Dedicated to Hans Waagen

I was flipping through the Mercury News this morning and came across a letter that Hans "Chuck" Waagen had submitted that I think pretty clearly spells out what went wrong with Prop H8 on the ballot the other day:

Prop. 8 foes need to stop whining

When we were young, many of us were taught to be graceful while winning and to lose with equal grace whether it be politics, baseball, business or whatever. The gay constituency would be better served if they quit whining about losing, and accepted the reality of the majority popular vote for Proposition 8. Marriage is not a civil right. It is a mainly religious institution that has lasted for thousands of years with the attendant definition being the legal union between a man and a woman.

Hans Waagen

Does everyone see Hans' mistake (it's highlighted in red)? Still not getting it? The problem is that if, as Hans stipulates, marriage is a religious institution, what the hell are we doing ammending our constitution to define it? Get it now?

Remember the first ammendment? Right, Freedom of Speech. But it also covers the separation of church and state:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So, Hans, how do you want to work this - do you want to change your definition of marriage to remove the religious aspect of it, or do you want to abandon the first ammendment. Your call. The Bush Administration has made strides towards abandoning the first ammendment, maybe you can just hop on their bandwagon?

Polling 2008

I worked the polls again this past election. I was really leaning towards no when the Registrar called me to see if I was available, but they had a training class that was convenient (apart from being held in a church that had Yes on H8 signs all over), and a spot at my local (walkable) precinct was available.

Training class was ok, there were far fewer dumb questions than usual, the ballot-counting math still baffled people though. I wonder if basic math skills are no longer taught in school. It's probably just not funded anymore, there are more important things to spend our money on these days (like constitutionally mandated discrimination).

I was relieved when the precinct officer called me to set up a set up time. She asked many good questions - had I worked an election before, etc. She then went on about how she would be relieved to have competent (my word, not hers) people working with her.

Turns out, I was wrong. We, the underlings, wouldn't be working with her, we'd be working for her. She arrived late on election day (voters arrived at the precinct before her!), and frequently went home for some random thing or other - glasses, food, check results.

Setup sucked, as usual. You meet people for the first time, most of them are lazy bastards and just sit around watching other people work. And, of course, there are the issues with different interpretations of the rules - no, we can't set up the ballots tonight, the machine stays sealed in the bag til morning, etc. But we're a team, we work through them. Or we just ignore the other people and do what we know is right (arrogant, I know).

The day wasn't so bad. Apart from the uber-conservative, homophobic precinct officer, most of the other poll workers were good; there were even a few of high school/college students - they were all so cute. I so wanted to put them all at one table, the "kids" table :) Sadly, they all left by mid-afternoon.

One guy was particularly annoying. He kept asking voters if they "knew about the arrow voting system" - sheesh, you connect the tail of the arrow to the head, it's not a system. And, by the way, STOP using one of the candidate names in your example; that's biasing the voters (the wrong way :).

He also kept telling little kids to "make sure your parents don't screw up their ballots" - I can just see where that would go - "mommy, you're not going to screw things up, are you?" "no, of course not dear, mommies don't screw things up, they vote for other people to do their screwing up." I have to wonder if he wasn't some sort of perv.

Cleanup would have gone better were it not for two things - the lack of math skills I mentioned earlier (counting ballots "should" be easy, but we go out of our way to make it difficult for some reason), and more importantly, when we found out that McCain conceded (thanks iPhone for making that possible) the precinct officer fell apart and just started babbling about random meaningless things, predicting the end of the world, calling people ignorant liberals, etc. Funny how hard it is to accomplish anything when the person who ultimately has to sign off on things is in a vegetative state.

Oh well. I'm afraid you're going to have to go at it without me next election. I can't deal with the crazy lady..