For Tuesday I Walk to the Village

...and I voted.  And voted.  And voted some more.

Well, actually, I didn't have to do much.  almost our entire ballot here in Texas was partisan, and we have the magic button that worked for almost everything (there were several positions in which that left me with no candidate; I thought about going through and strategically voting for the best candidate to mess with the opposition party, but decided that wasn't worth the time).  The only two other marks I had to make on the ballot (actualy, a touch-screen) were for two local ballot measures, which I did know about in advance and guessed what I should be doing on them without further research.

Anyway, it was an impressively long ballot, mostly because of pages and pages of judges (yes, they're partisan offices in Texas, for what it's worth).  And the big number is: 59!  57 offices, and the two ballot measures, thus lapping the field compared with small timers in Colorado and California.  Heh! 

Now, to review, I voted 52 times in early March, twice in mid-April, once more in early May, and once more in June.  Counting the candidate elections I passed on today, that makes a grand total of 115 voting opportunities so far this calendar year, on five different days.  That should do it for the year...unless there's a runoff in one of the elections today, or unless there's some school board election or whatever held on an odd date that I don't know about yet.  Could be!

Other than the federal and state offices, and the judges, we also had county offices to fill, which includes at least one I've made fun of before, the District Clerk (no, I still don't know what a District Clerk does, nor what District she'll be the Clerk of).  We don't get to vote for coroner, here, though, which I always find disappointing.  We did have a couple of rip-roaring dirty campaigns, chief among them for the local DA (actually, the Criminal District Attorney).  Those were fun.  I almost, but not quite, live in a local hotly contested U.S. House district, but instead live in Lamar Smith's safe GOP district, so that's boring. 

And, yes, it is insane to handle elections this way.  Although, as I've said, as long as it's a partisan election it's not hard to cast a sufficiently informed vote...I definitely felt more confident that I didn't screw up badly this time around than I did for the primary back in March, where I had no idea what I was doing in several races. 

Oh, and by the way: if you're still not feeling patriotic, I'll recommend a Ron Replogle post.  And, yeah, I loved the old voting machines too, although I never got to use one myself.