Does my vote count?

The presidential election year is upon us: newspapers, TV news, talk-show radio, and – for those states where their vote counts – TV commercials and signs all over the place. Politicians, their staff and volunteers are all out trying to get your vote, and your mailbox is full of flyers telling you why one person is better than all the rest. To support all of this an unbelievable amount of money will be raised and spent in this race for the White House, by one estimate almost $1 billion total!

One thing is different for this election: some states are being “punished” by the Democratic and/or Republican National Committees because they decided to hold their primary too soon. If you are a Democratic and live in Florida or Michigan your vote won’t count. If you are a Republican living in Iowa you face the same fate. The Republicans also took away one half of the votes of people living in Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Wyoming. This doesn’t mean that you can’t vote, but rather that there will either be no delegates or only a few delegates at the convention for your state. Confused? Read this article from The New York Sun about the whole mess.

All in all this makes me kind of mad. The political parties want us to contribute to them, they want us to vote, and then they decide to punish us. I didn’t decide to move my state’s election date up, I was quite happy with it where it was. I’ve had little faith in how much my vote counts on the national scale in the past and now I have no faith at all.

I still haven’t decided what to do on “election” day, at least as far as the national side of it is concerned. There are local and state issues that I will vote on, but since I have been disenfranchised by my National Committee why should I vote for one of their candidates? Maybe I’ll do a write-in candidate for someone I know or pick a popular TV celebrity. If you live in Florida you should read this newspaper article where they say your vote will probably have some “impact” even if it doesn’t count. Another Florida article says that the news agencies will mostly ignore Florida. Interesting considering what happened in 2000.

One nice thing though, since I live in a state that is being punished I am enjoying the fact that my mailbox is not full of junk, yards and street corners are not cluttered by signs, and best of all I don’t have to watch any of those campaign sound bite commercials!