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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Staying "Classy" All The Way Down The Drain 

...John Boehner is a confused man, apparently, or at the very least one who hasn't yet got his hands on any of the internals from Tuesday's election. While John McCain at least made a show of understanding the meaning of "having an epiphany" with his concession speech on Tuesday night after a grumpy, mean-spirited, and negative campaign that may well have gone further in costing the election than if he had nominated Michael Palin (and, actually, he probably would have won if he had), Boehner apparently doesn't have clear view of the lay of the political landscape. Today, showing his perverse sense of the classiness that a butt-whupped loser should display, Boehner responded to the news of Rahm Emanuel accepting the role of Chief of Staff in the Obama White House:
"This is an ironic choice for a President-elect who has promised to change Washington, make politics more civil, and govern from the center..."

One would think that the nominal leader (at least for now) of a Republican caucus that will be seeing some cost savings in January because of the ability to rent smaller rooms for its meetings would be able to arrive independently at the conclusion that most folks don't really care what he thinks about Obama's choice for Chief of Staff. One would think that even if the prospects of all those upcoming going-away parties for Republican members of Congress and their staffers didn't suggest that it was time to curb partisan enthusiasm for the moment, maybe the number 364 (that's electoral votes, John) would do the trick...

Since two years ago tomorrow, the Republican party has lost perhaps as many as 53 seats in the House of Representative practicing just the sort of politics that Boehner trotted out today. The voters in this country told Mr. Boehner what they thought about him and his party on Tuesday night, and that message should have suggested to him that he should spend more time crafting a further series of emails and letters to his dwindling team begging to keep his Minority Leadership position. Not John Boehner, though; he's bound and determined to ride his own twisted take on what's classy all the way down the drain...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:26 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

How Not To Do Vote By Mail 

...as an Oregon voter, I have been able to wallow for several years in the self-centered indulgence of sitting at my kitchen table (which I really do) and decide in a leisurely fashion - state voter guide booklets by my side - just exactly who and what I am going to vote for in a state-wide or local election. No scrambling around to find the time to make it to the polling place; no trying to figure out where they moved my voting place to this year (one time, two neighboring precincts had their voting places in side by side churches with which I was unfamiliar and I spent 15 minutes in line before I found out I was in the wrong church; call me a low-information voter); no standing in line or having to provide a notarized genome sequence proving I am who I am in order to get my hands on a ballot. Vote, slap a stamp on the outer envelope (the ballot goes in a slightly smaller "secrecy" envelope), sign that baby and slip it in the mail or - if I have been dallying - drop it off at the local drop site next to the city library if it's too late for the mail to get it to the county clerk on time. I live in the original Vote By Mail State...

It's a slick system, and there is plenty of media outreach to let occasional slackers like me know when it is too late to mail the ballot to assure that it arrives at the appointed location by 8 pm on election day. Idaho has the same vote by mail system, and the whole thing seems to have been working pretty well by and large. Our hemmed-in neighbor to the north, the Great State of Washington, had a legislature possessing less faith in both it's voter-citizens and the much-abused civil servants of the U.S. Postal Service than did the legislatures of either Orygun or Idaho at the point of enactment, resulting in a vote-by-mail system that requires only having ballots postmarked by election day. And there's the rub. From Oregon Public Broadcasting:
Around the region, a bunch of big election races remain too close to call and could stay that way for days. Those include the U.S. Senate race in Oregon, and in Washington, the state schools superintendent and public lands commissioner races.

In Washington State, part of the delay comes from the fact that fresh, valid ballots are still arriving in the mail.

This system has probably caused some delay in the announcement of electoral outcomes in the past, but this year turnout and close contests has turned the Washington state electoral process into a marathon with the likelihood that some ballots won't be reaching the appointed location until Thursday...or later...

Allowing postmark by election day rather than received by election day offers a remarkable degree of deference to voters, even given that there isn't an alternative once the decision is made to vote by mail, given that there are no longer precinct locations at which to vote, just for the heck of it. Voting is a fundamental right, but it also carries with it obligations, regardless of the system by which votes are collected. I suppose to say so brings me squarely down on the side of crazy-eyed wingnuts, but I fail to see the problem with insisting that ballots be in the election officials' hands by the appointed hour on election day, any more than I fail to see a problem with insisting that people make the effort to show up at the polls or file an absentee ballot by the appointed hour in the other 47 states (absent, of course, voter suppression efforts)...

The bottom line, I suppose, resides in the question of how important it is to have fairly immediate results from elections. The Oregon/Idaho system isn't a panacea; as I write this, the contest between Jeff Merkley and Gordon Smith for US Senator from Orygun is not yet settled, but this circumstance has more to do with issue-heavy ballots and near-record 'turnout' in the three most populous counties in the states rather than ballots still coming in. Washington isn't in that situation; it is simply plagued by those who waited to the last minute to vote and then exercised their right under state law to mail their ballots rather than having to take those ballots to a drop point. Vote by mail in tight contentious elections will run the risk of having a delayed outcome under the best of circumstances, but if you want to get to the right answer as quickly as possible, the Washington State vote by mail system isn't the way you want to do it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:07 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 03, 2008

BREAKING: Election May Be Called Before Left Coast Polls Close!!@!11! 

...from Reuters, we learn that - horror of horrors - the broadcast networks or cable news outlets or even some commie pinko lefty blog/website may well declare a winner tomorrow night before 8:00 pm PST, which is when polls close on the Left Coast. This has been a sore point with West Coast residents for a number of years, but I'm having a lot of trouble of working up any sort of angst or anger about such a prospect this time around...

In the first place, the three West Coast states are either going to go for Obama or it doesn't matter, since a win by McCain would indicate a complete repudiation of the polls in any case. More to the point, the fight in many of the newly designated "battleground" states far to to the east of us is happening on turf generally controlled by Republicans at one level or another, and the likelihood of voter-suppression shenanigans that can influence the outcome is very real...

In the second place, I went to bed on the evening of November 7, 2000, with the warm, comfortable feeling that Al Gore was going to be the next president (had to get to work the next day, after all). Turns out that this warm fuzzy feeling was entirely and spectacularly misplaced. Early calling of elections by the pundits and beancounters has been proven to be clearly something of a fool's errand as a result of this episode, and the possibility of the outcome being different when the sun comes up on Wednesday than what I might think it is when I go to bed tomorrow night (have to get to work the next day, after all) is clearly a possibility. I have learned that it will be what it will be; I did all I could within my personal limitations and I voted almost two weeks ago (thanks to the Orygun vote-by-mail process)...

That's not to say that that I will be happy to see the sun come Wednesday morning on a McCain presidency, but there won't be anything I can do about that. The possibility that various news outlets will call the election before bedtime calls and the polls on the West Coast close won't really matter either. This election will be settled one or two or three time zones to the east of us Left Coasters; let the news outlets race each other to declare who the new president is going to be. It really doesn't matter out here in Yonderland this year...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:41 PM 0 comments

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