE GIVING IT TO THEM FOR FREE, but they won't actually become frum from it.