Today is primary Election Day, and I will not vote. I can't, because I'm an Independent. I just declared myself party-less a couple of weeks ago when I renewed my driver's license. I did it to destroy even the appearance of supporting one party over another when I'm compelled to write about politics. At the time, I didn't think about not being able to vote in the only local elections that matter.

Prior to that, I spent some time as a Republican, without even realizing it. I first registered as a Republican years ago, partly as a joke (a Republican in Homewood? Isn't that like a snowball in Hades?) and partly as an experiment. I wanted to see how the Republican Party would respond to having a new name appear on their rolls in the 15208 ZIP code. Would I receive a postcard from the local party chair welcoming me to their ranks? Would someone invite me for a conversation on the party encouraging me to reach out to my neighbors? Would they recognize me as a potential asset that could be leveraged to their advantage?

Nah.

The party did zip, zero, nada, nothing. I concluded that, like the Gorgonites in the movie "Small Soldiers," local Republicans were simply programmed to lose. So I switched my registration to the Libertarian Party, which was a more comfortable ideological fit, anyway (that is, in its basic tenets; some individual Libertarians scare me). But the LP charges annual dues, and I let my membership lapse a couple of years ago.

Then one day, I went to vote, and the poll worker pulled up my name and informed me that I was a Republican again. Apparently, when I fell off the Libertarian roll, I was reassigned by default to the Republican column. And no one had told me. Again the party had not acknowledged my existence within its ranks.

In his column this morning, Tony Norman exhorts local Republicans, although not in these words, to stop being Gorgonites, because "a well-functioning city government requires vigorous political debate and engagement at every level." I agree, and will go further: if Republican write-in candidate Mark DeSantis gets on the ballot for November, he should go after the 73 percent of the electorate who didn't vote at all in the last mayoral election, and find out whether they're truly apathetic, or just disgusted and discouraged. If he can get the D&Ds to vote, anything could happen.

And if he wants to go after D&Ds, I can't think of a better place to start than Homewood.