1.19.2010

What's happening, or not, or maybe

Well, today was the day we went to the polls here in Massachusetts to decide between the regrettable Coakley and the unthinkable Brown to be the occupant of Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat. (There was a third candidate on the ballot, a Joe Kennedy, no relation, running as a Libertarian and on the assumption that if you're in Massachusetts and your name is Kennedy, what the hell, it's worth a shot.)

There was a very, very little bit of cold, sleety, almost-snow drizzling down all day which should have served to suppress the vote but apparently it has not - most reports have it the turnout is high. Considering neither candidate is much worth getting excited about and further that 90 percent of the voting machines in this state are Diebold machines, the other 10 percent Sequoia, all run on proprietary software and, in any event, are eminently hackable and most, if not all are maintained by a company that's admitted to fixing an election in another state (in other words, boys and girls, the votes are counted in secret by a bunch of people we don't know and can't check up on) you have to wonder why anybody bothers voting at all, or how dumb is it to run a government this way, or both.

The polls close at 8 PM Eastern time.

Meanwhile I got a robocall this morning - the only one in this campaign (a woman I work with said she and her other got 20, between them, yesterday). It started out by asking if I was registered to vote in MA - I said yes - and then it asked if I planned to vote today. I said I already had, whereupon the robo got all in my face and said if I didn't say yes, no, or repeat, it would end the call. So I hung up. And immediately started regretting that. Because, dude, if I'd said repeat and made it repeat, and then said repeat again....

I wonder if I could have got it stuck in a loop. If I ever get another one, that's the first thing I'll try.


PS. My hunch is that a big turnout here favors Brown. I hope I'm wrong.

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