Election problems?

"This administration remains steadfast in its support of free and fair elections," he said, adding, "in Iraq."

http://www.alternet.org/stories/44217/

To the democrats on my list: guys, your credibility will go right down the tubes again if you don't demand that this be fixed. It's as much of a disgrace as it was before, only now that the democrats are doing better it seems they're less likely to call for reform. That's not good enough.

Municipal elections

Any other election day, the polls would have been open at eight. For municipal elections, they open at ten. No wonder no one votes in them.

I've decided who I'm voting for. The incumbent councillor is being investigated for possibly taking bribes about getting a club license for a place that really, really shouldn't have had one, and subsequently was the scene of a shooting (hence the investigation.) The headline in the paper this morning is, "Merulla clean, says go-between." Since the go-between was a former campaign worker, I'm going to vote for the other guy. Merulla's rather sleezy to begin with. I'm glad to have a good reason other than instinctive dislike not to vote for him.

I was doing some mental calculations. Hamilton has an official population of about 500 000. It's reasonable to assume that about 25% of those are either too young to vote, or they're not yet Canadian citizens, so I'm guessing the number of eligible voters in the city to be between 350 000 and 400 000. Let's take the higher number, just for argument's sake. So, in a normal municipal election, about one third of eligible voters actually make the effort. That's 130 000 voters. Oh those, the vote will be mostly divided between the two frontrunners for mayor, with maybe 10% of the vote going to the third person on the ballot.

So our mayor will likely be elected with the votes of about 10-15% of the population of the city.

You gotta love democracy in action, eh?

Oh, well. At least, if there's any doubt about the outcome, there will be paper ballots that can be counted by hand.