Election Day

So election day… The day went as usual, starting to watch the first exit polls come in around 4pm PST. Co-workers and I were pretty confused and, if anything, upset with CNN and their incomplete and nonsensical polling results.

An example a friend pointed out:

Anyways, the election party moved to a Theater in the U-District for some Improv focusing solely on the election. Unfortunately, by the time we made it out the theater, Obama already had about 200 electoral votes, and with the west coast remaining, it was pretty obviously Obama was going to win. Luckily the show was still pretty humorous and they went just about all night. We were able to follow the Senate and House elections as well as the major propositions of the evening, and were able to catch both speeches.

side note: By the way, incredibly jealous of anyone who was able to make it out to Grant Park. Not fair, not fair at all.

Results from the election:

Obama won.
I’m immensely happy its over. I was growing tired of it about a month and a half ago.
After spending time on the west coast, its pretty obvious that the electoral system is no longer applicable. Your vote doesn’t count. You can try to say this is an un-American view point and a bad excuse for not voting, except that it’s true. By 6pm PST, it was obvious that Obama was going to win. The networks just needed the 8pm PST closing time of west coast state polls to call it. Hilariously, no votes needed to be counted, even though these states had just finished voting. McCain promptly gave his concession speech. If you already know the outcome of the election before you have a chance to vote, what’s the point? Do you really feel any better for not contributing? With a popular vote, one person might not directly make a difference (due to issues with vote counting), but 100 would. What’s more, seeing how the election is doing as the polls come in across the country might actually might bring more people out to vote, as they could have a real impact. One state might have more votes counted in this situation, but hey, their residents made the effort.

Soonish, I’ll discuss the day after, and today (John Hodgman).