Silly Sunday

My neighbors who kindly let me practice photography on them, esp with the sunset shot, have bought a Tesla and I was looking at it. There is a chandelier in their garage. It was there when they moved in and they have no idea why. (The chandelier is today's toy, not the Tesla.) It is a fun, charming quirk of the house. 

We voted! It isn't one of those things that feels like a huge accomplishment because you don't haul a bunch of stuff out of your house or yard. It isn't physical, but it takes research. Given the disruption of the postal service we dropped our ballots off at one of the ballot boxes in town. We have three. In two weeks we'll have more. Why? Because our county and our state care if we live or die in this pandemic and want us to vote. The same cannot be said for the governor of Texas. 

Voting is much more stressful this year. We have a pandemic and we have non-stop reminders that if you accidentally do anything on your ballot wrong that it won't be counted. Many people are deciding that, despite the risk, they will vote in person to make absolutely certain their vote is counted. I've gotten to that point too, but once you've requested a mail-in ballot you can't vote in person - and I live in Maryland so it doesn't really matter. 

Maybe in the next four years we can get rid of the Electoral College and all our votes will matter again and we can be a democracy. There is actually a complicated plot to make that happen. "The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.[3][4] As of July 2020, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia, although it is suspended in Colorado.[2] Including Colorado, these states have 196 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 73% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force. Taking the form of an interstate compact, the agreement would go into effect among participating states only after they collectively represent an absolute majority of votes (currently at least 270) in the Electoral College. Once in effect, in each presidential election the participating states would award all of their electoral votes to the candidate with the largest national popular vote total across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. As a result, that candidate would win the presidency by securing a majority of votes in the Electoral College."

Have a good start to the week tomorrow.