“Mark my words — if we let them take away our God-given right to pickle small children in a nicotine haze, they won’t stop there. Don’t come crying to me if somebody eventually questions whether it’s wise to let children watch fourteen uninterrupted hours of television, or if tossing a baby into the air repeatedly until he throws up is harmful for his development.” –Tony Woodlief

I hate the very existence of inaugural poetry. Despite all the pomp and preening involved with inaugurations, it’s that which I find over-indulgent. Maybe I just can’t consider poetry beyond proto-goths dressed all in black sitting in the back of a classroom feeling so tortuously misunderstood. Obviously on some level I know that poetry is used for other things, but I swear I have difficulty ever reading poetry that doesn’t say “Hey, look at me!” or “Hey, look at me look {nature/life/God/Mother Earth/whatever}!”

I didn’t get to watch the inauguration as I was stuck in traffic when it happened, though I will shortly have the whole thing downloaded.

Mindstorm made a pretty big to-do about it. Employees (in our building, at least) were invited to watch the swearing in and speech on the TVs in the cafeteria.

I thought that it was interesting that John Paul Stevens swore in the Vice President. I figured that the VP was sworn in by the Chief Justice, too. Apparently there’s quite a bit of discretion and that they don’t even have to be sworn in by a judge (Mondale and Cheney were sworn in by the Speaker of the House, Gore and George H. Bush by associate justices). I learned something new today!

It’s rather unfortunate that the special occasions was flubbed by the Chief Justice during the oath, which caught the now-president off-guard. Took them a minute or two to get their act together, but I suppose it’s forgivable since not only is it both of their first time, but as recently as five years ago it was exceptionally unlikely that either of them would be holding the positions that they now do.

The conspiracy-mongering among liberals that Roberts screwed up on purpose so that conservatives will be able to delegitimize Obama’s presidency (“He never took the oath!”) are kind of funny. As are murmurs on the right that it is somehow “revealing” that Obama took the oath with his middle name (“Such things are unheard of if you look back at and only at Jimmy Carter!”).

It took me quite a bit of time to find a picture of Obama taking the oath that didn’t prominantly feature Roberts’s bald crown but had no luck. Roberts needs to take some Rogaine. He’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It’s not like anybody can badmouth him for it. Of course, perhaps being Chief Justice means that you don’t have to worry about Rogaine in the same way that being old means that you can wear your pants however darn high you please.

Obama’s speech contained what I’m pretty sure is an inaccuracy less than five sentences in. Forty-three men have taken the oath, not forty-four. But surely Obama’s speechwriters and handlers would catch a mistake before I did, wouldn’t they? Did someone take the oath but never the office? I don’t see how that’s possible. Then again, they did claim to be directing the non-existent “Office of President-Elect” when no such office exists and Obama wasn’t technically even the president-elect, so maybe such details were considered unimportant.

Bush is apparently back in Texas. The whole concept of going from the most powerful man in the world to having to move out in one day seems kind of weird to me. I’m not sure how that works. Were they living out of suitcases that last week? I like to imagine that there was luggage in the back of that helicopter.

I’m sure that Half Sigma considers it suspicious that Bristol Palin’s newborn baby wasn’t at the inauguration (almost as though she doesn’t exist! Hmmmmmm…).

ADDENDUM: Roberts and Obama decided to take another shot at it, just to be cautious. No doubt Lincoln’s Bible had been put away, but odd that they wouldn’t go to the slight inconvenience of finding another one. Did the Bushes not leave behind any? Why have the Gideons let us down? Now we get four years of some people saying “See! He didn’t take the oath on the Bible after all! Just like we said he wouldn’t!”

-{Note that while this is about a political event, I tried not to take sides. Leave comments with care.}-

The subject of Parental Notification and Parental Consent laws came up on the sadly defunct Bobvis blog. I don’t want to get into the wisdom of such laws in this post, but for context purposes let me just say that I am conflicted on the matter.

As readers of Hit Coffee know, I am morally uncomfortable with the vast majority of abortions performed. It’s not my desire to defend that position here, but it’s important to note that for the sake of this post. This isn’t about what the law should be (either in regards to abortion or more specifically parental notification/consent laws), rather how I approach the issue morally and more importantly how I would respond should I have a daughter that becomes pregnant. If you think I am wrong to be morally uncomfortable with it, please don’t waste your time or mine trying to convince me that I am wrong in this venue just as I will not try to convince you that you are wrong. It’s a value judgment.

In the comment section of the Bobvis post, I said:

As a future parent, I would of course prefer that any daughter (or son, of course) not engage in risky sexual behavior. However, even independent of that I would not want my daughter having an abortion simply to cover up the fact that she had done so. I’m conflicted on parental notification laws, but I don’t think that it’s entirely based on the motives {of wanting to control my daughter’s sexual behavior}.

The thing is, if I had a daughter that was pregnant and intended to have an abortion, I don’t think that I would want to be notified. A part of me thinks that if I could convince her not to, I would want that opportunity. I would want to be able to tell her that we would work with her so that she could go to college and establish herself. We’d (informally or formally) adopt the kid as our own if that would change her mind or help her place the child for adoption with an agency. I would want her to know that while I may be disappointed in what led up to the pregnancy that I understand that things happen and how we respond to the consequences of our mistakes says as much about us as the mistakes themselves.

The other part of me, however, fears that it would tear our family apart if she declined to go along. If the law were notification, it would be excruciating to try to talk her into having the baby and not being able to do so. She would know how vehemently I disapprove of her decision and I would know that she did something that I have strong moral objections to. It gets more difficult with parental consent laws because I would have a lot of difficulty consenting to it. If her mental health were obviously on the line, I would probably not drag her to court over the issue and so would consent. But such things are extremely difficult to judge. She may overestimate the mental health effects of having the baby or I might underestimate it. If I did not provide consent and she got a judicial bypass (most of which are granted, from what I understand), it could cause a permanent cut that’s never entirely sewn up.

In this case, I have to wonder if ignorance is bliss. If I found out five years later that she’d had an abortion five years before, I think that it might be easier for me to handle. This is perhaps a very selfish approach if it relies too much on the notion of how clean or dirty my hands are, though also a factor (I’d like to think a bigger one) would be that five years down the line she would be a different person and it would all be in the past. It’s sort of analogous to the fact that I hate losing in sports and games a lot more than I mind having lost. I can deal with bad things having happened than watching them unfold right before me.

It’s only somewhat likely that I would be a part of this decision anyway. Our daughter would have two parents. She will know what my views are on abortion and though my wife’s views are almost the same, I still suspect that it would be easier for her to talk to her mother than me. I’m tempted to tell Clancy that should the day ever come when our daughter comes to her seeking help with an abortion that she not even tell me about it until it’s all in the past (if then). I’m not sold on the idea because I feel that’s unfairly placing too much burden on her, letting her deal with the muck so that I can steer my conscience clear of the tough decisions that she had to make.

Statistically, our daughter is not likely to get pregnant in any event. We will promote safe sex, for one thing, and she will get the lecture well before its time. We don’t intend to make discussions of sex too taboo, though obviously we will not want any salacious details. It’s also the case that neither Clancy nor I are particularly sexually adventurous. Promiscuity doesn’t run deeply in either of our families. It’s not in our nature. Neither, for that matter, is having access to a lot of sexual partners. The biggest threat would likely be a long-term relationship like the one that I had with Julie wherein contraception is not applied consistently or it fails when applied as it sometimes does. But risks are risks and it’s not at all unforseeable that the above won’t be an issue. If we do have a child that does become pregnant, they are probably more likely to be of the “pro-choice” mindset than the “pro-life” one regardless of the ideals that we profess to. I’m not sure about Clancy, but I was myself pretty strongly pro-choice when I was young. They will likely be college-minded and at least somewhat career-minded (they will have their mother to look up to, after all). So if a pregnancy does occur, we are more likely than the average family to have a lot of conflict over it.

In any event, I really hope that it never does come up. Failing that, at least a part of me hopes that I don’t know about it until it’s old news.

Apparently, the wife of the Governor of Iowa was caught smoking in a government car:

The issue arose Wednesday morning, when a Des Moines Register reporter noticed Culver openly smoking in a sport utility vehicle the state provides to her family. The truck was stopped at a red light in downtown Des Moines. Culver was sitting in the passenger seat, with the window rolled down. A state trooper was driving.

Culver’s action violated the state smoking ban, which forbids smoking in most workplaces, including bars and restaurants. The ban also applies to employer-owned cars, and it specifically says no smoking is allowed in state-owned vehicles.

She requested a ticket and that was that. Nothing brings forth honor like getting caught, no? Whatever hesitations I have about smoking bans in public places, state-owned cars are certainly a place where it’s fair game.

I did enjoy this gem by an Iowa writer named John Carlson:

The loopy law does permit smoking in a hotel or motel room in Iowa, if said room is designated for legal smoking. But no hotel or motel may have more than 20 percent of such rooms in the establishment. But if you, Mr. Motel Owner, have 15 percent of your rooms as smoking rooms, you may not increase that to 20 percent. But you’re allowed to increase the number of nonsmoking rooms.

Unless there’s a full moon on the second Tuesday of the month, and then you have to go to the casino nearest your home to fill out the forms seeking an exemption. At least I think that last part was in there.

I have a printout of the law, but I stopped reading when the bizarre rules started making my eyes hurt.

I personally wish that they’d spend less time expanding the law and more time enforcing it. In our travels, it’s become not-uncommon to get non-smoking rooms that are clearly part-time smoking rooms and when confronted they don’t typically respond by apologizing and getting us a non-smoking room. Usually the negotiations involve paying more than we had planned so that we can get what he originally paid for because they don’t want to honor the Priceline (or equivalent) deal we got (specifying a non-smoking room) or the only rooms they have available are more expensive. Of course, maybe they’d do a better job of enforcing the law is people like us were to actually contact the appropriate authorities.

I always have mixed feelings about these things. The former libertarian in me is naturally resistant to regulating our private lives. Further, I find the piecemail approach a little bit insulting. Outlaw it or leave us be. However, the former libertarian in me says that the way that they’re going about it is probably the best way to cut back on smoking and make life easier on non-smokers while giving die hard smokers enough room to prevent a revolt.

Cascadia had a gubernatorial election this year and I think that I was conned.

The election was slated to be pretty close. The Governor had only barely won the last one and despite the leftward tilt of the state as a whole, the sour feelings over her first election and only modest popularity suggested that the Republican challenger might have a shot.

I’ve been commuting for over three months now. I don’t have many nice things to say about Cascadia’s transportation system, but one of the really nice things are the signs over the Interstate informing me how long it’s going to take to get to New City, near where I work. Not only is it good to know how patient I’m going to need to be, what the sign tells me tells me whether I should go straight through New City by way of the Splinterstate or go through Zaulem to New City on to Mindstorm HQ. It was really, really nice to have that kind of information on the road. I don’t think that there were any days that it wasn’t up there.

Until the day after the election. Since then, the signs were only on one day and on two other days only one of the three signs I usually see was lit. Oh, and this morning it was wrong by a factor of three, suggesting a shockingly short day when in actuality it was one of my longest commutes to date. I didn’t even get any notice on the way home the other day that they were cutting the Splinterstate down to one lane for construction. Would have been helpful to know!

So I smell a conspiracy. The Governor needed state government to appear to be working while The Governor was angling for re-election. Now that that’s happened, the state says “screw it” and saves on whatever the lighting and monitoring cost.

Part of me now wishes that The Governor had been unseated, the worm. Then again, if this is what happens when they were re-elected, one can only imagine the havoc that would be wreaked if it had gone the other way!

When I was in high school, Mr. Hiller, my government teacher, asked every girl in the class to stand up.

Then he asked every student who was not white and whose parents weren’t white to stand up. After some looking at one another, most did.

He then asked everybody whose last name ends in a vowel other than “e” to stand up. They did so.

Then he said requested that everyone in the class that is not a protestant to stand up. The couple Jewish kids in the class and a Catholic or two stood up. It was when he said that anyone that had just stood up on the basis that they’re Catholic can sit down if their parents are millionaires that I knew what he was getting at.

Then, to the three-quarters of the class standing up, he said, “You will never be president when you grow up.”

Yesterday before work, a coworker scared the crap out of me. He said that almost all of the counties Cascadia have gone to mail-in voting only. That explained something I’d always been curious about (but never so curious as to get off my posterior and follow up). Without my asking for one, I had received a mail-in ballot. I ignored it because I was going to show up to the polling place. Then when my wife did not receive one, I forgot all about it. So I tried to load up the Seagull County voting registration page to find out for sure. You might be shocked to discover that the polling page is overloaded the day before election day. On one hand, it’s hardly shocking. On the other hand, that’s when a polling location page is useful!

After much difficulty, I was delighted to discover that Seagull County is the only hold-out with the old fashioned polling locations. Zaulem County has apparently gone mail-in only this election (or so the website says) and every county except those two had already gone mail-in. So I breathed a sigh of relief until I actually looked at the polling locations page and discovered that Seagull County has polling on a precinct-by-precinct basis. I didn’t even know what precinct I was in. And I didn’t know if I’d be able to find the mail-in ballot I’d tossed aside. And if we were mail-in only, where the heck is Clancy’s ballot?!

After getting home I looked at our voter registration cards. Hers included a polling address, so we were set. Right? Right?! Well, maybe not. My card didn’t give a polling location, instead saying that a mail-in ballot had been sent to me at my request. My request? I had requested no such thing! I would have remembered such a request and having no memory of the request no request was made. Of that I was sure. Didn’t matter, though, because the possibility struck me that maybe they wouldn’t let me vote in person if they sent out a mail-in ballot. Cascadia’s election page didn’t tell me and Seagull County’s wasn’t loading at all.

So I scrambled until I found the mail-in ballot in my car. My car?! There was no way that I would put it in my car! I would have remembered such a placement and having no… oh, screw it, I must have put the darn thing in my car. So I managed to unpack the ballot and fill it out. All was right with the world, except for one little thing. I don’t want to mail my ballot in. Going to the polling location is ceremonial for me. Seeing as how my actual vote is exceptionally unlikely to turn the presidential race (since I’m only a temporary resident, it doesn’t feel right to vote in local races, except the gubernatorial one because I’m inconsistent that way), the ceremony of performing my civic duty is about all I’ve got. Sending in a darn envelope lacks flare.

So I did some more scooting around on the voting web page and discovered that I can hand-deliver the ballot to the Auditor if I so choose. So that’s my new plan.

Clancy, meanwhile, was on call last night. She’s likely to be a zombie when she gets back, but she told me to make sure to remind her to vote (so that she can maintain female-dogging rights). So I left her a note on the door, on her chair, and on the bed. I also left her a GoogleMap to the polling location, her voter registration card, and a utility bill in case she needs it (she still has an Estacado driver’s license). I am the king of overkill, I guess.

Either way this goes, history is in the making. I fully expect Chariots of Fire to be blaring in the background as I deliver my sealed ballot to the appropriate county official.

Every four years I predict who is going to win the presidential race and every four years I get it wrong. So this year shall not be different!

My prediction is as follows:

While I don’t think that all of the polls are wrong, I suspect that the results will look more like the shows that are showing a close race rather than the ones predicting a blow-out. At least I think so as it pertains to the popular vote. I think that the race will be a little bit closer than it now appears for a few reasons. Even though its effect has been diminished, I think we’re more likely to see a Bradley Effect in a presidential race than anywhere else. We’re on the cusp of electing our first black president, and I think publicly people want to be seen as being on the right side of that whereas in the privacy of the voting booth I think they may go with their gut. I think that there also may be a Shy Tory Factor where conservatives are less likely to talk to pollsters in general. Mostly, though, I think that a lot of the undecided voters are people that voted for Bush in 2004 and not having been completely sold on Obama will fall into line for McCain.

I don’t think that this will be enough, though, and so I am predicting an Obama win of about 4% with Obama getting a 51% and McCain getting 47%. Basically, that’s a little better for Obama this year than Bush did in 2004. However, on the Electoral College front I see this different translating into a substantial Obama victory. By and large it seems that Obama has run the tighter and more organized campaign. I see Obama’s people getting the vote out where it counts the most. Of course, even there my predictions are modest compared to a lot of the polls, but it’ll certainly be a lot better for Obama in 2008 than it was for Bush in 2004 as far as the EC goes.

I also predict that the media is going to be very quick to call states that Obama wins and slower to call McCain states. I don’t see any reversals as I think that the states that they call for Obama will ultimately go to Obama, but I think (for instance) that you’ll get an early verdict on Obama’s victory in Virginia and only later will they decide that McCain won North Carolina, even though both will win their their respective states by about the same margin. We saw something very much like that in 2004 where the press could not call Pennsylvania fast enough even though in the final tally it was nearly as close as Ohio and closer than Florida. I think that the main reason that the press will do this is not to “fix” the election or anything like that, but because the press has clearly believed that Obama would win this from the start and anything that steps in the way of that belief will be due greater scrutiny than would anything that confirms the belief.

The Democrats will make gains in the House as well as the Senate, but will fall a couple seats short of the 60 that they need for a filibuster-proof majority. Despite what the polls say, I predict that Proposition 8 (banning gay marriage) in California will fail.

Anyway, below are my predictions for the 2000 and 2004 race, where you can see how wrong I was. My 2000 prediction doesn’t look terrible until you consider that I predicted that Bush would win the popular vote by a substantial margin and underperform in the Electoral College. My 2004 popular vote prediction was reversed, with Kerry winning by 3% instead of Bush.

Note that the EC tally for the 2000 election isn’t right because it uses post-census numbers.

-{I am not even going to try to moderate the comment section on a post like this. I am putting this up for posterity rather than to spark debate, so the comment section is closed.}-

-{After further consideration and encouragement from Abel, I’ve decided to open comments up on this post for predictions and predictions only. No candidate advocacy or denigration, please.}-

Addendum: As I mentioned in this post and last, I get an intuition on election day that can contradict my previous predictions and is usually more accurate. This morning, the intuition was: Landslide.

I had an overnight job during the 2000 election. Upon getting off work on Tuesday morning, I went down to Mayne to vote and then drove back to my apartment to get my sleep. I was living with Dennis and Karl at the time and in the same complex as my former college roommate Hubert. I don’t know what possessed us to decide to watch the results roll in together, but we did. Between the four of us, we’d voted four different ways: One for Bush, one for Gore, one for Nader, and one for Harry Browne. With Nader and Browne obviously not going to win, it was 2-to-2 in who was rooting for Bush and who was rooting for Gore. It was… contentious. They’d already started calling states by the time I got back to the apartment and it was not looking good for Bush. They’d called the states that Gore was supposed to win, hadn’t called what should have been easy Bush states (Georgia and Ohio, which at the time leaned fairly Republican), and Florida was looking good for Gore (though they hadn’t called it yet).

It was about the time that Hubert said “{expletive] you! {expletive} all of you!” and left in a huff when they called one of the states that I decided that I wanted to be somewhere else. That was fine because I was invited to a Defeat Party for one of the local candidates, Hal Barraby. They didn’t call it a Defeat Party, but it was pretty obvious that he was going to be defeated so I called it that. Barraby was a Republican congressional candidate running in a majority-Democratic district that the Republicans never stopped believing that they could pick up. Whatever chance the candidate had went down in flames when it was discovered that he hadn’t paid child support in five years and owed upwards of $50k to his ex-wife and it was widely speculated that he’d spent more than that amount taking her to court to get out of paying. He was really a prick. I’d done some work for his campaign early on partly because I thought his opponent was a fraud but mostly because the daughter of his campaign manager was hot and seemed like she might be interested. But hey, it was free food and I somewhat enjoyed the prospect of watching Barraby even if it meant that the incumbent would win.

By the time I got there they had called Florida for Gore. Along with the returns coming back against Barraby, had sucked a lot of the wind out of the room. The Texas Governor was on television flat-out saying that the media was wrong and that he was going to win Florida. The room that he was talking in, like the one I was watching, seemed pretty stale. About half the people at Barraby Central were expressing anger at Bush’s campaign for the apparent coming loss, much of which had been attributed to the late revelation that he had gotten a DUI in Maine that he hadn’t come clean about. The other half, though, believed Bush and loudly proclaimed that the media wanted to “give it” to Gore. I thought the latter group was ridiculous. The media never gets that sort of thing wrong. Obviously, if they called it for Gore, Gore was going to win. Duh.

I was still at the Barraby HQ, eating dinner with the campaign manager’s daughter, when they reverse-called Florida. I was pretty stunned, of course, and I was suddenly looking at the possibility for better or worse that Bush might win. I wondered what Hubert and Karl, who had gotten into the tussle earlier that lead to the expletives, were thinking. I had throughout the night been trying not to think of anything at all to avoid the emotional roller coaster of the state-by-state rollout of being called. I wanted to be dispassionate so that I could appreciate the first close election that I’d participated in. I had the day before thought that Bush was going to win, but I’d woken up that morning with the odd sensation that it was probably Gore’s. I didn’t realize at the time, of course, that I could have been right both times.

I had to leave Barraby HQ and go to work. I was working an overnight job at the time. I’d managed to sneak an old black and white television into work with me and watched the reports roll in. When enough states were declared that Bush could no longer win by getting all of the undecided states (which, at the time, I think were Oregon, New Mexico, Iowa, and New Hampshire) except Florida, I started running some numbers through Excel. Bush’s lead in the vote count was pretty substantial by that point, but Gore was starting to chip away at it. So I started filling in the size of the counties that were still counting, ran the numbers assuming that they continued to be counted as they were counted (in other words, if Gore had a 1,700 vote edge with 50% counted, I gave him a 3,400 vote edge) and determined that unless something changed, Gore was going pull it off!

Then, suddenly, the media called it for Bush. I was astonished. Sure my numbers could be wrong since they were entirely speculative, but surely they left enough room for uncertainty that everyone would hold off declaring a winner. Right? Apparently wrong. Forgetting the lesson that I had learned only a few hours before, I assumed that the media simply knew something that I didn’t and that of course they were right and I was wrong. After all, they’re the professionals, right?

I got a worried IM from my Republican brother about the tallies that were continuing to narrow the race. I took a look at my numbers again and found that they had actually underestimated Gore’s percentage of the vote in the counties whose counts had since become complete. However, towards the end there was a levelling off and Bush managed to hold on to the lead. Gore’s campaign announced that the campaign was not over and of course it was another five weeks before it was all decided.

In the final month running up to the election, I came to the conclusion that Kerry was probably going to win. The polls gave a very slight edge to Bush, but there is usually a last-minute push to either the challenger or the candidate that’s running behind and I thought that would put Kerry over the top. But when I woke up that morning, I suddenly had a feeling that Bush was going to do rather well. During my lunch break I drove my car to the nearest park and listened to news radio, which were hinting that the exit polls suggested that we were about to get a new president. Rush Limbaugh was pleading to Republicans not to give up hope, which seemed to seal the deal.

On my drive home, the longest train in the history of mankind was rolling passed and cost me ten minutes. This was bothering me because (a) I forgot to check what time the polls closed and (b) though I had an address to the polling location, I hadn’t been there and didn’t know how easy or difficult it would be to find. Deseret was almost certainly going to go to Bush (it’s no coincidence that the three states with the largest per-capita Mormon population are the three reddest states in the country), but I believe in voting as a civic duty and it’s one I take seriously even if I know my vote won’t make a difference. I actually found the polling place easily enough and voted. It was the first time I’d ever voted outside of Colosse County. In Colosse County there are something like 300 elected judges with 150 or so up for election every cycle. Seeing a ballot with no more than eight choices on it was really quite a shock to the system.

I had a problem after the election that I had nowhere to go watch the results. I didn’t have a television at the time that got any reception. I had a friend that offered to let me come over and watch it at his place, but I had the feeling that I would pretty much have to explain everything to him and being stoned as he always was, I knew that would be a challenge. I wasn’t entirely in the mood for it. So I decided to try what I would sometimes do when there was a big game on, I went to a bar. Of all the bars I could have chosen in the city of Zarahemla, I happened to choose the one that was the headquarters of the Beck County Democratic Party. There was an extremely uncomfortable feeling while I was there. A sort of desperation in their voices that masking as certainty that they were going to win. I remember one guy going over all of the states that Kerry could lose and still win the election.

Unlike four years earlier at the Barraby Bash, there were no cute campaign manager’s daughters to keep me around (oh yeah, and I was married), so I decided to to leave. I got a call from Clancy who said that she was watching the returns in the living room of our landlords, the Cranstons. So I drove back and joined Mr and Mrs Cranston as well as Clancy and we watched the results from their living room. They were goodstanding Mormons and die-hard Republicans and threatened to move to Canada if Kerry won. It was the first time I’d ever heard that particular threat.

It seemed pretty obvious late in the evening that Bush was going to win and that they were avoiding calling Ohio primarily to avoid the embarrassment of Florida 2000. Then a couple of the networks gave in and called the state. Kerry declined to concede that night, which I thought to myself was probably the right decision, but then conceded the next day when they went over the data and discerned that there weren’t enough recounts in the world to turn it around, which I thought to myself was also probably the right decision.

????

I have no idea what I’m going to do on Tuesday. Since I live in Pacific Time and it’s not remotely worth leaving from 3-5pm, that means that by the time I get home it’ll probably be 10:30 eastern time and the election may be over particularly if the eastern red states on the bubble go for Obama. I kind of don’t want to find out after-the-fact if we’ve elected our first black president. So I could leave early, but I was thinking about voting in the morning. Maybe I should take a half-day, leave at noon, vote, then blop down in front of the television and watch the results roll in?

Anyhow, what do y’all plan do to? How did you spend the elections in 2000 and 2004? Feel free to toss in their who you want(ed) to win, but try to avoid turning this into a political discussion since goodness knows there are enough of those to be had around here. The best way to do that is to remember that people that disagree with you read and comment here and try not to say anything that they’re going to feel the need to “set the record straight” on. As obvious as your choice is/was to you, it’s not obvious to everybody and the people that it is not obvious to are not stupid or evil.

-{This post was modified because the previous contents could not have occurred as I recalled them occurring. Thanks to Brandon Berg for pointing this out.}-

Colosse County has a setup called “early voting”, designed to try to relieve pressure at the polls so that there aren’t 7-8 hour lines on election day. Basically, for ~2 weeks before the election, people are allowed to show up at any “early voting” location in the county (regardless of their normal voting precinct), present their voter ID, and the ballot for their registered precinct will come up for them. This allows people to vote on their lunch break, coming home from work, or anywhere else that fits their schedule.

Unfortunately, when the Colosse County Voters’ Registration Office screws up, it screws up royally. Supposedly there is a little-known “loophole” in Colosse law that states that if someone moves, but their voter registration isn’t moved with them, they can show up at the polls, sign a change-of-address form… and then vote (legally) on the old ballot despite not meeting the residency requirements. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the signage at the polling places did not know of this loophole, and put in very large letters dire warnings about trying to vote for a race in a location you do not currently live in.

The inept, incompetent CCVRO has not honored of any the change of addresses I have mailed them in the past five years and thus mailed my official voter registration card for this year to an address I used to live at five years ago, approximately 40 miles from my current home.

And so, when I went to vote today, I found that my right to vote in local elections had essentially been stolen by the incompetence of the CCRVO… and I have no legal recourse on the matter. I considered voting in the races specific to my old precinct, but I couldn’t (despite REALLY hating the guts of one of the congressional candidates) do that in good conscience; instead, I voted only in the races I was sure that (by my current residency) I was actually, legally and morally, allowed to vote in. Three libertarian votes, one Democrat vote and a vote for an unaligned county judge later… I was out, my vote essentially meaningless in everything except the judges’ race and the one Democrat vote.

And that is how the Colosse County Voter Registration Office stole from me my right to vote. My one bit of solace comes from the fact that my Democrat vote was a vote to fire (with reasonable hope of victory) the utterly incompetent CC Tax Assessor / Voter Registrar Peter Wageringdocket.