Happy Holidays!

Here we are - election day. Yippee!! Today is the day we all go to the polls and hope that our vote is one of the percentage that actually gets counted. Or in some cases, from the looks of it, we go to the polls, wait an hour in the rain and go home pissed off that after 200 years, we can’t find a fucking way to reliably count the votes.

This bothers me. I don’t know how you feel, but this doesn’t seem like democracy to me. The Republicans are pulling every trick in the book to suppress the vote and nobody cares. It’s par for the course in a democracy, right?

No!

It is not the point of democracy to allow the system to devolve into a battle of who cheats better. It’s supposed to be a polling of the people in order to choose their new leaders. We shouldn’t have to place our “faith” in the words of a voting machine manufacturer that the booth works, or to assume that the Republican and Democratic parties would not cheat and change the votes because well, that would be like something Saddam Hussein would do. These people are paid to win; nothing short of victory will suffice. We shouldn’t have to “trust” these people and institutions. We should have absolute scientific proof of the accuracy of the count, whatever the count happens to be. Anything less than that is not democracy. Without democracy, we have nothing. Without a real vote, our leaders cannot be held accountable for their actions. Hey, maybe that worked for Augustus Caesar and Louis XIV, but how’d it go with Nero and Napoleon? Not so much.

No matter what happens tonight -- and Spaghetti Monster-willing enough of you Democrats will go to the polls to overcome the eight ball of gerrymandering and voting fraud the Republicans have put us behind -- I won’t honestly trust the vote. Our politicians have to wake up and fix this their very next day in office. Voting machines that accurately count the votes and can be verified. More voting machines in all districts, not just in the rich ones. Accountability in advertising and immediate shutdown of illegal election tampering operations. Most importantly, we need public financing of elections to get the corruption out of government. Oh, and also I need a rocket ship to the moon, and Natalie Portman to stop by my place tonight after she votes.

So what do you think? Do we live in the United States of America or a South American junta? Maybe we find out tonight…

Happy voting!