Hmm, could be a dud...

[altivo]

I did not vote in the Illinois primary. There was no point. Not one of the candidates from any of several parties earned or deserved my support. None of them.

As for anything else on the ballot, unless you take a Republican ballot around here, it is essentially blank. Either it consists of people running unopposed for their nomination, or there is no name at all. Come November, there will be a choice in only a handful of spots, and the rest will be unopposed. I don't vote for candidates who have no opposition. They've already won by default, why should I vote for them? By virtue of their party's clout and stranglehold on the county, and the backroom process that chose them, they are automatic winners. This county is run by the Republican committees, not by the voters. Those committees are open only to people who have a certain amount of money and, uh, influence.

The weather is disappointing so far. After 24 hours of increasing hype about the horrible storm we are going to get, with, according to the latest spot forecast from the National Weather Service, up to 17 inches of snow tonight and tomorrow morning, there is nothing happening. We got some nasty ice and snow right around rush hour time, but it petered out shortly thereafter. Now even the radar is starting to clear. All sorts of events for tonight and tomorrow have been canceled, and even many school districts announced today that they would be closed tomorrow. If it turns out to be a total dud, just imagine how hard it will be to get them to close the next time, when it will probably turn out to be real...

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Of course that's not how it worked. Back in 2001, Bush was already bragging about his "mandate from the people to make changes" even before he was inaugurated, when in fact the only reason he got to be president at all was that the Supreme Court intervened inappropriately.

Of course the Republicans have taken care of that now by introducing new secret proprietary means of counting votes that no one understands and no one can check up on, created by Republican-owned corporations. Fascism is alive and well in the US, that's certainly true.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Certainly true, yes. :/ What I mostly meant that even *if* you have (or had) elections where that kind of fraud did not exist, the president would still not even come close to representing the majority of the population.

FWIW, I just checked Wikipedia, too, and the number of actual votes that Dubya received according to the official result in 2004, already including all the irregularities and outright fraud, was 62.040.610. Slightly higher than what I estimated above, but still, it's only about 20% of the population - 80% did NOT vote for him.

The same most likely goes for any politician, of course, and politicians who've got some integrity left really should keep that in mind.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

We had unusually high voter turnout in 2004, by our recent standards. That explains how Dubya had such a high vote count. Even his opponent had a higher vote count than previous winners.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK - interesting. Thanks. :)