This morning it is the sort of fierce, icy rain that I remember being told didn’t happen in Seattle. Just one more reason to feel sufferingly virtous in my 2 block walk over to Emmanuel Bible Church to register some sort of sentiment that will be filtered, and boiled to a reduced smear of consent, and then largely ignored.

And I can’t help but wondering, given everything we know, and everything we don’t know about how elections are decided in this country if it wouldn’t all be better decided by Technorati Live Votes, or by web poll style ballot box stuffing, or maybe some sort of synchronized swimming, anything other then this WWF style competition-cum-soap opera thing we’ve got going.

Personally my favorite suggestion is choose a person at random every 2 years, probably would have to be an American citizen, but I’m not sure I see why.

Honestly, if I wasn’t going to Lighthouse directly after voting I’m not sure I’d make it. (though what really keeps me going is some stories I’ve heard about the intricate, multi-part local ballot initiatives that have to be seen to be believed, LSAT has gotten nothing on this.)

update: A thought occured to me whilst I was bubbling in my scantron this morning (I’m not cool enough to be using King County’s hacked Diebold machines), a thought I’ve had before: even if the challenger wins the presidential election, the incumbent still has unfettered access to the world’s largest collection of paper shredders, and so the challenger’s implicit promise to clean up the last 4 years of corrupt politics, and shine bright lights into dark corners always, in the end, remains rhetorical.

I think we could build a broad-based, non-partisan coalition to have locksmiths standing by on the morning of Nov 3rd ready to spring into action to preserve for future prosecutions our democratic legacy.