Mark Cornick

The Election

As I said earlier, this is the first election I can remember in which all of my votes appear to have been in the majority. Official results are still a while off, of course, but based on all the polls and stats and educated guesses, everything I voted for won, and everything I voted against lost. Here’s how I voted:

Federal

• President/Vice President: Voted for Obama/Biden. No surprises in the result here - suburban Maryland is blue like Smurfs. Regardless of what Obama actually accomplishes, it’s a remarkable achievement for this country to have elected an African-American president. The cynic in me, though, says that I was pretty excited when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, too, and he turned out to be a disappointment in many ways. So I say congratulations to Obama, but also that I expect great things from his administration, and I don’t want to be let down again.

Maryland

• U.S. House District 5: Voted for Hoyer. Not my favorite Maryland politician, but better than the alternatives, and besides, he’s pretty much Representative-For-Life at this point based on popular support.
• Question 1 (early voting): Voted yes. Marylanders have been able to vote absentee without an explicit excuse for a while now; this just codifies early voting into an officially sanctioned activity, as I see it. Really a no-brainer.
• Question 2 (slots): Voted yes. This is my major departure from this year’s liberal/progressive platform: I don’t really have a problem with slots, or gambling in general. No one forces you to play slots, or the lottery, or the horses, or poker; calling it a “tax” rings hollow to me. Taxes aren’t optional; gambling is. And clearly, a lot of Marylanders have opted to gamble on slots in surrounding states. If they’re going to throw money away either way, I’d rather they throw it away in Maryland. That’s all.

Prince George’s County

• All people for all offices (judges, school board): Ran unopposed.
• Questions A, B, C, D and E (bond issues): Voted yes on all. Might as well take advantage of that spiffy AAA credit rating.
• Question F (raise telephone service tax): Voted no. This really struck me as an opportunistic, “what else could we tax” kind of move by the county administration. Realistically, it would’ve raised my cell phone bill by only about a dollar or two, so it wouldn’t have hurt much if it passed, but it’s the principle of the thing.
• Question G (change notice time for legislation): Voted yes. I cede matters of political procedure to people who care. Honestly, on this one, I don’t.

Other things

This will be the last election for which Maryland uses the proven insecure Diebold AccuVote-TS touch screen machines. I have never trusted them for any meaningful election, and thus have voted absentee, on paper, in every election since they were mandated for statewide use in Maryland. It looks like future elections will use the same (or substantially similar) paper ballots and optical scanners as are currently used for absentee voting. I’m glad that the state finally realized that these because these machines are easily hacked and produce no paper trail, they are unsafe and untrustworthy. That said, especially given the passage of the early voting question, I will probably continue to vote early/absentee as long as I live in Maryland but work in Virginia. Between working and commuting, the day is long enough as it is.

This was the first election in which my eight-year-old stepdaughter took an active interest. Her understanding of things progressed from repeating vague stuff she had heard from her classmates, to forming her own opinions on the candidates based on things she had learned through her own extensive curiosity. She was so interested on election night that she actually went to bed listening to the audio of CNN’s election results. It makes me feel good about the future; I just hope she’s still this interested ten years from now, when she can vote for the first time.