Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Election Day!

As most or at least many of you may know I'm quite the political junkie, and election day is pretty exciting. Unlike the many partisans out there for me it's more about an exciting process than having my party seize power. Particularly since the party I am nominally affiliated with, the Libertarians, have never seized anything, possibly because the national Libertarian party makes you take an oath to "oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals". As a die hard-supporter of the need for a third party (particularly one committed to limited government) voting is a delicate balancing act, which mostly boils down to voting for gridlock, against incumbants and for the occasional Libertarian or Constitution Party candidate.

As a result of this, as a voter in Utah the majority of my votes went to Democractic candidates even though I imagine most people would peg me as a Republican. As you may have gathered I've already voted. I did it on my way into work. Utah is implementing a new electronic voting system and it was widely expected that there would be big lines and massive confusion. The only problem I ran into was they moved the polling spot from the front of the high school to the auditorium, other than that I walked right in, signed my name, got a card and blew right threw it. Talking to other co-workers who voted, or tried to vote before work it appears that my experience was atypical. Lots of people reported long lines, broken machines and clueless election officials.

I think, like many other people, the time has come to make some predictions about the US House and Senate. My personal predictions are that Democrats will have a gain of 18 in the house and 3 in the senate giving them a 6 seat majority in the house and a four seat deficit still in the Senate. Of course it will take awhile before we can say with any certainty how close I was since, I'm guessing that there might be a couple of races still in doubt as late as the weekend, but maybe the number of lawyers both parties have sent out (7000 for the democrats 1000 for the republicans) has made me pessimistic. I understand that my predictions are probably low of CW for the House at least, but my, admittedly personal, experience is that as long as I can remember CW has always over-estimated in favor of the Democrats.

Polls close at 8!

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

No problem at my polling location - no lines, no broken machines, lots of happy, smiling officials.

"Kaysville, things run smoother here!"

3:37 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home