On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 11:10:36AM -0600, Julia Thompson wrote: > If you are registered to vote in the US, be sure you vote on Tuesday > (unless you do early voting like I did). I don't care about *who* you > vote for; even if you're in my precinct (which I don't think anyone is, > unless there's a lurker living close by), or just in my state, and you > vote against every single candidate I voted for, you should take > advantage of your right to vote and have some sort of say in who > represents you in your government.
True. Unless, of course, you live in one of the approximately 415 Congressional districts where the race has already been decided by devious re-drawing of the districts. According to a recent Economist article, out of 435 races for US House of Rep., only about 20 are competitive. 4 of those are in Iowa (Iowa has 5 total seats in the House), and Iowa is the only state that has a non-partisan committee determine the districts (although Arizona recently passed a referendum to do that). In a "typical" democracy, about 20% of the Congressional/Parliament races are competitive, in the U.S. this year, that number is only 4%. Depressingly, I haven't seen much news about this, and none of the candidates I have an opportunity to vote for have made district-drawing reform an issue. I have to do some more research, but I am going to try to find a non-profit group that lobbies/campaigns for this type of reform, and donate some money and maybe some time to them (that is the only way I can think of to get a vote, since the re-districting has taken it away). -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
