Two things about Tuesday

[mrissa]

1. If you are in the US and choose to vote on Tuesday, please look carefully at your method of voting. I don't mean your method of selecting how to vote, I mean physically, specifically, how are they having you vote in your precinct? Ask yourself: if there was a question of malice or error, is there some way that a nonpartisan group could recount my vote with some reasonable assurance that they were counting it the way I cast it?

This is not just important if the election doesn't go your way. Even if you're having the best election of your life and are thrilled with everyone who is elected from president to third assistant dogcatcher--even if every referendum you wanted passed and every one you didn't failed--the process is important to democracy. And while people may feel a lot more passionate about it if they feel their vote has been stolen and the results have changed thereby, it sounds a lot less like sour grapes to say, "I don't dispute the results of the current election, but I think we need to look at this in the long term and change how we're doing this."

(People outside the US: no, it's not standardized. It's not even standardized within a metro area in some places, much less within a state, much less within all of them.)

2. Here is my plan for Tuesday: normal morning consisting of internet stuff, PT, writing, couch time with poodle, workout, shower, lunch, PT. Then there will be voting. Then tisane. And then--this is important--I will stop reading lj until Wednesday morning. I will not turn on the news. If I watch anything on the television, it will be a DVD or perhaps the first period of the Wild/Sharks game.

Because here's the thing: there is nothing I can do at that point to change the outcome, and it is not a horse race. If someone edges ahead with the first few states reporting and then someone else surges with the next few and like that, me watching it happen will not change it. And me watching it happen doesn't change the results of the Wild/Sharks game, either, but at least our man Mikko is on fire this year, and he has such pretty hands. (Note for the potentially confused: this is not literal. By "pretty hands" I mean that he does skilled and sometimes unexpectedly elegant things with his stick and the puck, not that he should model rings and wristwatches.) I know that some people will be comforted by knowing as much as possible about the election as soon as possible. I think it'll be a better idea for me to think about something else. And if you find you're not enjoying watching the results trickle in, maybe it's time for you to make cookies or read a book or knit a sock. If you are, if liveblogging the election or sitting around snarking with friends is your thing, enjoy it. I'll catch up with what you had to say on Wednesday morning.

Comments

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Huh, you've finally presented me with a complete "I can't understand that view." (Note that means simply that it's completely foreign to my experience, not that it's Bad or Wrong or anything like that.) I LIVE for election nights. I love watching the returns come in. I want to be there when the election gets called (or even as happened in 2000, uncalled). It goes back to my first Election Night in 1968, when I was five years old, and my parents let me stay up to watch the news until the unheard of hour of 9 p.m. I still remember being bummed that I had to go to sleep while the election was still in doubt, and being worse bummed on the bus to school the next morning when I asked my Mom who won, and she told me it was Nixon. I can't imagine going to sleep knowing that one could know (again, as opposed to 2000, where I needed to sleep, of course, between Election Day and the Supreme Court's decision a month later).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have very low tolerance for TV journalism in ordinary circumstances, and part of the reason is that the endless repetition of the same two to four points makes me want to jump through the screen and throttle somebody. This is only worse on election nights. If I curl up with New Scientist or Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Roosevelt presidency, information will flow to me in a peaceful way that doesn't make me want to scream, "Say something different!" or "Say something sensible!" or "MATH DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT!" (These could be addressed by reading bruce_schneier on making_light for my coverage, but I can skim that for the interesting bits in the morning, no problem.)

Probably it makes a difference that the first two elections in which I voted were 1996, in which I didn't have a TV or internet in my dorm room, so following the coverage was not an option and I didn't miss it, and 2000, and we all know what happened there.