Tomorrow is at long last Election Day, yet we still haven’t cast our votes. Being old-fashioned sorts we’ll have none of this newfangled “early voting” nonsense, which seems all the rage with the youngsters these days, and will wait until a proper Tuesday afternoon to arrive at the polls. In such a crazy presidential election year as this such adherence to protocol is especially wise, as it allows one to take even the very last plot twists into account before throwing away one’s vote.
The earliest voting of this crazy election year began before any of the presidential debates were scheduled, and was well underway in several states before that “Access Hollywood” tape of the Republican nominee boasting grabbing women by the whatever became the most widely watched video since O.J. Simpson’s slo-mo car chase, at which point all the polls and pundits agreed that he’d lost the race. Some 30 million votes had already been cast when the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that his agency was again looking into the damning e-mail scandal that had longed plagued the Democratic nominee, this time because of some missives that had turned up on the lap-top of her top aide’s notorious sex fiend husband, and the polls started shifting and the pundits were for admitted that the race was once again on. Over the weekend the reiterated its previous position that it would not recommend any charges, and for the same questionable reasons it had previously announced, the Republican nominee’s nudie model of a third wife gave a widely ridiculed speech blasting the “cyberbullying” and crude political rhetoric that her husband has come to personify, a dramatic assassination attempt against the Republican nominee turned out to be just another case of a protestor being roughed up at one of his rallies, by the time the early voting resumes today an estimated 40 percent of all the votes will have already been cast.
There’s no telling how many of those early votes might have been changed by late-breaking news, but we don’t expect it would be many. At this point in such an acrimonious campaign most of the voters minds are unlikely to be changed by any old thing that might be revealed, as shown in an hilarious but not-safe-for-work sting video by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who has proved the only satirist outlandish enough to keep up with this crazy election year, and by now even the most reluctant supporters of the candidates are already well of any flaws that might be revealed. Those of us who along ago decided not to vote for either of those two awful candidates have only seen that judgment confirmed by the most recent damning headlines.
Still, there are bound to have been a relative few voters whose minds might have changed, and in such a close election as this seems likely to be that could be just enough to have changed the results. Whether any would of those late-breaking stories would have changed the outcome for the worse or the worse yet will never be known, of course, but we still think best that except in the most extenuating circumstances people should vote on Election Day.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 