It was efficiency vs. democracy

by: Jack McCullough

Mon May 03, 2010 at 06:00:00 AM EDT

And this time democracy won.

As a member of Montpelier's Board of Civil Authority I have to go out and work every election day, doing various tasks connected with counting ballots. One of our tasks is to record and count the write-ins, and there are often a lot. We don't count votes for obviously fictitious characters, like Mickey Mouse or Eric Cartman (an actual write-in this year), but we do count votes for everyone else.

Sometimes it actually makes a difference, especially for the down-ticket offices, and on rare occasion an organized write-in campaign gets someone elected, but ordinarily the write-in is probably a protest vote or a friendly gesture to someone the voter likes and thinks might get a kick out of getting a vote or two.

Counting the write-ins can be time-consuming because even in towns with machine counting the write-ins must be recorded and counted by hand. It would be a misstatement to say that the election officials are always happy to deal with them.

A couple of weeks ago, in the context of some legislation pertaining to recounts, the House Gov Ops Committee got the idea to squelch the curse of write-ins once and for all. Here's the amendment they proposed:

Captain America Calling: Attacks on Civil Liberties Locally no Joking Matter

by: odum

Thu Mar 08, 2007 at 09:07:06 AM EST

But I just had to come back today. I couldn't stay quiet when I heard the news. No, not Town Meeting...or Scooter Libby... I mean the bad news. The news that Captain America is dead.

Yeah, okay, so I'm enough of a geek that I've blogged about Cap before. But consider the storyline in Captain America comics; a superhero-symbol of America not simply dead, but gunned down leaving the courthouse where he was on trial for his refusal to comply with a draconian law that completely deprived an entire class of Americans of their civil rights in the interest of law enforcement and national security.

Now I'm not going to belabor the metaphor's obvious relevance except to make the point that sometimes things that we roll our eyes at or don't take seriously can contain real content that should be openly talked about rather than casually dismissed.

Case in point, but in a negative way: Rep. Tom Koch's (R-Barre Town) proposed legislation that would mandate a $600 fine for virtually any "distraction" while driving - not simply cell phones, but coffee, or dealing with pets, children, or presumably scratching oneself in hard-to-reach places.

The reaction to this bill has generally been to mockingly dismiss it, the exception being Charity who implied that such a proposal was atypical of a Republican and more consistent with Democrats. I think both perspectives are fallacies (details below the fold)...