Anyway, my favorite blogs for today: Talking Points Memo and Mystery Pollster.

I voted this morning in an elementary school. My observations:

1. No lines, its great to be in Texas! I just walked right up and cast my vote.

2. Being in an elementary school is a lot like Liliput. Everything is miniature. It was really funny, because they must have run out of "grownup" size table and the election officials were sitting at little mini-tables all hunched over.

3. There is no such thing as secret voting here. Not even a curtain, just neck-high cardboard walls.

4. There doesn't seem to be much point of voting here. Most of the positions were uncontested (including our congressional race and the vast majority of the judges). There weren't even any referendums or bond issues...

5. Liberatarians are weird. Many of the "contested" races were Repub's vs. Lib's., especially for judicial positions. Anyway, I would've considered voting for the Lib's if THEY EVEN HAD A WEB PAGE! I mean, the party has a web site, but then you go to the candidate's info page and all you have is name, age, and where they went to school. Nothing else. Not a single word about them or their position or experience even if you google them. Now, maybe I'm a new fangled kind of gal, but I need to know a little bit more about the candidate than how old they are.

6. I voted for two Republicans over Democrats (whoa!). One was for the county tax assessor/collector, simply as vengence to the incumbant (a dem) for denying my appeal on the amount of property tax I had to pay. The other was an uncontested Republican for appellate court judge who put a bunch of her rulings on her web page and they seemed very level headed to my uneducated legal mind.

7. My way of expressing my pissed-off-ness of so many uncontested races (gosh darn, you think the Democrats could at least make a small showing...) was just not filling in the bubble if I didn't like the incumbant. I wonder if that makes any difference at all.

8. I didn't fill in the bubble for Ron Paul. He's my new Congressman (running, yes, you guessed it, uncontested) thanks to DeLay's stupid redistricting. He's more Liberatarian than Republican, and I would've voted for him if he was consistantly lib. But the number of times that he mentions "God" on his web site freaked me out. Plus I think that to be a "good" liberatarian you should support a women's right to choose (which he doesn't) and oppose the death penalty (which he doesn't). So, he lost my vote. Not that it matters.

7. I view my vote for Sen Kerry as counting even though I live in a solidly red state (see here for an interesting article on the color coding of states). There's always the off-chance that Pres Bush will win the electoral college and Sen Kerry the popular vote, and, well, I just want one more data point to support my belief that the electoral college is an out of date remement from the days where communication was slow between states (or non-existant) and the voting public was ill-educated.

10. I am having trouble counting this morning.

11. I don't think any news channel is going to be so stupid as to call the election tonight. Most likely there will be a lot of talk all night and pretty red and blue flashing lights (and maybe some purple and grey and stuff). Oooh, flashing lights. I'll be seeing the Chorus Line musical in town. Maybe when I come back the results will be clearer, but really I'm just hoping we'll have a President by January.

11. I think I voted against the space program by voting for Sen Kerry. But I think I voted for World Peace. So it probably all comes out in the wash.

On a non-voting issue, this one is for all my friends here at work. WebTADS (our time keeping system) has won an award for financial management. I don't know what these people were thinking when they gave this award out!

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