Voting

Tomorrow is the day early voting comes to our precinct.   I will probably wait until school's started to go down there (other end of town--a whole 3/4 mile away...)  and cast my vote against the incumbent idiots.   They include a governor who appointed the people who carried out the Texas Textbook Massacre and who managed (with the help of a state senator for our district) to obtain federal hurricane relief funds to rebuild the historic governor's mansion that was destroyed by arson.   (It would very likely still be standing if he hadn't decided it needed renovation and moved out of it.) This is the same governor who wants to take up a huge swathe of private property on some of Texas' most productive farm land to build a "transportation corridor" from Mexico to the Oklahoma border, disrupting not only farms and small communities but providing zero benefit to the people who live in its path.   And the state senator who engineered that clever little shift of money from hurricane relief and people who might actually need it, to the mansion rebuilding project which we really could do without.  (Or the people who so love Perry should donate for...)  

A friend whose early-voting day came earlier than mine was not amused to discover that the voting machine she used had a strong bias for Republicans.  It undid her choices and replaced them with a Republican.  She tried again.  Same thing.  Called an election judge over, and election judge was, shall we say, less than supportive...but friend did finally get the machine to (apparently) quit undoing what she was trying to do.   I hate the stupid machines.   I don't trust 'em.   If you mark a paper ballot, you make the mark and you know for sure it's on the ballot.  Yes, it's more time-consuming and expensive to count paper ballots.  But they're real, and digital stuff is slippery as mercury in an oil bath.  It can be invisibly changed where the voter has no chance to know that it's happening.

I am prepared to raise a large stink tomorrow if the one here tries to undo my choices...and yet can do nothing about the invisible sort of editing that could be going on.   But y'all vote now, OK.   Even if you think Rick Perry is pure gold with diamonds, while I think he's...pretty much something you normally leave out in the pasture or wipe off your boot if you step in it... you go on and vote.