Shannon Newton
President, ATA
Over the next year, we will see hundreds of elements of the 2024 election season play out in real time. We’ll watch campaign commercials until we’re seeing red (or blue). We’ll receive fundraising emails and political mailers. We’ll watch or avoid the debates. We’ll see candidates bow out and primary results posted. We’ll endure awkward holiday conversations or maybe offer heartfelt support to a candidate or cause. Then finally, we’ll conclude with the final task of making selections with a stylus on ballots next November.
All of that starts with the filing period, where candidates officially request their names to appear on the ballot.
It’s like the Rube Goldberg machines you see in cartoons or movies—the contraptions that turn some ordinary event into a series of a bunch of small steps carried out by simple machines. Pull this string that flips the cup that drops the marble down the ramp and rolls into an epic domino formation, and when the final domino falls, it lands on the button that turns all the lights on. It’s something you could do without a bunch of levers flipping, wheels turning, but the machine makes the work a performance to behold. The point of a Rube Goldberg machine is the spectacle, to make some banal task fun to watch.
Election season doesn’t always feel fun to watch, but it is a type of Rube Goldberg machine. It’s a chain reaction that we need to work even when all the little steps feel overengineered and unnecessary.