Wednesday, June 4, 2008

CA-04 Update

[A big welcome to Sideshow readers. - F]

Yesterday was election day around here. I'll cut to the chase: Charlie Brown won by a landslide and will run against Tom McClintock in November.

When we got to the polling place, Mrs. G took her paper ballot and disappeared into one of the high-tech cardboard-and-trash-bag booths.

i didn't get off so easy. One of the poll workers spotted me as an obvious sucker cutting-edge type guy and asked if I would care to, er, volunteer to try out their new electronic digital high-zoot voting machine. Here's the dialogue:

Me: "Did Diebold have anything to do with that thing?"

Him: "No. You'll be wanting a Democratic ballot, right?"

Heh. Right.

The machine was way cool, but I was so dazzled I didn't get the brand name. It was like sitting under an instrument flying hood in a biplane. It had a little wheel you turned to make your choices on a screen, which changed after each 'enter'. At the end, a paper backup scrolled into a window. I then got to approve my choices or not, and then it thanked me warmly.

It only took me about twice as long to vote that way as it took Mrs. G with her #2 pencil. Ah, the progress of man.

Update:

More at AmericanRiverCanyon. Click 'there's more...' at the bottom of his posts.

Gotta go now and prepare my new 49-state motorcycle for an attempt at getting a California title in place of an Oregon one. There's a little innocent trickery involved on my part due to a stupid California law. If it works, I'll post about it at F & G in a coupla days. If it doesn't work, I don't know when I'll be able to post...

DMV twice in one week. Yeesh. Later.

Update 2:

My motorbike now has its very own California title and license plate, and I didn't have to outrun anybody. Let's just say for now that my faith turned out to be well-founded in the supposition that the DMV lady, a very nice person by the way, is not an expert on much earlier English motorcycle odometers than came on the sled. I actually was concerned that she might wonder what a 150MPH speedo was doing on an 80MPH motorcycle. More later.

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