About a year ago, some strange ballot wording opened the door to victory – or at least continued existence – to the Mecklenburg County Transit Tax. It seems that such wording may actually be handed down from the state.
You see, in most places, if you were to go into a polling place and vote a straight ticket, you would expect that your vote would include casting your lot for the president on that party. Not so in The Old North State.
Apparently in 1967, state lawmakers decided that Democratic candidate Hubert H. Humphrey might adversely affect the rest of the Democrats running, so the president was removed from the straight-party button, and that was that.
Since then, no one has thought much about it, and since we all know that no one is able to read or pay much attention to what they do because they don’t have that much time on their hands, North Carolina has an inordinate amount of voters who cast no vote at all for president – even if they turn out and vote for every other election on their ballot.