US Voters: This year, in King County WA, I have 36 choices to make an educated choice on. Most of you will have similarly broad choices to make, from endless propositions to various seats of government. I typically spend in the order of 40 hours working out how I’m going to vote on my ballot. That’s not to say that you have to spend that much time, but that it does take time and it’s time worth investing.

If you are a US voter and haven’t started looking into your ballot and researching your options, I really encourage you to set aside time this week to do so. Some places have already opened polling and are accepting votes. The rest of the country will open up to voting in the next couple of weeks. If you are an international voter this is even more important as most embassies only accept ballots until 2020-09-30 (yes, this Wednesday)!

This is particularly true this year given that it is much better to do early in person or mail in voting rather than exposing ourselves to the long lines on 2020-11-03. The earlier we have all researched our ballots and presented them to the polling station, the better. Optimally, we have all voted in ways that will have been counted by the end of the day on 2020-11-03 and that will leave little wiggle room for those who would sow dissent around the validity of the election.

If you can’t find your ballot information on your states website, Ballotpedia provide a lookup tool https://ballotpedia.org/Sample_Ballot_Lookup