Thursday, October 30, 2008

My pre-election rant

I've been following the U.S. election very closely over the past couple of months, and I usually keep my trap shut on this blog - mostly out of respect for my beloved American friends, and a concern that my acerbic opinions may hurt some feelings. Americans - you're super sexy, and I love you unconditionally, but I can no longer stay silent about this: I'm really annoyed with all the news reports regarding long line-ups and technical problems with the voting machines at the early polling stations this week.

Could someone please explain to me why this shit is happening?!!

I mean, thanks to the American media's inability to shut the hell up about it, the whole world has known about this election for a couple of years now. And since there were faulty machines and hotly contested votes during the last election, one would assume that the people who designed (and charge money to maintain) these wonders of technology would've gotten off their asses during the past four years and worked out the bugs.

Of course it's way more convenient to blame the voters themselves with lame excuses like "operator error", but that's ridiculous. Sure, there's always some dumbasses in the mix, but if citizens honestly can't figure out how to push a button or two, perhaps that says something about your fucking polling machines.

Not to brag, but we just had a federal election in Canada (Oct 14). It was called 45 days before election day. There were 5 candidates for Prime Minister, and one televised debate. It might seem quaint, but like most countries in the world, we still vote the old-fashioned way - by marking an 'X' on a little square of paper that contains a list of the candidates names. You simply put your 'X' in the little circle - or if you're retarded, you can put a scribble or a line or a smiley face in the circle, and it still counts. If you can't colour inside the lines, or go apeshit with the pencil and mark more than one circle, it's a spoiled ballot. When you're done, some official government person puts your little folded up paper in a sealed cardboard box with a slot on the top. No tampering, no cheating, no gray areas.

There are thousands of polling stations (sometimes three or four in one neighbourhood) so not a single polling station had a line-up the size of a theme-park ride. We don't even have to be registered in order to vote - you just show your ID, or something with your name and address on it, like a utility bill. The cost of the entire process was approximately 3 million dollars, and yes, a whole lot of trees gave their lives for all the paper ballots. Don't worry too much about that - all the paper gets recycled.

Go ahead and poke fun at our simple ways, but when a winner was finally declared, there were no controversies about bizarro polling machines that choose the red guy when you really wanted to vote for the blue guy. There were no stories of voters being turned away because the polls closed while they were standing in line for several hours. The entire election process was over and done with in just six weeks.

So I'm asking my American readers to enlighten me. Please help me understand all this voting machine nonsense. What the hell has happened to you guys? Was it all that cocaine in the 80s? Remember the good old days when you put a MAN ON THE MOON before anyone knew what the hell a computer was? You invented the fucking AUTOMOBILE for chrissakes, during an era when very few people were educated beyond the basics of reading and writing. So how is it even possible that your brightest minds can't invent a polling machine that works?

I realize it's none of my concern how you handle your elections, but whether I like it or not, your policies, trade agreements and wars affect my existence, too. If McCain gets in, I'm just as fucked as you are, and this is now the third close-race election in a row where the outcome may not be entirely accurate.

So if you'd like to continue calling yourselves "the leader of the free world" or "the best country ever", or some other delusional self-congratulatory phrase, please tell the idiots in charge of your elections to stop being so laughably incompetent.

19 comments:

The Guv'ner said...

Well evidently it's all Chad's fault. Whoever he is. And during that first Bush election why was he hanging in the first place? WTF? I can't figure out why they don't have a uniform system for voting. Like everyone votes by hand (as you said) or electronically, but not 672 different ways depending on location. There are probably parts of the country where monkeys do the counting, I don't know. I always have visions of someone in a room counting votes and getting distracted by like American Idol or something and having to start over and going "Ah fuck it, we'll say 3,456 and go from there..."

That's actually the part I'm looking forward to in the stupid round the clock election coverage - what will go wrong this time?

Dr Zibbs said...

I agree. It's absurd that the voting machines aren't simple and standard across all states.

The Imaginary Reviewer said...

Good rant. I completely agree.

Poobomber said...

I like the drama of elections.

Especially when people in Kentucky or Florida or some fucked up place vote. When they interview someone who just voted in these places, it's amazing that THESE people choose the leader of the most powerful nation in the universe.

SouthernBelle said...

So true, I was just thinking about this yesterday!

Back in Australia we have the paper & pencil system too. Granted, the pieces of paper are fucking enormous what with all the names they have to put on there, but if you manage to fuck up your vote, you are so stupid you don't deserve to vote anyway, so it all evens out.

I am not looking forward to trying to figure out whatever godawful mess of a system they use here in GA. Probably you have to catch a pig with the name of your chosen candidate on it or something.

red said...

"They" want it to be a big ol' debacle! It's how the man keeps us down!

SkylersDad said...

I apologize for the rest of us Americans Kat. It would appear that we outsourced pretty much everything, and we included common sense!

Some Guy said...

It is a very helpless feeling. How can we say that we love democracy when we can't be 100% sure that the vote we cast is for the person we intended? Like you say, it's a pretty simple concept.

Steve Caratzas said...

It's happening because fascists are in power.

Gwen said...

I'm going to say this this way because I haven't seen it on paper anywhere and I want to see it:

Oh, dear Lord, please let the black man win.

Chris said...

I used to work at a print shop. We had the contract to print ballots for the county (and some neighboring counties, too). It was actually pretty interesting, and VERY frustrating!

The first thing I learned was that there's not just one ballot for an election. There's a separate ballot for every precinct. In Sioux City there are, gosh, I dunno, 32 precincts... Something like that. So you have 32 different ballots.

But it doesn't stop there... For ever ballot there are "rotations." There need to be an equal number of ballots with Candidate A listed first and ballots with Candidate B listed first. This is fine, except in some races there can be eight or ten candidates -- so for each of the 32 precincts there will be eight or ten rotations, meaning there are now upwards of 300 different ballots. (Most of the time we had around 60 different ballots for our county, but if there were a race with a large number of people running the number of ballots skyrockets.)

Okay, so say there are ten candidates running for city council or something, so each precinct has ten different ballots to deal with. Some precincts in the rural parts of the county will only have a hundred people vote. That means that we only print ten copies of each ballot in some cases... But since our ballots are optically scanned and counted by some goofy machine we can't simply photocopy them -- the ballots HAVE to come off a printing press or the scanner doesn't work right. That means a lot of time making expensive plates for the press, setup time, etc. And, if you've ever seen a printing press run, you simply can't run only ten copies of something -- in just a few seconds the press will spit out a couple hundred copies... So someone has to count out ten or twelve copies and we just throw the rest out (shredded, of course).

Now, you need to remember that each ballot needs a certain number of test ballots -- ballots that the election officials use to test the machines. This is on top of the sample ballots that get hung up in the polling places that need the word "SAMPLE" printed across them...

So, for one election in a relatively small town we often have 32 different categories of ballots, each with eight or ten variations, each with samples and test variations. It's quite stressful trying to keep it all straight! And it's quite expensive to print them all...

steakbellie said...

HOLY CRAP, CHRIS!
is this all your fault?

Leonesse said...

Amen, sister.

Common sense seems to be severely lacking these days.

Bluzlover said...

I couldn't agreee with you more. I have been advocating a short campaign period for years. These scarecrows have been neglecting the job they were elected for while they cavort acros the country trying to become our prez. America seems to have a way of complicating the simple in an effort to make things "better". The more I read of your blog the closer I come to moving north.

Falwless said...

hahahaha @ steakbellie

BeckEye said...

Everything I need to know about voting, I learned from American Idol. The voting system is obviously flawed, and could be fixed, but no one wants to because the flaws give rise to controversy, which keeps people talking, gives the media something to do, and lets whiners all across the country complain that their favorite should have won, and everything's crooked.

Grant Miller said...

But we all secretely, or not so secretly, hate each other down here. We're a dysfunctional family.

Dr Zibbs said...

Congrats. See my blog for details.

pistols at dawn said...

I thought about it, and thought about it, and I've got no effing idea why this is the case. Maybe it's because we only care for one news cycle every four years?