Rainy Day Election Musings...

Somebody flipped the Winter Switch here sometime last week. We went from a long string of golden days baking the tattered tan end of summer into the dust to three days of rain marching back and forth across the sky and hitting the pavement like the heels of polished jackboots.

I stood at the bus stop with the maple tree dripping water and wet brown helicopters into my hair. The invisible residue summer's travels left on the road sparkles on the puddles and runs down the gutters in oily rainbows. That'll be gone soon and flat gray will be all that remains. What a perfect day for the serious business of pondering an election.

I'm not sure where this going to go. I'm doing my part working on the issues that matter to me, and in November we'll see where this all ends up. I see it as a mechanical system in need of some work, and the metaphor carries through this whole process.

You don't get too far tightening a bolt if you are putzing around with that hose clamp off to the other side. People spent a lot of time blowing smoke about "election fraud" this last couple years, when an obvious culprit is the stupid ways partisan regulations have crept into the election system that lock people into voting specific ways. It never says it in so many words, but if you stack all the stupid rules together you effectively can't vote for anyone who isn't Republican if you declare yourself a Republican in the state of Washington. Or even better is the rules/traditions that allow an incumbent to run without opposition from his own party and to actually avoid a real primary election in many cases. If you're a member of that same party you're effectively disenfranchised. Where this really bites is where it applies to many federal elections like Senators, Representatives, and the President. I know this affected my voting patterns and I believe it's a huge factor in these close presidential elections where in order to vote for the candidate of the opposite party you literally have to not be able to vote for anyone in your current party anywhere else on the ticket. What say we stop going on about chads and supposed weakness in voting machines and fix the concrete and demonstrated problems in the election rules.

The whole system is connected so you have to be careful how your change is going to affect the rest of it. Trying to get an ordinance passed about jobs for people in low-income housing while slashing the funding for the bus system in that area and cutting funding for subsidized child care isn't going to have the effect you're hoping for. Unless all you're trying to do is shut up some vocal group and not do anything really effective.

If you don't use the right tools you can't turn it. The best you're going to get is hand-tight. And that's just not good enough for most applications. My favorite one is the people who try to tell you that there's a right to privacy in the Constitution. Or a right to education. Or any number of other indicators that they don't know what their problem is so they can't bring to bear the right effort to fix it. I have an acquaintance who is all up in arms about some of the content in the "health" book her child brought home. So she wrote a letter to her Congressman. Real helpful. You want to fix local education issues, try talking to your local school board and get on the Curiculum Committee.

If you don't even know which way to turn the wrench then you're really up a crick. I've run into a bunch of those. A bunch of absentee ballots here in my state are going to be invalidated because people didn't indicate their party affiliation on it (see that section up there with the hose clamp and the partisan election regulations). This is plainly marked on the page but they didn't follow the directions. It's not just their fault - it's hard to wade through the verbiage. I don't know how it's going to affect some races.

I'm not a fatalist about it. I just know that to make real change in a system involves acting on the system itself and doing it intelligently. But sometimes it's hard. This next election is going to be interesting, that's for sure.