I voted

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

I complained about my apathetic feelings toward voting in this election. It was an unusual feeling for me, since—despite all the efforts to change this point of view—politics are a hard news journalist's idea of sport. But there wasn't a single race or question that I could get heatedly behind—Question 3 came closest—and there were far too many races where there was either only one candidate listed or the candidates were mirror reflections of banality: “You want chocolate or vanilla?”

I seriously considered not voting in this election. It would be the first one I missed in my 30 years in Nevada.

Well, it's Election Day as I type this. I voted, but I'm not even wearing the little sticker. It's waiting in my car for some ironic purpose—too late to sneak it onto the Emancipation Proclamation.

This election, I voted with a strategy. I've long disliked that canard, “If you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain.” My feeling is not voting is as strident speech as protesting the results of an election. I don't give up one right by not exercising the other. And anyway, those races where there is only one candidate aren't voting anyway; they're just signing onto the Big Brother ticket. All that means is some judges got together and decided who gets to sit on the bench this time. It boggles my mind to think that I'm supposed to believe there's no collusion in all those races in which there's only one candidate.

So my strategy this time was not to vote in races in which I was offered only one choice, and I didn't like the one choice I was offered. I also didn't vote in races where there were two bad choices. (The voting machine's programming really doesn't like it when you refuse to pretend to make a choice.) Finally, in two instances in the state constitutional races, I voted, “None of these candidates.”

I've got to be honest. I felt better walking out of the polling station than I have in years.