Monday, June 28, 2004

after voting in the canadian national election today, i discovered a renewed sense of incredulous befuddlement at how the american election of 2000, especially the florida recount, could have gone so, so incredibly wrong.

remember how it took, like, two weeks for the official results to be announced? two weeks for the recount in one state? in unprecedented, the revealing documentary about how florida disenfranchised thousands of people -- most of them blacks -- the filmmakers discussed the negative impact of the confusing butterfly ballot. confusing!? fucking retarded, was what it was. the voters had to punch holes for a candidate on a convoluted list of staggered and alternating names. most of the voters -- the ones who were allowed to vote -- didn't even know whom they were voting for, and sometimes the hole punch didn't go all the way through and was never registered.

today, as i cast my ballot, i took a moment to revel in its beautiful simplicity: a list of candidates; you use a pencil to mark an x by the name of the candidate for whom you would like to vote. x. that's it. no hole-punching, no lever-pulling...the ballots are handcounted, but that's a pretty self-explanatory process.

during the american election debacle, my buddy JH remarked that it took four hours to count all of the ballots in canada when chrétien scored his threepeat; with a population ten times canada's, wouldn't it just take at most 40 hours to recount all of the ballots in the country, let alone those from a single state of geriatrics?

in november, the ambitious americans are tryin' out those crazy new-fangled electronic voting machines. let's see how far up shit creek they get this time 'round. do they think that implementing a new and barely tested (not to mention utterly unnecessary) technology somehow makes their brand of democracy superior? give me a golf pencil and a simple list of names any day.

...

in other news, go see napoleon dynamite. D&A treated us to it on their stop in town before embarking on their alaskan cruise and it's incredibly, dysfunctionally, hilarious.

also: i just fucked up my sweetie's rubik's cube. he took the news really well.

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