jrsmith.net

…they’ll eat a working girl like her alive.

Today is Virginia’s presidential primary. On all sides, I am bombarded by exhortations to “Get out and vote!” since “Change is coming!” and “It actually matters this time!”

It amazes me how far people will go to delude themselves into believing they have control over their own fates.

Putting aside the questionable veracity of results produced by Diebold electronic voting machines, and the highly suspect practices being used at some polling places, and who knows how many other crooked, sketchy, or just plain idiotic things that have been happening during these primaries, the system itself should be enough to make you lose faith.

When you vote in a primary, you are not voting for a candidate. You are voting for a delegate. Your state has a certain number of delegates, which may or may not even be counted in their entirety when the time comes. In most states, those delegates are not even bound by the results of the primary. They can decide to cast their vote for whoever they want. The actual election works much the same way. Consider the disparity between the popular vote and the electoral vote in the last couple of presidential elections. Look up some information on the electoral college sometime.

In this country, when you vote, even under the best of circumstances, you’re really saying “I’d like it if this happened, but really, you guys should do what you think is best.” That doesn’t sit well with me.

What about your options? Even if the election process was flawless, look at who you get to choose from: insane Christian fundamentalists, cantankerous old men who want to be at war for hundreds of years, and a career politician who will do and say anything to stay in power and bursts into tears in the middle of Starbucks, probably just for the media attention. Then there’s Barack, who’s vaguely non-threatening, yet charismatic, and who seems to sit right in the middle on not only every issue, but also every demographic, so that he appeals to pretty much everyone. Not too young, not too old, not too aggressive, not too compassionate, not too black, not too white, not too masculine, not too feminine. Intelligent, but not so intelligent as to alienate the idiots that populate this country.

I will not be voting today. I’ll most likely never vote. I understand that people feel a need to at least pretend like they’re making a difference, but I’d appreciate it if you kept your rhetoric to yourself. I’m tired of hearing it.