The absentee ballot's all marked and ready to be mailed back to the local board of elections. It appears that the local board of elections is going with an optical scan ballot for its absentees, and checking the state's website, it appears several optical scan systems are being looked at to replace the older voting machines in the state for regular voters. Personally, I think that's a good system to go with, since it's already used very widely in education, and it has a relatively easy error-correction mechanism - hand-checking the ballot.

Anyway, back to the ballot. There are 11 registered parties in the state, Republican, Democrat, Independence, Conservative, Working Families, Green, Families First, Libertarian, Rent is too High, Socialist Equality, and Socialist Workers. Since the removal of the Right to Life party from the state ballot in 2002 (which coincided with the removal of the Liberal party), the guide I follow is to vote down the Conservative ticket, since trusting New York Republicans on social issues is a dicey issue at best (see George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani).

Voting a straight Conservative ticket in this election means, ironically, voting for 5 Republicans and 4 Democrats in the 9 races in which the party has endorsed a candidate. In the other race, for Congressman, I opted for the Republican, making a total of 6 Republicans and 4 Democrats. The Republican candidates are for Governor, Senator, Representative, Attorney General, Comptroller, and State Assemblyman. The Democratic candidates are for State Senator, State Supreme Court, County Judge, and County Clerk.

As a sidenote, this is where I get to make a mathematical plug to go out and vote. Although for every office, the public at large can favor only one candidate, the only sampling of the public that matters are the ones who actually choose to express those preferences. Assuming voter turnout of approximately 50%, that usually means the winning candidate has the votes of somewhere between 25-30% of the public as a whole. In a 2-party system, usually both candidates, no matter how horrible, register at least 30% support in polls.

What I'm getting at is that the losing candidate in elections often could have won had all of their supporters gone out and voted if the opposition's vote count remained the same, particularly when the election is close (in New York, this rule of thumb does not apply, since a genuinely close election only happens about once every decade or two in any given office).

There is of course the side remark that those who don't vote have no business griping about whatever idiots they get in office for the next 2 years. My personal thought is that whether the Democrats win or lose next Tuesday, the runup to 2008 is going to be filled either with their getting too caught up in paying Bush back or their bitterness and internal feuds over having lost. A sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of thing, since I don't think they can handle either winning or losing in a dignified manner this cycle.

- Posted by in Politics at 5:43 PM