First this weekend, let me nag you a bit. I suspect that most Weekend Reader readers are registered to vote and regularly exercise the franchise: After all, every election could be the last one.

Tuesday is Election Day for a variety of school board and other local races throughout Benton County. Voter turnout always is lower in these off-year elections than it is in years when we elect statewide and national officials, but that’s always surprised me a bit. Here’s why: These local races and ballot measures can have more impact on our daily lives than any state or national race. These off-year elections sneak under the radar at our risk.

Benton County turnout as of Friday in the May 20 election was 16.47%. The county has 60,804 registered voters, and just 10,012 had returned ballots. (This is better than the current turnout in Lane County, which is a paltry 9%, but that still gives us no reason to gloat.) In the last two off-year elections, in 2023 and 2021, Benton County turnout was right around 40%, meaning that a minority of voters decided important issues like bond measures and school board seats.

In any event, chances seem good that perhaps just a handful of you haven’t returned ballots yet. Dig out your ballot and fill it out this weekend. Drop it in the mail — if it’s postmarked by Tuesday and gets to election offices within seven days of Election Day, it counts. Or you could drop it off at any of the county’s ballot boxes.

Need information about the candidates on the ballot? Here are a couple of resources: Click here to get access to the official Benton County voters’ pamphlet, although chances seem good you might have a printed copy still hanging out on your kitchen table. And my friends at the League of Women Voters have information about candidates and measures at their very useful site, Vote411.org.

So go vote and help ensure that democracy lives another day — or at least through Tuesday.

Speaking of democracy: “Original Sin,” the new book from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline (which, the book reports, was apparent at least to some observers as early as 2017, if not before), raises chilling questions not just about Biden but about the people around him who propped him up. And that, by extension, raises some tough questions about our political system. Tyler Austin Harper writes about “Original Sin” for The Atlantic.

Nearly 10% of Oregon kindergartners aren’t fully vaccinated because their parents requested nonmedical vaccine exemptions, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reports. It’s the highest level of nonmedical exemptions ever reported in the state. Since every drop in immunization rates lowers community immunity — the so-called “herd immunity” — you can see how this ends: with diseases we thought we had just about eradicated staging vigorous comebacks. Like, you know, measles. Or polio. I was going to say something about how is part of the price we pay for the war on science, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

In other news from the war on science, the Trump administration has canceled a $45 million grant to Oregon State University for research into microfluidics. As Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian/OregonLive explains in this story, microfluidics is the study of how liquids act at microscopic levels and is the technology that makes ink-jet printers possible. An OSU official said the university was “disappointed” in the decision, but I bet he used stronger language than that off the record.

Writing in The Oregonian, Ken Goe has an interesting story about the future of collegiate track and field. Even with Track Town USA just down the road in Eugene, Goe writes that the future of the sport in an era when college athletics are in the midst of massive changes isn’t particularly bright — unless the sport begins to make some big changes of its own.

Concerns about drugs and homelessness in Oregon may spark legislative reforms to Oregon’s first-in-the-nation “bottle bill,” a big part of the state’s environmental legacy. Associated Press reporter Claire Rush reports about a proposal that could allow new time restrictions on some bottle-redemption sites.

Here’s one of this week’s long reads: If you’re from Montana, you’re probably familiar with the Berkeley Pit in Butte, a former open-pit mine that now is filled with millions of gallons of highly toxic water. (When thousands of snow geese on their migration landed on the highly acidic water in 2016, more than 3,000 of them died.) Now, though, researchers say wastewater from sites like the pit could be used to extract badly needed rare earths, critical for electric vehicles, medical technology and defense purposes. Jim Robbins has the story — which includes a reference to OSU — for The New York Times.

Here’s the week’s other long read: Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus explains how nearly a century of research into happiness has identified a formula for happiness. As you might have guessed without researching this for 100 years, it involves connecting with other people. But, of course, it’s not quite that simple.

Should James Comey, the former director of the FBI, posted to social media a photo of shells arranged to spell out the message “86 47?” Probably not. Was Comey sending a message that someone should kill President Donald Trump? Certainly not. Does the fact that the Trump administration now is investigating this as a serious threat say something, well, unflattering about the times we live in? You can answer that one on your own.

What is news? It used to be, of course, that news was what news organizations said it was — “all the news that’s fit to print,” for example. Nowadays, with news — or, at least, content — available from so many sources, news is in the eye of the beholder, according to a new study from the Pew-Knight Initiative. In the words of one expert, every news user now is in the position of serving as the editor of a wire service. The bad news is that not everyone might be up to that task.

Coming later this weekend to the blog: My annual list of summer movies for grown-ups. By now, you know the rules: No sequels. No superhero movies. But, as you will see, I’m making two exceptions to the rules this summer.

That’s it for this weekend’s edition. Now go vote.