• Outside our local polling place... Two gray-haired women were walking past the campaign sign-saturated street corner, and one said to the other with a laugh, "You don't see any Clinton signs around here!" Obama took almost 73% of the vote in Chicago.

• Voting mid-day with no waiting is one of the best perks of working from home.

• I didn't vote in the most hotly contested local race, State's Attorney. I couldn't make up my mind so I skipped it with the intention of going back to it. But by the time I finished, I forgot about it. Oops!

• On the way home from voting, I was discussing Mayor Daley's endorsement of Obama with my wife, a police officer for 11 years. I said, "Of course, he endorsed Obama. If you have a local guy with a shot at the presidency, how could you not support him?"

  "Oh yeah, I guess he'd make sure we get taken care of," she said. "I hadn't thought of that."

  I looked at her incredulously. "Really, you never thought of that? Geez, no wonder you never get promoted!" A Chicago police officer should always be conscious of clout.

• Aside from Obama, almost everyone I voted for lost. All the incumbents I opposed held their positions. I picked the three Sierra Club selections for the Metro Water Reclamation District, but even in that eight-way race for three spots, the best I did was fourth with Mariyana Spyropoulos. The one incumbent I cared about, Judge Laura Bertucci Smith, finished third out of five. She was the only candidate from any race who bothered to knock on our door this winter, even though our neighborhood lies across the river from the rest of her subcircuit (my wife doesn't like it when I call her "the babe judge," but she is attractive).

• Getting election results online is unnecessarily complicated. Chicago has an election Web site, but so does Cook County. For countywide offices, one must add the city's numbers to the county's numbers (which are only for the suburbs). Even more confusing are races like Laura Bertucci Smith's Sixth Judicial Subcircuit of Cook County. One might think that since the judgeship is a county position, the results would be on the county site. Actually, since this subcircuit is wholly within Chicago, results are only on the city's site. The Chicago Tribune doesn't help matters by directing people to the county's site "for more information" about countywide races without mentioning the city's site. Since the Tribune didn't put out consolidated totals for the Metro Water Reclamation District, I had to add up numbers from both sites for all eight candidates to figure out who won.

• Finally, to anyone who might say this was "only a primary," I say, "You're not from here, are you?" The overwhelming majority of city and county offices are held by Democrats, so on the local level, the Democratic primary is more important than the general election.

Labels: election08

- posted by David Johnsen @ 10:33 PM