Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of being able to choose the folks who are going to spend my money, but I always get irritated around election season. The reason for this? I’m never sure that I’ve made the best choice. I spend way too much time (of which I have very little) researching candidates, but I never feel like I have all the information that I want. I’m not always sure how to judge a candidate, especially for the less glamorous positions.
This year is particularly bad because I moved to Illinois a few months ago and now all the candidates are new to me. :mad:
It takes some time to even figure out what some of the positions are for. For instance, on the ballot this month is the State Comptroller. I had to look up what this job even was. It seems to be the person who writes the checks when the government says to write the checks. The incumbent says that he did a good job writing those checks. The main challenger says the incumbent didn’t whine enough about budget problems. The incumbent says he did whine, even though that wasn’t his job. The minor challenger doesn’t even have a campaign website that I could find. Yep, I’m going to make a really informed choice here :smack: .
I also have 6 judges where the vote is “Shall [judge] be retained in office as Judge of the Circuit Court.” It doesn’t seem like they’re allowed to campaign, and it’s not like they’re running against anyone else, so I have to base my decision on the off chance that I can dig up a shoddy (IMO) decision.
I also get to vote on rather useless referenda, like whether the voters of the township should ask our House Rep to support articles of impeachment against Dub and Dick. It’s not like this has and binding power either way.
Oh well, it’ll be over soon. Then I can hate myself when the people I did vote for get elected and suck.
Ah, just do what everybody else does, and vote for the person whose name you’ve seen most on signs stuck in people’s yards.
(That must be how people do it, right? Why go to all the trouble of cluttering up the landscape with those political signs if they don’t actually influence anybody?)
The part of the election “season” I both love and hate are all the phone calls from my warm, close personal friends such as Bill Clinton, Joe Piscapo and Rudy Guiilani. I’ve also never been quite so popular with pollsters before. What an ego booster
I hope I got extra points for getting the guy from Gallup to laugh
This year has been a bad year for elections. I get a call nearly every day, and some days more than one for one or the other party. I am sorry, but you are not welcome to call me. Period.
I plan on declaring myself as independant next year, hoping that that will stem the number of calls.
I’ll go the other way. Tuesday will be my first general election vote, and we have no presidential race, no senatorial race, no gubernatorial race, and an unchallenged representative. I’m going to drive for two hours for that? Sheesh!
Good luck with that. When I moved here I registered as an Indy for precisely that reason. Accordingly, I get calls from **both ** major parties :smack:
