I realize this is horribly cynical. The truth is really much worse: that no one is good at governing, at least not in a way that will please you all the time. But really, vote. Otherwise the crazy half of the country might win!

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The fifteen electoral votes from North Carolina went to Barack Obama by a mere 12,160 votes. That means 49.84% of the 4.2 million NC voters voted for Obama and 49.55% voted for McCain. I’ve never felt so much like my vote counted in this stupid Electoral College system. I’ve already commented on how the United States employs the absolute worst voting system ever invented.

I leave you with some humor, courtesy of The Onion:

Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job
WASHINGTON – African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”

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Customize and send this video to your friends, especially the lazy “might not actually vote” ones, at cnnbcvideo.com.

Thanks to Alan for sending this my way.

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Frankly, I’m quite pleased with 75% of my votes winning.

Strangely, the Commissioner of Labor contest was incredibly close. Of more than a million votes, the final breakdown was

That’s seriously close. Mary Fant Donnan won by fewer than 39,577 votes from the runner-up and only 42,762 votes from the candidate that got the fewest votes. Amazing!

Obama gave another one of his speeches. The first time we heard one of these, we were all amazed, but now it more like, “Yeah, so Picasso painted another masterpiece…ho..hum…”.

Go Barack!

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• If one of the candidates is the incumbent, vote for the other guy.
• If one is male and the other is female, vote for the woman.
• If one is white and the other is a racial minority, vote for the minority.

I realize that this is horribly sexist and racist, but Washington is overwhelmingly run by white men, and anything I can do to make the demographics of the government more closely reflect the demographics of the population, the better, I think.

Apparently it cost the North Carolina taxpayers $1.80 to send me the ballot. What is that, like one euro now?

My vote for the Democratic nominee for the Presidential Elections of 2008.

To anyone in the Obama campaign offices, I’ve got a suggestion for a great chant that can be used at rallies:

Half the crowd: “Who’s got B.O.?”

The other half: “We’ve got B.O.!!!”

I hereby submit this chant into the public domain. It can be used without my explicit consent.

For some reason my blog has a Voting category. It must be because this was my second or third post. Anyway, this post fits perfectly in that category, don’t you think?

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But just in case you wanted to vote in an intelligent manner, I’d recommend you check out this link: Pick Your Candidate.

It’s a clever little script written by some dude name Matt Waterman. Good work, Matt!

Since it ranks by the fewest disagreements, that would seem to favor candidates, like Gravel, who have unknown stances on many issues. Not surprisingly, my closest match was Dennis Kucinich, who, as you may recall, astonished me by making the most sense in the first debate. Apparently people are complaining that the script favors Kucinich, and Matt is trying to rectify things. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was really true that Kucinich is the closest match for a lot of people and that they were surprised by this because no one votes by issue.

The script also says that I disagree with certain candidates on some issues that I was pretty sure we agreed on. Of course it’s so hard to actually get a candidate to take a yes or no position on anything that these scores can only be an estimate anyway.

Great link, though. Thanks to Simon for mentioning the link.

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Since installing the plugin that enables this rating system, WP-PostRatings, and having seen it almost never being used, I have almost disabled it a few times. I have a theory that, at least for internet content, a “thumbs up or thumbs down”, Digg-style, voting system is probably best. Due to the hyperlinked nature of the internet, once you’re done reading a page, it’s so easy to leave and go somewhere else that no one ever sticks around long enough to place a vote of any sort on what they’ve just experienced. So if someone is voting, that means that they so strongly approve or disapprove of the content that they’ve taken time to vote. I begun to formulate this theory when I was noticing that all my blog post votes were either 1-star or 5-star. And that makes perfect sense. If you’re indifferent about the content, you just don’t vote! It’s very rare to see a 3-star vote.

I’ve just read this very interesting interview with author William Poundstone about voting systems and how the one used by the United States elections, “plurality voting”, is the absolute worst voting system ever invented.

I won’t go into what Instant-runoff (you go, Cary!) and the other alternatives are are; go and read the interview for that. What I found particularly interesting is what the mathematicians that work on these things have to say about my post ranking theory described above. Obviously the way they are judging the voting systems is based on the assumption that you are choosing one victor from a handful of candidates, but I suspect that their analysis probably carries over to ranking the best blog posts.

My blog uses what is called “range voting”. You give each story a grade as if it were a preschooler, by assigning it a number of stars. The thumbs up/down, Digg-style, voting is called “approval voting”. According to Mr. Poundstone and his research, range voting is the most fair voting system we have come up with so far. Approval voting, a simplified version of range voting, seems to be a close second.

The internet, and sites like Digg and YouTube, are doing a lot to provide examples of alternative voting systems. What would be really great is if a game show like Weakest Link or Survivor would use, say, range voting. Then, when it came time to introduce the general public to the new voting system, we could just say, “You know, like what they do on Get Off My Island!”

At the moment, however, even if we could remove all the dirty corruption surrounding the democratic voting process in the United States and count every vote fairly, the horribly inane voting system we use would still put the second best candidate in office.

Something tells me Dubya wouldn’t have won a Nobel Prize if he’d lost not been given the 2000 elections.

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If this terrifies you, there’s a petition and tons more information here. If it doesn’t terrify you, then shame on you.

The petition might not do much good, but I can’t see it doing any harm and it’s only 10 seconds of your time.

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Hillary and Barack are already shifting too close to the middle for my tastes. Dennis Kucinich, who, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I had never seen speak until today, said almost exactly what I would want my chosen candidate to say. One statement of his particularly stuck with me for its clarity and power over the other candidates:

I think it’s inconsistent to tell the American people that you oppose the war and, yet, you continue to vote to fund the war. Because every time you vote to fund the war, you’re reauthorizing the war all over again.

Please re-read that at least once more. You can’t say that you’re upset that your child is obese, and then obey him when he tells you to bring him a bag of potato chips without getting up from his video game console. Well, you can, but you’d be lying. Actions don’t lie. And in the case of congressmen (I’m sorry Hillary, but “congresspeople” just sounds silly), it’s your votes that don’t lie. The fact that Kucinich has never voted for the war, even back in 2002, when we were all duped by the “faulty intelligence”. That wins him some points in my book.

One quick complaint about this chart that I found on this article from the San Diego Tribune (it was the top on my Google News page):

The plus and minus rows are pretty stupid and sound unprofessional. But my real complaint is the “Celebrity donors” row. WHO CARES!??! Do people really decide to vote for who Jerry Springer, Tom Hanks, or Don Henley are endorsing? That seems pretty sad to me.

Now, how much which corporations are donating to each campaign would be much more interesting, mainly because it would help measure bias in news coverage.

That’s all for now. Comments more than welcome.

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