Tag Archives: vote

Nearly the entire office watched Inauguration 2009 this morning.

I thought that overall it was a good event. Not too thrilled about the Rick Warren guy, but whattahyagonnado. Gotta love Yo-Yo Ma!

I really like the way Obama has captured the “hope” motif. I think that’s really rallied a lot of people. Like him or not, he’s really mobilized voters who’ve felt alienated in the past 8 years, and speaks to people who’ve been through a lot of misfortune over the past year or so. Whether or not he’ll live up to the great expectations of the masses is yet to be seen. We’ll see what happens.

Am I the only one who was worried about an assassination attempt during the speech?

Handed in my early ballot this morning before work. Got my sticker.

I wonder if anyone thought that my red sweater was to signify Republican? I will consider it my camouflage when I goto lunch at my family’s house.

I voted no’s all around on the propositions. They were incredibly evil this year. Almost all of them involved modifying the Arizona constitution.

Tonight Shawn and I will be working at the poll hub again. We may or may not goto a party afterwards to watch the results.

Go vote, if you haven’t already!

I spent an entertaining night over at my family’s house, with a mix of shitty fast food, coffee, politics and the show Freaks and Geeks.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but my family and most of their friends are all Republicans, whereas I am …not. Usually we just Don’t Talk About It. But last night a family friend stopped by and of course the subject of voting came up, and then my family got to unleash their list of arguments against Obama that follows almost exactly along the lines of all the retarded chain mail attacks out there.

So we’re a military family, given that some of my family served in Vietnam and my uncle was deployed to Iraq for about a year back in 2004. I can definitely understand their support for McCain and I don’t believe he would do a terrible job as president. There are so many checks and balances in place that all of the “exciting” new ideas proposed will probably never make it into policy.

The older you get, the longer the world isn’t blown up by “evil” presidents, the more cynical you get, at least in my case.

Not so with my Republican family. Their biggest fears are terrorists and high taxes. They are convinced that Obama receives large contributions from former and current terrorists, that he was put through school by those same people and is a pawn in a game that will lead to us all living under Muslim law. They think that Obama will lead to higher taxes for their business and they’ll be forced to shut it down and their employees will be forever out of work. Also, he was born in Kenya and isn’t a real American.

Tuesday was the presidential preference election so once again Shawn and I helped out at the voting hub in Scottsdale. My fam’s neighbor got us into being voter staff back in 2006. Basically, you get to the assigned hub location and set up the truck and blinky signs to let people know where they drop off the ballots and other voting paraphernalia for each district. Then we wait for polls to close and people arrive with their stuff. We check off each district as they drop off their cargo and we load it into the big truck, which then takes it to downtown Phoenix and they unload it all there. All the tallies are included on an electronic cartridge which a guy with a computer uploads to a central server. The paper ballots are still kept track of, just in case.

Somehow, the voting coordinators thought that there would be a low turnout and only had a few polling locations open and a bare bones staff. They were wrong! Lots of people came out to vote for party candidates. (Although we technically have open primaries, it doesn’t apply this time so Independents couldn’t vote.) We didn’t get the first dropoffs until well after 7:30 and one district didn’t show up. We stayed until after 10, but there was nothing more we could do so we got to go home.