An Experiment in Scotch

I voted today. Did you?

My over­all expe­ri­ence was fine. I got to the polling place right at 7 AM to find 22 peo­ple in line ahead of me which is not unheard of. From the time I received my card to the time I gave it back, things were good. How­ever, the gen­eral expe­ri­ence at this loca­tion was closer to an unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter. They had 5 machines plugged into one out­let. When I got there at 7, the machines were still charg­ing. The elec­tion offi­cials seems untrained and unable to han­dle issues. It took 1 guy 5 trips to the machine before they finally got him a bal­lot. One guy was still receiv­ing the wrong bal­lot when I left and one man had gone through the bal­lot only to dis­cover they had given him the wrong one. He was not pleased.

The elec­tion judge in charge of the machines seemed untech­ni­cal and poorly cho­sen for the job (I vote in Precinct 56 in Collin County, if any one is inter­ested). I under­stand that these peo­ple are vol­un­teers but please, this isn‘t rocket sci­ence. As usual, the peo­ple sign­ing you in were friendly and help­ful. It‘s easy to see how con­spir­acy the­o­ries start when you give mul­ti­ple peo­ple the wrong bal­lot in a sin­gle loca­tion. Not good.

Vot­ing: I voted for Kinky and then as close to a straight Demo­c­ra­tic ticket as I could. Where there weren‘t Dems run­ning, I voted Lib. Where they didn‘t exist either, I left it blank. I believe Repub­li­can party has lost its way and its man­date and needs to be, shall we say, refo­cused. The Port secu­rity bill with a rider pro­hibit­ing gam­bling (well, not horse rac­ing or lot­tery or pari-mutuel gam­bling or Indian casino gam­bling or any other gam­bling inter­est well funded by spe­cial inter­est groups) was the last straw but the Schi­avo affair, the nom­i­na­tion of Miers to the Supreme Court and the gen­eral affin­ity for dark­ness and secrecy in regards to how the gov­ern­ment spends my money all had an influence.

The party of Rea­gan and Gin­grich is gone and it‘s been replaced by the party of Frist and Hastert, a mor­al­iz­ing, judge­men­tal, big gov­ern­ment mon­stros­ity that embarasses me. I‘m hop­ing the GOP loses both houses but I‘m count­ing on at least one. I don‘t think the Democ­rats are a viable party either based on their pan­der­ing to the anti-war left but I don‘t see any way to make the GOP back into a decent gov­ern­ing party with­out strik­ing fear into their dirty lit­tle hearts. It scares me to give con­trol to the Dems but maybe a lit­tle grid­lock wouldn‘t hurt us that much.