Special to the Americans

[jlh]

Voted this morning. Many more people than usual, but not a crazy line, I think mostly because mine is not a very 9-5 neighborhood. I predict crazy lines this afternoon and evening.

There's a documentary coming out about the school board in Kansas (you know, the one that decided against the teaching of evolution for a while?). Wanna know how the Christian Coalition-types gained so much power, not only in Kansas but in the rest of the US--so much that they became a major force in the Republican party? They ran candidates and voted in local elections. They did that grass roots democracy thing, only no one was paying them any mind because who votes in local-only elections?

I bring this up because I want to stress that even if you don't live in a swing state, your vote counts. The entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for election and the Senate is nearly evenly divided. Your state legislature is where any constitutional amendments (whatever gets out of the Congress) will be ratified, and if Kerry is elected, where gay marriage will be decided. It's also where most civil rights are decided and where so much of the nitty gritty of the education, health, and welfare system actually gets determined. If you live in a rural area, your town council or county board will decide on how the roads are maintained, how school funding is distributed and how high your property taxes will be. If you live in an urban area, your city officials will also be setting the tone for things like law enforcement, public works, and mass transportation.

So, please, take a book for the line, maybe an apple, and vote.

Oh, and by the way: The polling places in most of the east don't close until 9pm, and no one will be calling anything at least until then. Since all the news you're going to get for the next twelve hours is about voter challenges, you might just want to watch a movie. Not, you know, that we're likely to know anything tomorrow anyway.

Comments

[danielerin.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you said all of this, because it's easy to see why people DON'T vote when you look at the front of the paper this morning. A big map of the US, covered in the pretty colors red and blue, a few white ones here and there. I mean, what a joke? I'm a blue voter in a red state and it makes me crazy. But I still stood in line for an hour and a half, starting at 6:30 this morning, to make my choice known. We need to get rid of the electoral college and we need to stop the craziness of our campaign process - polls and predictions and spinning and half-truths and hundreds of millions of dollars going to waste.

*sighs* But I'm optimistic. We keep chipping away at it, that's all. After all, they do teach evolution in the classroom now, don't they? :-)

[budgiesmuggler.livejournal.com]

When do you find out the results?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

The official results may not be known for weeks because of voter challenges and the like.

However, we used to know the results around mindnight-ish, when the California polls close. The networks would use a combination of exit polls to project the outcome of the election, but that's how things went so horribly wrong last time, likely because people who voted in Florida thought they voted for someone other than they actually did.

But Americans will be actually voting until about 3am my time (in Hawaii and Alaska) and then the votes have to be counted, so in a close election like this one probably will be, we won't know at least until morning if not for weeks, like in 2000.

[budgiesmuggler.livejournal.com]

I guess, given the size of America, it would be expected. I mean, our election takes one day. We find out the results that night, if we're dying to know, and the next morning for those who prefer to sleep.

So how do voter challenges work? I'm confused. :/