election.special, 2

Whatever headline writer wrote ``millions of americans to stay home this election day'' probably did not have in mind the irony we saw in the headline. Our housemembers, all 30-odd eligible voters, had only to walk into the living room to vote, as our house is itself a polling location! Numerous housemembers voted in the convenience of their pajamas as they ate their morning meal, and two even took the liberty of voting naked -- hey, why not? Yes, this is Berkeley, and it shows.

Alameda county now uses computerized touch-screen voting apparatus. Despite my trepidations about computerized voting, I have to say it went incredibly smoothly. And we were able to print out the aggregated voting results from our machines after the polls closed at eight. I present them to you here. From here in the Nation's liberal fringe (see map), we can only feel sorry for the misjugement of the rest of the country, and, for that matter, the state.

	Our House	Alameda County	California
Davis (Dem)	48.6%	62.6%	47.4%
Camejo (Green)	34.8%	11.1%	5.3%
Simon (GOP)	12.0%	22.4%	42.4%
Gulke (AmInd)	1.1%	1.0%	1.7%
Adam (NatLaw)	1.1%	1.1%	1.1%
Copeland (Lib)	0.6%	2.0%	2.1%
	350 ballots	287,020 ballots	6,429,431 ballots

After the election we Berkelites retreated to our hot tubs knowing that we did our part and fantasizing about a Green victory (come on, wouldn't a Green attorney general be fantastic?). But it's quite sobering to see that the Democratic candidate won by a margin of only 5% this year when compared with the solid 20%-lead trouncing in 1998.