The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters has taken its campaign to inspire Mail-In Voting to the ultimate extreme this election: Giving you no choice.

Don’t Wait in Line … Because you can’t!

First they introduce a lovable mascot. Then they make you embrace him. Voters in Precinct 1671 — and quite possibly others in WG — have no choice but to vote by mail for the November 4 election because there are not enough regular poll-going walk-up voters left. The Registrar convinced 434 of the 644 registered voters in the precinct (southern WG, east of Lincoln) to become permanent mail-in voters, triggering the mail-in only threshold.

Precincts with fewer than 250 walk-in voters are now mandated “Vote-by-Mail” precincts, and you may live in one. Check your sample ballot, which arrived in many mailboxes this week. In years past, the Registrar has combined precinct voting locations in Willow Glen, but requiring mail-in voting is a new phenomenon here.

The non-partisan SmartVoter.org website (sponsored by the League of Women Voters) lists numerous polling locations across WG, but you can’t tell whether they’ll be yours or not just yet.

The Registrar of Voters website also hosts a Mail-In Vote FAQ page, but there are apparently only three frequently asked questions. The WGx Executive Summary: Yes, your vote will count; yes, it’s secure; no you don’t have to actually mail it.

WGx would like to humbly ask a Fourth Q: “Why did you spend all that money asking if we wanted to vote by mail, only to tell us we had to anyway?”

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By the way, our friends at SJ Metblogs have offered two voting-related reminders last week. October 20 is the last day to register to vote for the next election. And they also published a thorough list of non-partisan resources on various ballot issues.