One thought crossed my mind, though. If you wouldn’t mind indulging me in a little experiment, please write me in for Burleigh County Commission. It would be interesting to see if we could make a statistical showing.

If you don’t know when to vote, please visit the North Dakota Secretary of State’s Office at www.nd.gov/sos to find your polling location. You may even get a sample ballot in PDF format that you can print and use to practice. You can weigh your choices, fill out the sample ballot, and take it with you. Nobody can cast your vote for you, but you can use the sample ballot to help remember the choices you wish to make. It’s not like you’re taking the SAT in there; you can bring notes or a completed sample ballot in to assist you. Make your choices on the sample ballot, take it with you to the poll, and copy your well-considered choices to the actual ballot. That’s perfectly legal and a good idea if you have a shaky memory.

I know the media has carried Barack Obama through this election, and they may well push him over the top; but with the worship he’s been given by all the mainstream newspapers, broadcast news outlets, and cable news stations, he should be up by thirty points in the polls. The fact that he isn’t gives me a little bit of optimism. The fact that ACORN has managed hundreds of thousands of fraudulent voter registrations is worrisome, however. We’ll let it all shake out and see what happens.

Even if the Obamessiah lost in a landslide, you know there would be weeks of caterwauling about voter fraud. If he wins, we’re in for a bumpy ride; however, if he and his ilk take the country where they want to, the backlash could seal their party’s fate for decades. Now is not the time to worry; it’s the time to call all your friends who don’t want to be socialists, rally ’em up, and get them out to vote. Regardless of the result, we’re going to have a big mess to sort out come Wednesday morning. The difference between the two candidates will be the nature of the hangover.

I’m going to be too busy Tuesday to pay much attention to the coverage until evening. To torture one’s self with a constant barrage of news all day isn’t worthwhile anyway. See y’all tomorrow night, then.

I edited the voter and pollworker education videos being used by the state, so I’m no stranger to voting procedures and equipment operations. My boss closed our office on Thursday, saying that it was too nice for everybody to be stuck in the office, so I used the time to saunter down to the City/County Office Building on north 5th Street to vote. Then I took my little boy down to the sandbar to watch the machines tearing apart the bridge debris and to throw sticks into the river.

I was surprised to see how many people were there! I had no problem strolling right in and getting my ballot, but by the time I had left the line of eager voters ran all the way out into the hall. Because early voting locations serve multiple precincts, there were multiple optical ballot scanners in the room. Each scanner and ballot was color coded to make sure that ballots were counted for the proper precinct. Since I did the training video on the M100 Ballot Scanner too, I watched the display on the machine as I fed it my ballot. I was number 477 for that machine for the day. I think that’s pretty decent turnout!

Then I saw an AP story this morning that indicates a quarter of North Dakotans may have already voted! More than two thirds of the vote-by-mail ballots have been returned, nearly three quarters of the absentee ballots have been submitted, and nearly 20,000 people had taken advantage of the six Early Voting centers provided in our state. Wow!

After working on all those videos, I pay particular attention to pollworkers and equipment. I must say that the pollworkers at the Bismarck location were very professional, friendly, and obviously knew what they were doing. Handling a voting center serving multiple precincts complicates things, too. Hats off to the folks running the voting center!

If you have any confusion about the measures, I’d like to point out a couple of things that may help in your decision.

Measure #1 puts oil money away into a “rainy day” fund. There are some questions about the way in which it does it, and government types are moaning that getting money OUT of the fund is too difficult. But look at it this way: North Dakota’s government budget has SKYROCKETED in the past few years. Governor Hoeven is a big spender, and nobody in the state legislature wants to argue with him. When they start instituting all these bigger budgets and new expenditures, they’ll never go away. What happens when oil revenues level off or decline? Let them have the money now and they’ll spend it. Put it in a trust fund, and it will indirectly help control state budgets and spending now.

Who’s against Measure #2 (the individual and corporate income tax cut measure)? It has only one opponent: a group of PUBLIC EMPLOYEES’ UNIONS dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly from outside of North Dakota, into fighting lower taxes for North Dakotans. I’ve met North Dakota residents fighting to get this measure on the ballot and see it passed. I’ve posted pics of them from the motorcycle show, for instance. But the only people trying to run ads against it and putting money into fighting lower taxes for North Dakotans are a unions trying to keep those taxes as high as possible so their members benefit from your money. Think about that before you vote.

Measure #3 looks like a good thing, fighting tobacco use. But the part that really caught me was the funding. After to tobacco money runs out,”If in any biennium, the tobacco prevention and control trust fund does not have adequate dollars to fund a comprehensive plan, the treasurer shall transfer money from the water development trust fund to the tobacco prevention and control trust fund in an amount equal to the amount determined necessary by the executive committee to fund a comprehensive plan.” Marrying the tobacco program dollars to a Dept of Health water program raised a red flag in my book. No mention of any water trust fund is mentioned on the ballot itself; you should click here for a PDF of the full text of all ballot measures to get the full description of the measures.

Measure #4 wants to make the head of WSI a political appointment, rather than someone hired by the board. I don’t think this is necessarily a good idea, and I don’t think WSI’s problems were on the part of its leader. I have good inside information that there were a few other disfunctional people lower down the ladder causing the problems. But the bottom line on this measure is the fact that WSI management is not broke enough to “fix.” We don’t need governors installing friends or supporters in that position; we need people who the WSI Board feels are qualified. Let them continue the hiring.

There you have it. Remind everybody to get out and vote on Tuesday! Try to be as informed as you can. If you can’t decide who to support for a particular office, write me in. I wrote myself in for one of the County Commission positions, for instance. It would be interesting if I got enough write-in votes to actually show up statistically!

Oh, I didn’t get an “I Voted” sticker this year. I recycled that photo. Maybe they save those for election day, not early voting centers.