Monday, August 18, 2008

Who is this guy?

I've decided not to vote for people I don't know anything about. In the past, I've walked into the voting booth, looked at the names, and realized that I knew nothing at all about most of them. I'd be voting not only for President of the U.S. but for my local school district members.
Over the years, I've developed various strategies for making my vote a valid one. For a while, I voted for the first half of the alphabet one election, the second half of the alphabet the next election. I realized, though, that this skewed my choices, since way more than half the people in the U.S. have names that begin with a letter in the first half (Don't believe me? Check it out).
So, for a while I used word association tests. I'd look at a name, say the first word that came to mind, and if the word had a positive connotation (chocolate, say), I'd vote for that person. If the word had a negative connotation (licorice, which I hate), I'd vote against. But what if both candidates had negative connotations?
Then, for a while, I chose names on a consonant vowel ratio. If there were exactly two consonants per vowel, I voted for that name.
All of which means that I voted for a large number of doofi (plural of doofus) in my time. Best to not vote at all.

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