Just Voted In Florida

We haven’t been back long from voting. I feel like I should apologize or something to all those poor people who have stood in line four hours waiting to vote. We each stood in line behind one person to sign in, and then got our ballots and walked right over to the voting booths. All in all, it took about 10 minutes total to vote. But that’s one of the perks when you vote in a small neighborhood church, I guess. Of course, we voted at around 4:20pm. I imagine things picked up a bit after 5:00 when people started getting off from work.
We circled by the health food store and picked up some Old Heathen beer. Going to have beef stew, black-eyed peas and cornbread for supper, and settle in on the couch to watch TV and wait out the election results. Like a lot of other Progressives, I feel good about Barack Obama’s chances, but the Republicans have found ways to steal election before. I think we all know that if Obama doesn’t win by at least a large margin, if not a landslide, the Republicans will be squealing “voter fraud”. Of course, only a Republican could think that registering people to vote is trying to steal an election.
It’s already fairly obvious that while the Democrats have tried to register new voters, the Republicans have responded by trying to suppress votes. The College News web site has already posted an article titled Obstacles For Student Voters about how Republican officials in Virginia, Colorado and Iowa are making it difficult for student voters. Naturally the Republicans are going to try to suppress the student vote, because it tends to lean Democrat. The same way they engineered shortages of voting machines in heavily African-American areas in 2004.
We’ll see. I’m hoping for the best. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll wake up in a democracy with a future, and the United States will have begun to arrest this long, slow slide toward never-ending-war and Fascism.