Health & Fitness
When Will We Have Election Results? Will the Election Be Hacked? When Will I Be Able to Exhale Again?
It's getting harder to wait for the outcomes of the elections. Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz's threat to arrest international observers & expected delays don't make the wait easier.
Now that Matt Schultz, Iowa's disgraceful Secretary of State, is threatening to arrest international observers of Iowa's elections, I'm afraid that Iowa will once again become an object of derision on the national, even the world stage. What are we, Russia?
It's hard enough to wait for election results as it is. Matt Schultz already predicted that Iowa may be the last or one of the last states to report results. He blamed a new rule regarding absentee ballots, which must be postmarked no later than Nov. 5th, 2012, the day before the election Nov. 6th, in order to be counted. Iowa's presidential election results could be delayed as long as a week after the election.
I'm no fool. I know that nationally, the Republicans are once again planning to suppress voter turnout and possibly alter election results. In Florida in 2000 and 2004 a combination of hanging chads, phony felon lists, an insanely partisan Republican secretary of state, Florida State Trooper roadblocks on Election Day, and other barriers blocked voter turnout and an accurate count of the votes.
Find out what's happening in Iowa Citywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
What will Florida do this time to screw up the election? What will Iowa do, for that matter? Will Ohio's current secretary of state, as former Ohio SOS Kenneth Blackwell once did, move voting machines from inner city polling places to the white suburbs, forcing students at Ohio's Kenyon College to wait in line up to 10 hours and inner-city African-Americans to wait for four or more hours in the rain until they could vote while white suburbanites had virtually no wait at all?
Will Iowans be mocked for not only throwing out judges who recognize the constitutionally guaranteed civil rights of all Iowans, not just straight Iowans, but also for arresting international election observers?
Find out what's happening in Iowa Citywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The political ads on TV (with the exception of the ones I really like), the phone calls from real people and robots, the daily robo-surveys that I'm tired of answering and hang up on now, and the pop-up ads on my computer when I'm trying to read an article about the national and state-by-state polls are all getting way frustrating.
I relate to the overwhelmed four-year-old, Abigail, who started crying while telling her mother, "I'm tired of hearing about Bronco Bamma and Mitt Romney."
"The election will be over soon," her mother soothed her.
Who's going to soothe the rest of us? The election won't be over until we have the final results, and there's no dearth of people telling us that we won't get the final tally November 7th.
I remember my sister in Seattle hanging on the outcome of Iowa's presidential election results in 2004. As I recall, exit polls suggested that John Kerry won Iowa, but the final tally, several days later, revealed that George W. Bush very narrowly won Iowa by three-tenths of a point. Ralph Nader received one percent of the vote, so apparently Nader cost Kerry all of Iowa's electoral votes and gave them to Bush.
After that election, I knew that every vote counts because elections are sometimes just that close.