[ol][li]Leave work.[/li][li]Vote.[/li][li]Hit the gym.[/li][li]Go home. [/li][li]Have dinner.[/li][li]Read.[/li][li]Go to bed.[/li][li]Wake up the next morning and get the results from the paper.[/li][li]Sign on to the SDMB and either[ul][]Enjoy the meltdowns with evil, gloating laughter, or []Pretend I knew what would happen all along.[/ul][/ol][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
You watch FoxNews. . .and you’re voting for Kerry? Guess “fair and balanced” reporting hasn’t poisoned all of the voting pool yet. That’s nice to know.
Dan Rather always knows “for sure” early on, but may have to recant when his sources turn out to be unreliable. 
Hear, hear! When the networks are “projecting” winners by 6 p.m. Pacific (when the polls in Hawaii are still hours from closing) I’m sure it keeps at least some voters from going to the polls at all. If the outcome has already been determined, why bother?
I do bother, however. I always vote early, and stew in my own juices for the rest of the day/evening. If Bush wins I haven’t decided whether I’ll use hemlock or eat my shotgun. I almost had apoplexy four years ago. I’m not sure I can take another presidential “appointment.”
I’m going with the evil gloating laughter. I called a 52-48 percent Bush victory on the 8th of August on this very board. The way things are going now, that margin might even be larger.
Hah…I was eight hours ahead of PST, awake in 2000 when the California results came in, and I still made it to work the next day…
Sometime in the last month it suddenly struck me that I have never actually been able to go to the polls in the US for a presidential election. I was 15 in 1988; in 1992, 1996, and 2000 I was in the UK. I’ve lived in Canada during provincial elections, and the UK through the 1997 General Election, but obviously couldn’t vote in those. And I’ve seen how the US media seems such a pale shadow of its Canadian and British counterparts, obsessed with minor scandals and ignoring the wider issues concerning the nation.
So, on election night, I will likely be researching my book, calling my girlfriend in Illinois at 10 as I do every weeknight, and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Then I’ll turn on the CBC morning news and the BBC World News in the morning. Oh, and at some point during the night, I’ll pray for an undisputed election.
I will be hiding in a darkened room with my fingers in my ears attempting not to hyperventilate.
I will have sent in my absentee ballot already, so I’ll be praying it actually gets counted.
I have class from 9 to 10, then another class at 11:30, then nothing until marching band rehearsal from 4 to 6. What’s going to suck is sitting through my evening class after band with no access to a computer for an hour and ten minutes. I’m going to run back from that and go to a news site and click refresh for the rest of the night. If Bush wins I will despair loudly; if Kerry wins I will rejoice loudly. Either way, my whole floor will know I’m a Democrat.
Obsessively monitoring the news, my favorite blogs, and C-SPAN from 5PM until we’re fairly sure of the winner or until I’m so damn tired I cannot possibly stay awake any longer.
After work, my mother and I are going to pile in the car and head down to Granny’s (about 2 hours away). One of my aunts, her husband and my cousin will also be there. The 6 of us represent the democratic contingent of the family. My 90-year old grandmother is the leader of the pack. 
She watches CNN and CSPAN religiously so she keeps us informed. It’s a tradition for us to get together to watch the returns. We have dinner and drinks and hats and horns. It’s quite the bash. I think the few Republicans in the family are a little jealous. 
In 2000, I had to miss the election party because I was in grad school 900 miles away. I could have really used their commiseration to get through the “appointment.” :mad:
I will spend the day being thankful that I won’t be seeing political ads for a while.
Right now it seems 99% of commercial breaks have a political ad, and 95% have 2.
(I get Wisconsin TV)
Brian
I’ll have some sort of map to fill in so I can keep up with the running total of electoral votes. Sortof like filling in a NCAA bracket and seeing how your team does. In this case, the “team” also includes senate/congressional/other races.
I’ll probably watch all night, flipping between FoxNews and ABC.
Of course, its easy to be optimistic and excited now, b/c of the way the polls are looking. If things take a serious turn for the worse and election night is just a confirmation of that; well, I’ll probably just go to sleep.
Its just so darn entertaining.
Also, if I suddenly get a fit and try to get a write-in ballot to vote for my real choice, Howard Dean, my son is instructed to rip it out of my hands.
(I’m in Ohio. Can’t take that chance)
A few of my more political friends are planning on having a party that night, school the next morning be damned.
The way they see it they have two options:
-
Get smashed to celebrate a Kerry victory
-
Get smashed to ease the pain of a Bush victory
Ah, the lives of high school students, eh? :rolleyes:
Personally, I just plan on praying. A lot.
Note to the Other Pollworker: Hah! We have to be there at 5:30 am and our polls open at 6:00! I LAUGH at your 6:45, do you hear me, LAUGH at it!
I didn’t work the 2000 election because I lived in MA and they have the same people that have been working since the Taft/Roosevelt/Debs/Wilson shindig of ‘12. But 2004 should be fun. The 16-hour day (polls close at 9:00) will go a little faster with the crowds we’re expecting. We use 1962-era gray lever Shoup machines about as big and cuddly as battleships (if you want to see one, download the video here Warning: narrator has amusing outer-boro accent). And yeah, we fill out paper forms with ballpoint pens if the machines break down too, although to be fair they don’t very often and there are Crack Teams o’ Techs roaming the five boros all day. They can run w/o electricity, too, although they don’t leave a paper trial.
For this we get $225 a few months later, usually when we’ve totally forgotten having worked that day. Last year’s primary check to me paid for everybody’s Christmas presents.
However, we are not allowed to bring in laptops, let alone radios or l’il TVs, so unless the voters let us in on what’s being said in the outside world, we’ll be pig-ignorant of what the vote’s been anywhere except on whatever particular big ol’ machine we’ve been running all day. I intend to go home and turn on CNN at 10 and then just sit n’ watch. I honestly have no idea how the election will go. I thought I knew how it would go in 2000 and was just about as wrong as a soul can get. 
I usually spend election night sitting in front of the t.v. with a pint of Jim Beam and a coke. In fact, my running joke on election nights is to tell people "Tonight is my annual night to sit and scream at my television!"
But this year there shouldn’t be much screaming. John Kerry probably isn’t going to be President, and that R.I.N.O Mary Panzer , whose been feeding at the public trough for a quarter century, isn’t even in the running! Now if only we could score a hat-trick and get Feingold out, I may not do any screaming at all!
There was an election prediction thread I believe before that. I searched for it the other day but found nothing.
I want to verify what I predicted for the final results. Do you happen to have the thread?
Regards,
Shodan
Random worrisome thought of the day: Does anyone think that the election could result in violence? Considering how the U.S. is so divided, that we’re still at war, and especially if there’s similar ridiculousness like Florida this time around… If there is going to be violence, what would it look like? Civil War? Post-superbowl riots?
My GF and I actually mulled over that possibility last week. I reckon a disputed election, regardless of the eventual winners (The Dems lose: “We got jobbed again!” The GOP loses: “They jobbed us this time 'cause they thought we jobbed them last time!”) could certainly result in violence, somewhere, somehow.
What particularly worries me is that so many concerns about election impropriety are quickly written off as partisanship. I don’t think all the concerns are so motivated. After the debacle in 2000 so clearly demonstrated that our election system is at least partially broken, we should be able to ask now whether that system is now fixed. Granted, I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m not convinced that they are.
If Election 2004 demonstrates that the system remains unrepaired, shouldn’t all of us–Republican, Democrat, and Independent–be righteously outraged? Someone should, and most likely will, have hell to pay for it.
I’ve gone the absentee ballot route the past two elections, and it’s worked fine. I’m leaning toward Kerry, but my family instilled a “no free rides” attitude in me, and I’ve been seriously unimpressed with his campaign so far. It’s probably going to be an in-the-booth decision. As for local elections…eh, whoever impresses me the most in the debates. Local politics rarely affect me in any meaningful way (I’m done with school, I don’t have any children to raise, I think the Department of Transportation has always done a fine job, and I don’t give a flying malasada about sovereignty or Bishop Estate.)
So when the big day rolls around, I’ll be in front of my TV set…and either play video games or watch a movie since it’s not hooked up to our cable. I’ve been jerked around by those know-nothing news blowhards long enough, and I’m not wasting another minute on their ridiculous “projections” and “prognostications”. And I’ll say it right now: POLLS ARE WORTHLESS. News flash, people, there are well over a quarter billion people living in this fine country. You’d have to question several million before you could even pretend to have a decent representative sample.
The Republicans are actually getting a little concerned about losing, and they’re definitely not above dirty tricks (remember, a Republican-controlled Supreme Court ordered a halt to manual recounts last time, and the issue was so clouded that they actually got away with it). I’ll read all about it…here, most likely…the next day, as I don’t have the stomach to watch it live again.
In Davidson County, the polls don’t stay open so late, nor do they open quite so early. Sometimes, they REALLY don’t stay open so late. Did y’all know that Tennessee was one of the three states sued by the USDOJ for infringement of voters’ civil rights? Yep. Actually, I’m glad that I won’t be able to watch TV or listen to the radio to get results all day; it would just get me nuts.
I’ll vote at the VFW building just two blocks south of my house, probably about 1:00 PM. Then, check the boards here until 3 or so. Go in for my nap, as I’ll have been up since 2:00 AM–darn freight day at work.
Get up and watch CBS election coverage, hoping that Dan Rather comes up with some colorful ways to say that this nation is in for another four years of lackluster Presidential “Leadership”, all the while hoping against all hope that Kerry somehow pulls off a miracle.