Democracy Inaction

After you get done chuckling in response to the oh-so-clever wordplay in the title of this post, I’d like to talk about the election for a moment. As some of you idiots might know, today is Election Day in the US. All day, it’s been the only thing people can talk about. There have been reports of technical glitches, long lines and sorts of other wacky electioneering shenanigans. But what I’ve failed to see are accurate depictions of the average polling place. Now, I didn’t vote today (I’m not registered in Arizona and my beliefs as a Calvinist strictly forbid any participation in the democratic process) but I was at a polling place for over 10 hours today. You see, although for income tax purposes I am a gentleman of leisure, to fund my addictions to fast food and German sandal-licking porn, I breakdance for nickels in an elementary school cafetorinasium. This elementary school just so happened to the local polling station.

Like I mentioned before, there has been a lot of writing, blogging and semaphoring about the problems at polling stations, but no one wants to mention the real problem: the people who run the polling stations are flat-out morons. Bloggers and talk-show pundits can blather on and on about the confusing inefficiency of electronic voting machines or claim that every long line is clearly the result of partisan redistricting, but they fail to notice the abject incompetence of the people responsible for collecting the accurate votes of million of people. For instance, around noon one of the election people told me that the room being used for voting was very, very hot. I went into the room and looked at the thermostat. It was set at 80. I said, “the thermostat is set at 80, that is why it is so damn hot.” The election dummies responded that in the morning it was very cold, so they turned the thermostat up. Apparently, the people responsible for ensuring the efficient working of the democratic process are smart enough to know to turn a thermostat up when it gets cold, but not yet smart enough to turn a thermostat down when it gets hot.

At another point in the day I noticed one of the election volunteers brought her son with her. The boy had splints on the index finger of each hand. In a moment of strikingly social behaviour, I remarked, “What happened to him, Chinese finger trap?” The woman replied, “No, he broke his fingers.” Were a violent misogynist, rather than a passive-aggressive misogynist, I would have punched her in the mouth. Really, he broke his fingers? How the fuck could I have ever figured that out? It’s not like he has splints on both his fingers. Oh wait, yes he does. All I wanted to know is how this little putz could break the same finger on each hand, but suffer no damage to any of his other eight digits. But instead of satiating my curiosity, I was once again reminded of why I should never talk to people who have not passed my rigorous screening process.

Anyways, what I’m trying to get at is this: don’t believe all the partisan finger-pointing and conspiracy theories you may read over the next few days. Yes, some long lines might be the result of deliberate attempts to inconvenience certain voters, but more than likely it’s probably just because a bunch of jackasses yapping on their cell phones didn’t bother to read all the signs posted and hold up the line fumbling around for proper identification. And buggy software might contribute to some of the problems with electronic voting, but any such problems are minor compared with the fact that the bible salesmen and suburban housewives responsible for assisting voters in the use of such machines couldn’t even figure out how to set up the damn table where the machine was supposed to sit, much less be able to provided technical support to bewildered old lady voters. Trust me, if any of these reporters and bloggers actually spent all day at a polling station and watched what was going on, they’d realize that the number one problem with the electoral process is good ol’ fashioned American nincompoopery.