eh... i do want to ramble more
ok, something else about the elections. first, i love tech week but who the hell decided to shove it into elections week. there are going to be demonstrations and protestations, and i damn well want to go downtown and join in. second, oregon is one of the fateful 11 states, all of whom passed their amendments to ban gay marriage. but at least oregon, who's pretty damn identical politically with iowa, managed to ring in solidly for kerry. also... kally called me a bit ago and said chet called off the counting in iowa and sent everyone home, with a small percent of the precincts left to count, because everyone was tired and it was looking grim anyway. i laughed - a macabre, ridiculous, our-voting-system-is-hopeless laugh. furthermore, i'm insanely curious to discover all the things that will be going down in ohio. that place is a mess right now. it's just amazing - as all this inquiry is raised over the validation of voter registration, i remember when i was interning at the sec of state's office right after the census, and we were reapportioning the precincts and all that jazz - but one of my tasks for over a month was to transfer names and information on all the convicted felons to a database. this database was tiny font with no spaces between numbers and letters, and it was thousands of names, and no one proof read any of my entries. so - i have this mental image of how chaotic our voter registration system is, and how inevitably easy it is to mess up and therefore invalidate registrations (especially in the crazy drive that's just ocurred)... you would think that if we're messing with the formation of governments in other countries we could solidify our voting system at home well enough that we could elect a leader in a slightly fair and precise manner. you would think we would learn. eh... or would you?