I saw Kristen again yesterday. She is day-shift bartender at The Copper Fish, one of four fine dining facilities opposite the legendary Frost Diner at the core of the historic downtown of Culpeper, Virginia. I am not a regular, but approaching a “frequent” status there.

If you have not had a day-drink there (I like their Chardonnay) you might want to consider it. I was having a bit of a celebration with their luncheon special of a $5 cheese flatbread (add pepperoni for $1.50. I did).

I had successfully voted in the 2017 Commonwealth election for the Governor and some associated state offices. I think voting is important. Our current Governor is a Clinton crony swept into office based on the changing demographics of a former solidly Red State being overwhelmed by the mass of Blue voters who live in the counties close enough in distance to make a living off the Imperial Swamp in your National Capital.

I like it up there, but hate the politics. I switched my voter registration down to Culpeper, since I was becoming weary of doing my civic duty and watching the local elections in NoVa go to increasingly irritating social justice candidates. Plus, I was wary of those touch screen voting machines whether they were connected to the internet, or just some local political activists.

I am not going to go off on a rant about voter fraud- you either understand that opening the electoral rolls to the broadest extent possible (i.e. Motor-Voter registration without proof of citizenship or the more traditional multiple votes of the quick and the dead) and think the system is ripe for fraud or you insist that nothing of the sort has occurred. I have been concerned about the issue of voter fraud since Nixon-Kennedy and the Chicago tallies that gave the election to JFK. Just imagine a world where Mr. Nixon was not a paranoid and Kennedy lived to a ripe old age, and we never had to endure the scourge of Lyndon Johnson.

The allegation that the Russians tossed the last election from Mrs. Clinton to Mr.Trump seems preposterous to me. Not the motivation, though. The Russians have been screwing with our elections since the inception of the Soviet State, and even had agents of influence inside the Roosevelt Administration who helped negotiate the founding documents of the United Nations. (Alger Hiss, et al, but I am too tired to get into that this morning). Sorry.

All that aside, if some of the opposition people are voting multiple times, I would like to ensure that I at least vote my legal once in each election.

A nice feature of the modern voting system is the ability to vote on the timetable convenient to the electorate. I will get to that matter anon. I do understand the system. I have worked election day in Arlington at my former precinct in Arlington. I wanted to support the volunteers who make this system work, and I think I actually was compensated a C-note for a 14-hour shift enabling our electoral system.

(old school voting).

Our precinct in Arlington voted in the social center of an assisted-living facility, and I blush to say that I helped some aged voters select the candidate of their choice on technology they did not fully understand, often for a candidate I did not support. You try to do the right thing.

No one dead showed up that I was aware of, though I admit in some cases it was hard to tell. But that aside, it was the experience of working with the voting machines. Digitally-based, the machines were reported to possibly be subject to external manipulations, and there were no paper ballots that could be subjected to recount. This is not recent news- think back to the “hanging chad” circus in south Florida when we were miraculously saved from the disastrous prospect of the Presidency of Al Gore.

We dodged a bullet on that one.

No changes in a shaky system were made until the spin cycle began about Russian influence in the 2016 Presidential election. I know they spent a total of about a hundred grand on social media ads over two years, half of it after the election. Democratic Party and pro-Clinton expenditure committees/PACs spent a record $1.2 billion on her strange aloof ScoobieVan campaign. Go figure what fifty grand over two years does. Reprehensible, if true, but not much. Hell, I could have funded that myself!

Anyway, health issues have lessened my presence in Culpeper, and having driven the seven miles to my polling place from Refuge Farm, found it inconvenient if I was also going to pretend to work in NoVa the same day. Virginia permits voters to vote absentee up to a month or more prior to the election, a dispensation I appreciate, since the calendar is chaotic and the traffic intolerable.

The means of voting down here was the touch-screen console, just like Arlington. I was watching the election date looming, and was determined to cast my ballot. Virginia has a provision in voting law called “Absentee in Person,” by which you can drop by and do your civil obligation weeks in advance of Election Day. The polling station is not in the precent, but at the County Tax and Registrar office near the Copper Fish restaurant on historic East Davis Street downtown. I did not have much on the calendar on Monday, and decided to go from Arlington down to country and check the mail and make my vote before some unexpected event demanded my presence elsewhere.

I parked at the curb downtown- free for two hours!- and hobbled over to the County Building. A man older than me was waiting to vote at the desk. I waited a couple minutes before one of the other ladies gave me a form to fill out to determine whether or not I was registered. Only when the record matched was I asked for my photo ID. It appeared that I was eligible, and I was handed a paper form with little bubbles next to the names of the candidates. I filled them in to the best of my ability. The County worker had complete access to my ballot when complete, and I marveled that the sanctity of the ballot box is now apparently a thing of the past.

I hope it is a glitch and not a feature.

She walked me back to the single voter machine in the back room. It was something completely new to me. The lady instructed me to insert the ballot into the machine, and it obediently sucked it in. I looked at her, saying “This is new. So, there is a paper record for recount purposes?”

She nodded. “And the machine is not connected to the internet.”

I thanked everyone in the office as I limped back to the elevator to depart. On the way down to the street, I marveled at the changes. I don’t think it will mean much- after all, if you are committing voter fraud, what does feeding the same ballot into the machine several times mean? But it gives me some hope.

Going out the door of the County Building, I decided to have a simple lunch at the Copper Fish to celebrate the mundane majesty of our Republic. The chardonnay was wonderful.

Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com