The Best Way To Vote

I have an early memory of going with my mother to vote at a polling place.  I don't remember exactly what year it was, but it would have been either 1980 (when I would have been four), 1984, or somewhere in between.  I do remember going behind a big curtain and watching her pull big metal levers and thinking that looked like fun.

The first time I ever voted was in 1996.  I registered in Kittitas County and signed up for an absentee ballot, which my mother forwarded to me in Pullman.  I voted for Clinton and a conservative friend of mine scolded me for "voting for a criminal" (he is now one of my more liberal friends).

Since then I have voted in most elections, but never at my designated polling place.  I know a number of people who insist on going to the polls because it holds some sort of romance for them.  However it still seems silly to me, perhaps because I'm all for modern conveniences.

I filled out my ballot last night, and as I did so I looked up what I could about the various candidates and initiatives on the Internet.  Just about every candidate has a website where they list their views on the issues as well as their endorsements.  The Seattle PI and other local papers have dedicated pages where they list their endorsements and links to write-ups where they explain their positions.

So after spending about an hour with my ballot and my Mac, my ballot is almost completely filled in and I am pretty confident in my choices.  To have a similar feeling going to the polls, I'd have to do all of my research ahead of time and take a list with me, which I'm not sure I would do.

I'm happy to see that absentee balloting is on the rise throughout the country.  I believe that this leads to more informed votes instead of just voting a party line or for those names that sound the most familiar, or in the case of initiatives just for whatever sounds best based on the two sentence description.

So take my advice, stay home on election day... just don't forget to vote.

The Race

It's been so long since I've posted that Safari didn't autocomplete blogger.com for me.  My only excuse is that I've been updating my Facebook status with some regularity.

In the meantime I have been pretty engrossed in the election.  Never before has politics grabbed my attention and kept it for so long.  Why is that?  I think there are two reasons.

The first is that as I've gotten older, my interest in politics and news in general has risen.  I used to spend my time in the car listening to Howard Stern and Tom Leykis, now it is almost exclusively NPR.  Does the world in general just become more interesting as we age?

Secondly is that I haven't been all that happy about where our country has been going politically for quite some time.  I don't consider myself too closely aligned with either party, but I have strong political views.  Recently I'm getting more and more hopeful that the majority is coming to realize that fighting an effective war on terror doesn't mean toppling any regime we don't like without thoughtful planning, or that letting gay people enjoy the benefits of marriage doesn't diminish anyone else's relationship, or that from a scientific perspective, there is no dispute that humankind was shaped by evolution.

So as you might guess, the recent polling data is leading me to get my hopes up that November 4th is going to be a good day for me.  Becky and I are thinking of having some friends over that night.  I'm planning on being glued to the TV all night, but I think that it will be like a major sporting event where having others around pulling for the same team will make a victory all the more savory.

After watching these campaigns for almost two years now it's hard to believe that it will all be over in just 19 days.  One big reason to look forward to the getting the election behind us is that I think there is a lot of news being obscured by the race.  It has taken a complete meltdown of our financial system to steal the headlines from the candidates, though now that the bailout has passed the economy seems to be talked about more often as a factor in the race then as its own standalone issue.

It's almost time to stop worrying about who's going to be fixing this nation and start worrying about how he's actually going to fix it.