Don't Back Down

In North Carolina, we have "no excuse" early voting. Essentially it means that we have a time period (I think it's a couple weeks) prior to election day, and at any time during that time period, we can go in and vote, no questions asked. This year, somewhere around 1 million people have used the system.

Frankly, I think it's cool. Why in the world would we want to strap ourselves to the single-day method? It's not like there's anything special about the first Tuesday in November, and if someone decides that there is, how about ending the two-week period on that day? If nothing else, it should save schools from having to schedule teacher workdays to handle everyone's voting on a single day. It should also greatly reduce stress on any counting of the votes. They could even be reviewed in that time.

Of course, one worry would be the condition of the voter. Namely, if you have a couple weeks to vote, what happens if you cast a vote a week before they votes are tallied, and then die? Hey, it could happen. It has happened. I'm sure it happens more frequently than we might suspect. But the same thing could happen in a single-day voting period. There are going to be people who vote on the way to work in the morning and get in a wreck on their way home in the afternoon.

I can't imagine that this number is statistically significant.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands."

I've been saying that for three years. It is simply not the responsibility of the government to protect us in every circumstance. There will be events that are not foreseen, and there will be times when we must face the truth that the world we live in isn't always pretty and there may be difficult choices for us to make regarding those truths. No matter how hard they try to worm their way into every facet of our lives, there will be times when the government isn't around to offer their "help".

The varied departments of the government don't do one thing to make me feel secure, much less offer me any actual security. When someone is committed to their cause, it doesn't matter if they are carrying a knife, a box opener, a corkscrew or a pointy nail file. Serious damage can be done with something as mundane as a ring of keys or a ball-point pen, yet they don't (yet) prevent you from carrying these things on board with you. It's simply ridiculous to think that they can throw more and more legislation at the problem, remove more and more liberties in the process, and think that it will all just go away.

The quote? That was Osama bin Laden, though I suspect that he may have meant it a little differently than I do.