Tuesdays are too busy a day for me, so I went home and voted early on Friday afternoon.
At about 12:30 today my confirmed real life INFJ friend posted the facebook status "DON'T VOTE!"
This girl is an anarcho-capitalist, but I've never heard her say anything opposed to exercising the right to vote before. She was a big supporter of Ron Paul, and was excited about the Rand Paul campaign. She still considers Kentucky her home, although she moved away when she was 5 years old and has only visited a few times in the 20 years since then. We definitely disagree on some things, but I still value her opinion and was wanting to call and discuss candidates before voting. She was too busy to pick up the phone last week though.
Her status had been deleted without a trace by the time I got back to my apartment this evening. It could be that someone hacked her account and she removed it once it was discovered.
My suspected INFJ real life friend who moved back to Chicago (well, a suburb thereof) a month ago has had in the little box below her facebook profile pic this:
"I like it when you vote:
http://www.sos.georgia.gov/mvp/
http://www.cookcountyclerk.com/ELECTIONS/Pages/default.aspx "
(This girl volunteered for the Obama campaign and I believed was a paid employee of the democratic party for at least a year before she moved.)
I found that the major party candidates tended to have much flashier websites but no real articulation of a platform. The Libertarian candidates seemed to take things more seriously. (This was most true in the race for School Superintendent, where the republican had the flashiest website with no positions or goals mentioned at all. He also looked somewhat like a pedophile.) I mostly went for the Libertarians, but not in every race where one was running. Their Lieutenant Governor candidate was clearly the worst choice, and the republican incumbent for that office did a much better job of clearly stating a reasonable platform than anyone else in his party. I went with the democrat for my district's state senator, as there were no third party candidates, the republican incumbent had a platform of empty platitudes, I liked his last name, and I vaguely recall that that friend of mine speaking well of him. I went ahead and voted republican for Public Service Commissioner because the candidate is a close friend of my father. It is hard to say who would have gotten my vote in that race otherwise, as I dislike the policies of all 3 candidates about equally.
Close to half of the races had one candidate running unopposed, which I refuse to support on principle. I did a write in for all of these. I know that there were no actual registered write-in candidates for these offices and that my write-ins won't count for anything, but it is the principle that counts. Most were judges, so my half brother who is an attorney got the most votes. My dad, a CPA, got a vote for tax commissioner. I voted for myself in for the Soil and Water Conservation District Chairman, as I have taken some classes on managing water resources. One unopposed candidate had his party listed as dem
corat, so in that office I voted for Miss Spelling. Another unopposed candidate was names Al Wong, which sounds too much like All Wrong, so I instead voted for Al Wright.