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You can view and update your voter record, find your local polling location so you know where to go and cast your ballot, and view a full sample ballot including your city or town's unique local elections (i.e. state legislature, town council, school committee) and referendum questions at the Rhode Island Secretary of State's website: https://vote.sos.ri.gov/.
Election Day is on Tuesday, Nov. 5. I respectfully urge all Options Magazine readers to make a plan to vote.
Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m., and as long as you are standing in line and waiting your turn to vote by 8 p.m., the law guarantees you the right to vote.
Defeating Donald Trump and rejecting the far right authoritarian vision he and his allies seek to manifest in this country is our most important civic duty. It is a duty not to some abstract conception of a nation, but to each other, to keep each other safe. Rhode Island is blessed to have more than one alternative to that vision represented on the ballot on Tuesday.
You can view and update your voter record, find your local polling location so you know where to go and cast your ballot, and view a full sample ballot including your city or town's unique local elections (i.e. state legislature, town council, school committee) and referendum questions at the Rhode Island Secretary of State's website: https://vote.sos.ri.gov/.
The state and local referendum questions on the ballot will decide on the issuance of bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which are essentially long term loans used to fund things like affordable housing, public school facilities, and infrastructure related to climate change and the state's key industries. While changes to our physical and political environments sometimes appear to come from on high, steered by forces beyond our control, it is actually us, the voters, who make these huge financial decisions about how to allocate future taxpayer dollars when we approve or reject bond issues.
Question 1 on the ballot is a statewide question which asks voters to reject or approve a state constitutional convention, which could lead to possible amendment of the Rhode Island constitution.
Many prominent people in this state, including state rep. Tiara Mack, have campaigned to reject a constitutional convention. Opponents to the convention cite evidence, including an anti-abortion amendment which came out of the most recent state convention held in 1986, that it can be used as a vehicle to further the political goals of the right wing.
While political scientist J.H. Snider has written op-eds in the Rhode Island Current and in the Providence Journal in favor of the convention on the grounds that it represents a populist check of the state legislature's power, I think there is a legitimate possibility that dark money, right-wing interests would attempt to hijack the convention and attack the rights and protections of women, LGBTQ+ folks, undocumented people, and unhoused people. I feel compelled as the editor-in-chief of Options Magazine to advise our readers to vote "no" on Question 1.
Read our voter guide, which is largely based on the Rhode Island Current's excellent voter guide but also includes third party presidential candidates, and check how your local candidates rate on The Womxn Project's Bodily Freedom Forever Index.
Hear from our former editor-in-chief Alex Morash, now based in the swing state of Florida, about how a vote for Harris does not mean the fight is over for progressives trying to push the Democratic party left, and read a great piece by Martha Young, a member of the Rhode Island Chapter of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC), about the efforts of a local posse of LGBTQ+ volunteers to send personal letters to voters all over the country.
I will be working as an election clerk at a local precinct in my hometown of Warren on Tuesday, but if you are looking for community in Providence on Election Day, Haus of Codec is hosting a low-key election results watch party event starting at 8 p.m. at Black Sheep.
Zane Wolfang
Editor in Chief
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