If there's a wall of separation between church and state, why did I vote in a church?
As I'm going into vote, I see a sign about no cell phones. So I figure what are the odds I'll get a call. You guessed it, my phone rings just as I'm signing my name. You'd think from the reaction I just offered 50 bucks for a vote for the Socialist Workers party. I mean really, what's the big deal. The Fruit of the Murphy Loin's pediatrician has a sign please don't talk on the cell phone during the examination -- that I understand, although since it's a nice practice in the heart of West St. Louis county it makes me wonder what's wrong with people in a way that no election does -- but what is the burning problem with getting a phone call at a polling place. Somebody is going to tell me how to vote? I just don't get it. But I'm not about to get into an argument with a bunch of nice old people who have an ounce of authority once a year, so I turn the phone off without answering. Turns out it was my wife calling to ask how bad the lines were. I should have ignored the old people.
Once again I was able to vote using a butterfly ballot and a punch card without any problem, just like I have for the last 20 years I've been voting in Missouri.
What amazes me about polling is how people try to use them like a scalpel when really they are a club. If a candidates poll numbers change by 1% between two polls that have a quoted margin of error of 3.5%, you know exactly zilch. This statistical noise is invariable quoted as a sure sign that a candidate's message is working if an increase or support is ebbing away if a decrease. If a candidate is up by 5 percentage points in a poll with that same margin of error, then we know that either candidate could be winning. You ever see a poll reported that way? Only if it's a Republican that is up and it is the New York Times doing the reporting.
And polls are never as accurate as the quoted margin of error. The margin that's quoted is the mathmatical error of a random sample compared to a full population based on the size of the random sample. Mathematics has a wonderful neatness to it that real life rarely obtains. The sample is never random and people lie. There have been very few presidential elections that weren't inside the polls' true margin of error, and yet like lie detectors, which aren't, we follow polls with great fanfare and fascination. I have to admit though, it takes rare talent to screw up exit polls as badly as they did this election.
Why do people sit glued to the TV on election night and watch the returns like it's the Superbowl? Yes, the election is more important than the Superbowl (as long as the Rams aren't playing), but it's not like you miss anything by just turning the TV on the next morning and finding out the results. It's not like you get to watch the ballots being counted or anything; what you get is the same old people saying the same old things (with the exception of Brit Hume, Michael Barone and the occaisonal guest who actually has something to say despite the best efforts of the media to keep those people off the air). I understand all you people who tuned into CBS to see if Dan Rather would talk his own style of gibberish, or better yet, have a complete emotional breakdown on air. Understand, but not approve.
I, like my fellow Americans, was so looking forward to November 3 so that I could watch the idiot box without announcers telling me how awful some politician was over menacing music (or worse, how life would just be perfect if only I voted for some politician over saccherine music). Now if we could just vaporize the yard signs when the polls close, life would be complete. Except for the breast beating of the losers. I know the word was out for Bush suporters not to gloat (you'll notice this blog was a gloat free zone despite the fact that I voted for more winners than losers this election, a pretty rare event), but I wish the word had gone out to Kerry supporters to keep the wailing and gnashing of teeth private. Instead, I was treated to more insults by people who don't know me and have gone out of their way to not understand me than I've gotten since junior high. Can't we just insult the politicians before and after the elections, and leave me and my fellow Americans out of it?
Election night coverage is the weather channel for the national zeitgeist. It's one of the few times that we take out our inventory of political ideas and "mark them to market."