The Franchise Came to Douglaston

As it does every year, September marks primary season in New York State, and a few interesting elements came together this time around to make for a worthy post.

For starters, the mechanism in which New Yorkers express their freedom, liberty, and patriotic duty underwent a major revision during the political offseason. Gone are the traditional, giant, lever-based voting booths, replaced by a scannable sheet of paper reminiscent of taking a standardized exam in high school or college.

The Good -- The paper form allows space for write-in or protest candidates, eliminating a burden that previously involved the mandatory use of absentee ballots and no guarantee that your sheet would actually be read.

The Bad -- The voting sheet features perhaps the single-smallest font size I have ever encountered, to more compactly cram in all of the requisite elections and candidates. At a spry 34 years old, even I found myself hunched over the voting table squinting to figure out where the little circles were that needed to be filled in via magical pencil. I can only imagine how much the elderly or those without corrective lenses fared.

The Ugly -- For a state run by a seemingly endless array of liberal bureaucrats, I have to wonder in silent amusement who came up with the grand idea to slaughter countless trees to print the giant new ballots, and how many ballots went unutilized (case in point, I was the 24th Republican to vote in my district as of 6 PM; judging by the pad they tore the ballots off of, I imagine there were at least 250 sheets to a pad). Someone in the depths of the Board of Elections hallways is walking around a little more hypocritical these days, methinks.

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Meanwhile, as to the actual election results, I am pleased to report that I and my fellow state GOP voters gave perennial loser and establishment candidate Rick Lazio the boot in the race to be sacrificial lamb to occupy the Governor's mansion in Albany, in favor of the somewhat enigmatic and quixotic Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino.

I have no delusion that Paladino will upset the heir-apparent to the NY throne, current Attorney General Andrew Cuomo -- and his campaign Web site is a mess -- but there is little question that Paladino is definitely not your traditional candidate and is more than willing to use a little creativity, decisiveness, rhetoric, and his own money to make life uneasy for the other side.

Mr. Paladino, an upstate real estate developer, spits out tough statements. In one of his campaign ads, he promises to “clean out [the state capital of] Albany with a baseball bat.” He wants to cut taxes by 10 percent within six months of taking office. And he would settle the controversy over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan by having the state take over the property by eminent domain.

[...]

Paladino certainly knows how to get attention. One of his campaign mailings – which told voters on the outside of the envelope that something smells in Albany – had a scent inside that made it stink like a landfill. Speaking of New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, he says, “A fish rots from the head.”

The long knives are already out to cut Paladino down into a million pieces, but if he keeps it up and goes after the utterly deplorable state of affairs in Albany at least I will be able to not hold my nose and fill in his little circle come November.


Links:

• "Who Is Carl Paladino?" (Christian Science Monitor)
•  "Paladino Rout of Lazio Jolts New York GOP" (New York Times)
•  "Taking a Baseball Bat to Carl Paladino" (Politico)
• Paladino for the People Campaign Web site
• "POLITICS: Who I Voted For In New York Today" (Baseball Crank)