Walk the Vote

I voted in the Presidential election a couple hours ago. The polling station is only about half a mile from where I live, so I took advantage of the lull in the rain to walk over instead of drive, thus exercising my body as I exercised my right to vote.

There were some pretty long lines, and naturally, I was in the longest, slowest line. My last name starts with L-Z so I had to wait in that line while the A-K line had half the number of voters in it, and was moving so much faster. The polling station was in an elementary school gym, and the most amusing part of the morning was the early morning anouncements. The principal, or whoever the woman was, was an absolutely incompetent speaker. She tried to read a list of names of students who had won some sort of writing contest, but she absolutely butchered each and every kid's name on the list. It was embarrassing - made worse, I suppose, since some of the children's parents might have been in line to vote.

Anyway, I voted John Kerry. I'm not a democrat, and I actually supported Bush in the last election, but Bush and his crew have proven themselves incompetent when it comes to improving the economy and in foreign policy. For me, the final straw was the Abu Ghraib scandal. Bush has repeatedly implied that he is not unwilling to use torture, and I just think that using torture puts us on the same level as the terrorists.

Interestingly, some of my co-workers were surprised that I supported Kerry, but I explained that I'm a single-issue voter in the sense that I am anti-torture.

By all indications, this year will be a repeat of 2000 in that we won't know for a few days at least who has won the election, it is that close. I'm ready to wait patiently for the outcome.

Yesterday, I tried to conduct an "exit poll" with my students, just to confirm the suspicion that I have that most of them are for Bush. Indeed they are, by a margin of 24-5 (with some undecideds and one girl who abstained). They are all worried about a draft and seem to think that Bush will never re-institute the draft, but of the two of them, Kerry and Bush, I think that we are more likely to see Bush, in a second term, bring back the draft. Why wouldn't he? It would solve his personnel problems, and he wouldn't have to worry about the political fallout. Kerry, I suspect, would want to get re-elected in 2008, and so would be disinclined to bring back the draft. But my students seem to think that they can trust what Bush tells them, so there they are.