democracy in action.

so, tuesday was election day. did you all vote? i hope you did.

i had my first experience with an electronic voting machine, because bucks county hadn't gotten them for the primary last spring. i'm not sure if it was thanks to some protesters or not, but bucks county did not have the fabled diebold machines. we had some other kind that i've never heard of, but were kind of weird. it wasn't a touch screen; it looked more like a touch-sensitive screen that had a big piece of paper on top with the candidates' names and offices. there were red LEDs under the paper, and you had to push a little square to, i assume, complete the circuit and make the red LED light up next to the candidate or ballot issue you voted for. it was interesting.

the other interesting thing i noticed is that while nationally, the area seemed to vote democrat, locally, people voted republican. where rendell and casey took bucks county 60/40 against their republican opponents, the republican state senators and representatives won by about the same margin. and the federal representative was running 50/50 with his democratic challenger until he conceded a loss by about 1000 votes and gave bucks its democrat representative in washington. with all the speculation about what appears to be a wide-open race for the whole country in 2008, it might be worth examining national verses state elections and see where people voted. there were reports that republicans were hitting the local issues hard, so it may be that there's this disconnect in people's minds, and they somehow see the state parties as separated ideologically and politically from the parties at the national level. on the other hand, pennsylvania has always been a staunchly purple state.