The topic of my blog today is political. Surprising? It's true I tend to avoid political discussion, but not because I'm not interested. One of the main reasons is that I don't enjoy being attacked and that has been the typical result whenever I have shared my political views in Seattle or Madrid. The other reason is that a lot of crooked junk goes on in the political realm and it makes me sick. Talking about it puts me in a bad mood and depresses me. But I'm breaking the mold today, mainly because I have some funny stuff to share - it's not all depressing.
For Washingtonians, the electoral debacle of 2004 is doubtless one of the first things that comes to mind when discussing local elections. For those not familiar with the situation, the contest for governor between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi had much in common with what happened in Florida during the 2004 presidential elections. After the original count, Dino Rossi(R) had just 261 more votes than Christine Gregoire(D). From an approximate 2.5 million votes, this comes to a percentage difference of less than 0.01%. Because the margin was so small, an automatic recount was done. The results were for Rossi again, but this time by just 42 votes. So then there was a manual recount, and the outcome was that Gregoire won by 129 votes. Throughout the process, ballots magically materialized and disappeared. Deceased voters miraculously made their way to the polls, convicted criminals managed to sneak out of prison just long enough to vote, and a bunch of other sketchy junk happened. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, but the final results hinged on the recount done in King County. At the final recount in King County, ballots which had been previously rejected were added into the count. But this was NOT done in other counties. King County is strongly democratic, so this played a large role in the final results. I now live in King County.
The reason I brought up the whole embarrassing, disturbing, disgusting story (I can come up with more adjectives if you like), is that I received an official local voter's pamphlet in the mail. Inside it says, "King County is working hard to fix problems and make sure your vote counts." Then there is a list of FAQ and answers. I found a couple of them particularly amusing and I wanted to share them with you, so I felt that I should provide a little background. Anyway, here they are:
"Q:What are you doing to ensure felons and deceased voters don't vote?
A:A top priority has been cleaning our voter rolls. We've cancelled more than 850 felons and 6,500 deceased voters from our official rolls since last year's election.
Q:May I vote for another family member if that person is away, or sick, or just recently passed away?
A:Absolutely not. It is against the law and a punishable offense to vote for anyone other than yourself."
It is really comforting to me to know that if any dead people show up at the polls, they will be turned away. As far as the question about voting for someone else, I sincerely hope that is not really frequently-asked. It is my feeling that everyone who asks that question should be automatically relieved of their right to vote because THEY ARE IDIOTS.
4 comments:
Hey Hey,
I agree with you Marianna politics can be a very sticky subject. I must say though I find it very interesting how the news networks are covering the disaster in New Orleans. CNN's Wolf Blitzer said live on CNN, "You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold."
So black huh..... I thought black was black?
Can you imagine if a conservative would have said something like that on the news...
Hey Jonny, I've been reading about Hurricane Katrina from a lot of different news sources in an effort to get an unbiased view - well, as much as possible, anyway. It's interesting to see the contrast between different networks. Some of them make it sound as if people were intentionally targeted because of their race or financial status. Although I'm sure that racism and prejudice played a part in the fact that so many were left behind, I believe that it had more to do with negligence and poor planning than it did with spiteful plotting. There was an emergency evacuation plan, the problem is that the plan didn't provide for those who couldn't get out on their own. A rather large flaw, obviously. I'm not even going to talk about the suffering that could have been averted had disaster relief gotten there sooner. I don't discuss politics, remember?
Yo! Marianna!
It's time to post again
Yeah, you're right.
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