Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Maybe We're Not So Lame After All
George Will once argued, in re our historically pathetic rate of voter turnout, that it was actually a healthy sign, because it signaled a general contentment with the status quo. Well, George, if you're right and my state's forecast is representative, your boy is in a heap o' trouble:
Yeah, we're feeling mighty patriotic about our kids dying for nothing. Mt. St. Helens isn't the only thing that's rumbling around in these parts. As a tunesmith once put it, Something is happening here/But you don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?
Highest voter turnout since World War II predicted
The white-hot 2004 election campaigns will probably result in the heaviest voter turnout in Washington since World War II, Secretary of State Sam Reed predicted yesterday.
He forecast a turnout of 84 percent of the state's more than 3.4 million registered voters and said it could even surpass the record of 84.6 percent set in 1944, a presidential year marked by an "intense feeling of patriotism" among wartime voters.
That was the highest in state voter-registration records that go back only to 1935, the year the state of Washington began permanently registering voters.
(via Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Yeah, we're feeling mighty patriotic about our kids dying for nothing. Mt. St. Helens isn't the only thing that's rumbling around in these parts. As a tunesmith once put it, Something is happening here/But you don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?
