The most useless vote ever.

In the interest of civic duty I went to the polls yesterday to vote in DC’s Democratic primary. Here’s how little I accomplished:

1. It was a primary — an election meant to choose a candidate for the actual election.

2. It was a non-binding primary — DC statehood activists got the primary set to be the first in nation this year in hopes of shining the blinding beam of media hype on the fact that DC residents have no vote in congress. However, the DNC wants all the hype fully focused on New Hampshire and Iowa, so they pressured the locals to make this primary “nonbinding” — it has no effect whatsoever on DC’s convention delegation.

3. The DNC also encouraged the major candidates to ignore the DC primary. As a result, Dean, Mosely Braun, Kucinich, and Sharpton were the only majors on the ballot. Although I also had the choice of Lyndon Larouche, Harry Braun (jank, check out his site — he might be the candidate for you), and Vermin Supreme, a performance artist whose platform is based on tooth care and who wants to genetically engineer flying monkeys to serve as tooth fairies.

4. The kicker — I’m neither whole-heartedly a Dean man or a Clark man, but I figure I’ll be one of them eventually. So when I got to the polls, it seemed wrong to vote for Dean without Clark on the ballot, and there was no write-in option. So I turned in a blank ballot.

5. Also, my polling place had one electronic voting machine, which I used. So, as we know, The Man can change my vote to whatever he wants anyway.

Democracy in action.

Posted by KellyMc at January 14, 2004 12:01 PM