I still haven’t totally unwound from my pre-election fetal position, as I still can’t bring myself to look at my blogs and other news sources to see how things are going in detail, though my general sense is that the march toward fascism has been somewhat slowed, but certainly not averted.
I spent Election Day as a poll worker, registering voters, as Election Day registration is allowed here in Connecticut. My job was to hand people a ballot and explain how to put it into an envelope for future processing, as the registrations all take place in a room next to the registrar’s office, and the new voters vote there, each given a ballot for their particular voting district.
I played a little game with myself, trying to predict what party, if any, with which they would affiliate themselves. I think I batted way above .500, because it’s really not that hard to spot a sure fire Republican, though not quite that easy to spot a potential Democrat. What did surprise and depress me was the number of young people, particularly young men, who registered as Republicans. It was my understanding that the party is aging, so it is double depressing to think that any new blood is entering.
When I was assigned to help with the registration process, I figured I’d be sitting idly most of the day, but that wasn’t the case. We had a steady stream of registrants, 166 in all. That may not sound like many, but each has to be processed, which is fairly time consuming. For instance, if the person had been registered somewhere else in Connecticut, an attempt had to be made to determine whether they had already voted there. We were hampered somewhat because for reasons that the Groton tech guy could not fathom, the computers set up for us refused to log in to the state voters website, and one decided that it simply didn’t care to work with its internal hard drive anymore. But he persisted, and after several hours he was able to get all three up and running. Based on what I observed, it was a significant achievement of which he should be proud. While he was doing that, we made do with computers in the registrar’s main office.
I was there from 5:00 AM until 8:30 PM, with one short 15 minute break. I could have taken more time off but didn’t really feel like it. After I got home, I avoided any opportunity to find out how things were going nationally. I’m still in that mode as I write this, though some things are filtering through. It looks like we have another tough two years ahead of us, as even if we manage to hold the House, which seems unlikely, we’ll still be held hostage in the Senate by Manchin and Sinema, assuming we also hold that august institution.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when the noted mathematician, Kurt Gödel, became a citizen, he was dissuaded by Einstein from telling the authorities that the constitution has a fatal flaw. We don’t know what flaw he had in mind, but it’s now plain as day that the constitution has a number of fatal flaws, one being the overrepresentation in the Senate of nutjobs from underpopulated states, and another being the ability of entrenched politicians to create the American equivalent of British pocket boroughs. Add a hyper-politicized Supreme Court to the mix, and you have a recipe for destruction of true representative government.
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