In an attempt to spend the day writing, i turned off both phones and IM (and tried to avoid email, sorta). Yet, i did not expect the number of door visitors i would get today. Not only did the UPS delivery man ask me if i had voted, but i received visits from five Gonzalez supporters asking me if i had voted (one covered in Gonzalez stickers from head to toe).
I really wonder what this turn out will look like. Normally, rainy days for a non-Presidential election are a disaster at the polls. But the whole city is abuzz with election fever. Normally, when i go to the polls, there are very few people voting. Sadly, most of my neighborhood is ineligible to vote (or doesn’t speak English so very well). Thus, i was pleasantly pleased to go to the polls this afternoon and find it !full! of voters (rare at 2PM). One cluster pleased me the most. The older ones didn’t speak English but the younger ones were helping explain the process to them. This totally made my day.
One thing will be interesting… right after the first round of the mayor election, many Gonzalez supporters invaded my neighborhood to get people to register to vote. (Everyone in my neighborhood despises anyone situated in the Marina.) I’m guessing that most of those registered didn’t speak English, and most of the discussions i overheard were in Spanish. I wonder how many of my neighbors were eligible and came out today for the first time.
was the voting machine working when you went? when i was there this am, the machine that sucks in the ballot was broken and i was asked to put my ballot in a bin, w/ the implied assumption that someone would feed it to the machine later when it was fixed. i just rolled w/ it; i was groggy and on my way to school. but it felt nasty. i honestly don’t know if my vote counted. i suspect odd shit like that at the polling-place end-points introduces plenty of noise into the vote.
btw, salon.com has a forceful pro-newsom opinion piece worth checking out:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/12/09/newsom/index.html
Yeah – the sucking machine was fixed, although i couldn’t figure out which way i was supposed to put it in.
As for the Salon article, there’s a lot of heated undertones in this election that go far beyond the result. It’s a battle for both the Democrats and the Greens at a national level (think 2004 for one; validation for the other). Newsom is definitely a classic Democrat. He’s getting tagged a “racist” because of his backing of the Care Not Cash policy (whose billboards were horrifyingly racist). Personally, i’m still at absurdist level with it all. I think politicians are inherently screwy people, but i have to admit that i love the idea of living in a Green city. Regardless of what it means for mayor, i’ve been nothing but disappointed with the Democratic party for a while. And frankly, if it takes electing a Green to SF (after losing CA to a bodybuilder) for them to realize that they’ve lost control of their party, i’m all for it.
Was this a Diebold sucking machine…. ?
i was heartily amused by your story of the gonzalez supporter clad in campaign stickers, but given your self-declared love of the absurd, i wasn’t sure if you were serious or not.
my ethicist-philosopher middle brother is always accusing me of pragmatism; as it may be, i’m still sore with the greens for 2000 presidential election. i wish that the left, as a whole, would be a little more willing to compromise internally to get left or left-center candidates elected. there’s such incredible vigor, depth of belief, and grass-roots activism, especially among san francisco lefties — i wonder if that gets in the way of closing ranks in the face of real evil, like gw.
gavin may be slimy-looking (he screams “frat boy”!) but he had his shit together from the policy perspective. looking at the photos of gonzalez from today makes me like him more, but i’m not sure how that translates to the space of governance.
all for naught, though — as a soon-to-be sf resident, i’m thoroughly disenfranchised for this mayoral term.
how can you tell if it’s a diebold sucking machine?
as i understand it diebold machines don’t suck paper ballots. i think they only make touchscreen machines, in which case our sucking machine is no diebold. that, however, is orthogonal to diebold machines’ widely reported capacity to suck.