Friday Silliness

The election in Afghanistan is barely over and both Hamid Karzai and his rival for the presidency are declaring victory despite the fact that the votes have yet to be counted and probably won't be for nearly a month. It makes you wonder why it takes so long to count ballots. In the United States, news agencies declare the winner hours before polls even close. In Iran, recently, the victor was declared in less than 24 hours. In fact, this just in, the Ayatollah has just declared Ahmadenijab the victor in Afghanistan as well. The point is, how hard is it to count?

It seems that prior to Y2K, people holding elections the world over knew how to count. Before that magic date, the default election was a smooth, boring, affair where a victor was declared promptly and quietly and the winner got their ballons and the loser called and conceded. But, as with all things, elections weren't sexy enough. Instead, we had to have the Y2K election fiasco here and suddenly the world took notice that down to the wire, tight, close, only seperated by mere tens of votes, elections were MUCH MORE INTERESTING! (I.E. bigger ratings, more ad revenue, better odds in Vegas, etc...) And since then, if there's a vote, there's a voting controversy! Somehow we've elevated the act of watching people pick up a piece of paper, count it, and then put it down, into a blood sport that will someday soon have its own Cable Channel (You're watching the Voting Channel - next up, Paraguay Elections for Dog Catcher...)

I long for the days gone by when a voting controversy meant Chicago's dead voting for Mayor Daly. The voting seasons just seem to get longer and longer, the pre-vote coverage is stretching out more and more, and before long, I half expect to see the kind of "election" that is seen on one of those Pro-Wrestling shows. There was a brief time when I thought that More TV couldn't hurt. Now I'm thinking the birds should sue the US government to get the AIR back and we should pare down the FCC to cover only about three channels. If nobody is covering stuff, would there be news created?