Something I just read on the RSS feed from BoingBoing:

From Warren Ellis’s BAD SIGNAL mailing list: “Karl Rove is not Aleister Crowley, Severus Snape, Darth Vader or Satan. You can kill him by ensuring your vote is counted and being vigilant at your polling station.”

Tee-hee-hee.

Our little town got some new-fangled voting machines for this election. When you walk into the booth, there’s a huge screen in front of you. It’s the paper election ballot that you get in the mail prior to election time, except that this time it’s laid over buttons that light up when you push the box containing your chosen candidates name. Once you select the candidates you want, you press a big red button on the bottom of the panel to cast your vote. The machine issues forth an electronic (and rather triumphant / video-game sounding) trill to let you know you done good.

The only ways that could be messed up:
- the trill means nothing and your vote isn’t cast
- the paper with all the names is misaligned, thus leading to inadvertent button-pressing (highly unlikely)

I overheard the election volunteers talking about the machine since there was a guy stationed next to it counting the paper ballot stubs (that voters sign) and comparing them to the votes the machine counted. The little old lady next to him mentioned that at 4:00, they had counted 461 and the machine had only counted 456. Not horrible, but I wonder what the accepted margin of error/standard deviation is.

Anecdote: a few years ago, when my father learned that I was registered as a Democrat, he said (quite seriously, and in Polish - but this is a pretty literal translation), “so I’ve been nursing a viper in my bosom.” He doesn’t have a bosom and the idea of my father as nurturing nurse is beyond incredible… but I think it’s funny. I wonder how many Republican parents out their think of their Democratically-affiliated children as vipers.

After voting, I stopped at Staples with the family (since we all went voting together) and got a spiffy new notebook for work and some good new pens - that are only available at Staples since they’re a Staples product. They’re the Staples Opti-Flow pens. Very nice.

I haven’t had dinner. No wonder I’m ravenous. I’ll check election results while I’m at it.

Update: Big surprise. My historically blue state of NJ continues to be blue. 70% blue, actually. As of 3 minutes ago (9:50 pm) the Democrats had 101 House seats versus 79 GOP seats, but with 255 seats still undecided. I’m going to go to sleep, but I hope to wake up to a more equal House, or one that’s a little bluer than today.