Operation Virginia Freedom

Why does Virginia insist on holding the governor’s race on off-year elections? Not only does it make the election boil down to which candidate makes the public more aware that they even should vote, but it also makes everyone in VA feel like there’s no civic participation. Haven't we been bending over backwards to give other countries' citizens the right to vote? Then we look like idiots when nobody bothers to show up at home.

But why should there be high turnout on these odd elections? There’s a competitive governor’s race this year, but the other local elections almost all follow Virginia’s notorious history of being astoundingly anticompetitive. I voted for several candidates simply because they ran unopposed. We need to sync the governor’s race back up with the presidential race, if not at least with some sort of off-year national contest, like 2006. It's almost as if the state offices don't want to be noticed at the polls.

On the plus side, it turns out that I didn’t need to get up too early to vote. I arrived at the polls at about the same time that I did in 2004 (6:15-ish), and there were the same number of voting machines (6). But the wait was slightly shorter this year:

Time waiting in line to vote, 2004: 1 hour, 10 minutes
Time waiting in line to vote, 2005: 45 seconds

Don’t forget to vote. And please, don’t vote for Jerry Kilgore. He’s dumb.