For A Minute There I Thought About Asking For A New Ballot

I generally vote Democratic because Republicans have gone off the deep end since 2000.  Back then I voted for Nader over Gore.  I remember talking to a guy, an older gentleman, who voted for Gore and thinking he was just a "pragmatist."  Well then you know what happened, Bush was elected President and we got eight years of our country going down the toilet.  Now I'm a pragmatist.

But now and again I want to send a flare up into the sky at how unnerved I am over two-party rule.  I do understand the need to vote Democratic, but oftentimes they listen to the same big-money folks who control our economy and thus our democracy that Republicans listen to.  They're just less successful at it.  So, from time to time, I vote for a third-party candidate.  It's always in a race where the Democratic (actually the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party) candidate is going to coast to a win, so I don't feel any pressure that my vote will cost the DFL an important seat.  (And by the way, I just checked Twitter; both Al Franken and Mark Dayton have been re-elected to the Senate and the Governor's house.  Such routs that they were declared after the polls closed here in Minnesota at 8.  Thank Buddha, God, Allah, and your choice of deity that Minnesota remains a blue state!)  Yet I don't want to totally fall lock-step in with them.  It may be narcissism, but I want to zag a bit, be a little unpredictable.

Because I'm so busy with work I haven't checked out the candidates as much as I would have liked.  But this interesting tidbit from the Star Tribune gave me the third-party candidate to fill in: Andy Dawkins was running for Attorney General under the Green Party.  It was the Green Party's best hope to attain five percent of the election results; if he did, the Greens would achieve major-party status in the state.  And that's not a bad thing, even though I don't remember if I ever voted for someone from the Independence Party, Jesse Ventura's party that is about to go extinct because no one's voting for their party.

So I went to my polling place to vote for Dawkins just to mix things up a little.  But as I was going through my ballot and skipping all the judges that were running unopposed, I realized that I had filled in the bubble next to Lori Swanson, the DFL candidate, for AG.  Oh, crap.

And for a minute I thought I was going to invoke my right to get a new ballot.  But then I thought that that would raise suspicion.  Like a polling judge would write my name down and the note, "Decided to change his mind."  And that would lead to scrutiny from some shadowy people in the government, and that would somehow lead to me losing my right to vote.  Or something.  Yeah, I really thought about this while I was resting my arms in the voting privacy stand.  So in the end I decided not to ask for another ballot.  I went straight DFL this year, including Swanson.

I just now went through the Dawkins Twitter feed and I found this:

Don't forget there's only one real #progressive choice for MN AG- #VoteDawkins today #TicketExceptAG pic.twitter.com/lysmZ2O8l8
— Dawkins for AG (@ADforAG) November 4, 2014

Holy crap, is this true?  Swanson's a gun nut??   Now I'm really upset that I didn't get a new ballot.  Well, I'm also pretty upset that I didn't do my research.  Sigh.