midterm elections

I witnessed a "real" election this week! In the recent mid-term Senate elections, CT voted for Blumenthal over McMahon for senator.

During the weeks prior to the elections, voter registration booths were set up around campus encouraging students to register to vote (because their votes may actually count!). On Tuesday (Nov 4), people went down to Mansfield to cast their votes. Tiffoo and I saw a front-page image of voting booths in the NYTimes, and it was amusing that our reactions were something like "So cool! We've never seen this before!". I'm sure we meant it in a metaphorical sense rather than the literal sense of not having seen voting booths before, although I also haven't really seen a voting booth before... I think.

I was also amused at the rampant commercials shown on TV involving the slamming of each candidate, using "facts", "data" and "public opinions". The terms are in quotation marks because practically all of it's skewed/unrepresentative/self-interested in some way or another - that's just how it works.

Of a another type of amusement is the bombastic record 2 billion american dollars that was spent (so far; this report was a few days before the elections i think) in the elections.

Imagine how many good causes, human (and other, if you're into that sort of thing) lives and alleviation of dire material circumstances $2 billion could potentially have been used to serve, instead of politicians slandering each other and trying to have their faces appear in the most number of commercials at the most prime TV times. No wonder they say democracies promote an inefficient allocation of resources.