Election Day in the Garden State

Another local election day has come and gone here in New Jersey and once again I dutifully voted for the local political candidates that are the most qualified, the most experienced and best suited to take bribes and embezzle money on behalf of taxpayers everywhere. My wife, being a native of New Jersey, didn’t bother to show up at the voting booth this year because she had already filled out and sent in all six of her absentee ballots.

A stack of New Jersey Voter Registration Cards.

In my little town we had a special election for mayor because the previous mayor was ousted on corruption charges for taking a $1500 bribe to award government contracts to housing developers. Our entire town was shocked and appalled that he wasn’t getting at least $3000 to rig lucrative contracts like that.

Other mayors in about a dozen other towns south of us were being caught for making bribes of $5000 or more, so we all knew our mayor deserved to be caught for not being more proactive with his bribery. In a brilliant political move the former mayor stepped down for “personal reasons” and the entire town government was run for a month by an unelected office worker who had been a secretary in our city hall for years. A month later the Town Council approved a temporary mayor and then tried to sue the clerk for “doing mayor stuff.”

Here in New Jersey all of our politicians are required to be corrupt by law, so we try to vote for the person whom we think has the least chance of getting caught while in office. Getting caught just screws up our entire economy because then bribes have to be resubmitted, threats have to be repeated and it simply slows down any progress our government makes with needless paperwork and legal trials.

The mayoral race in our town was between one older white guy and another older white guy. One candidate had the magical ability to always looked as though he stumbled out of a bar at four in the morning on all his official campaign literature. Even in the photos where he was obviously in a photo studio and posing for the camera left him looking shocked and amazed in his photos. The other candidate looked like a slick financial kind of guy who likes to tell people what to do with their money but doesn’t pay his own income taxes for years. The reason he looks like that is because he was a slick financial kind of guy who likes to tell people what to do with their money but hadn’t paid his own income taxes for years. Go figure.

The slick guy won because he had more “voter registration cards” available than the photo-impaired guy.

Other than local politics, we had a few state wide issues to vote on:

We had to vote to decide whether or not we wanted our increased sales tax to be given back to us in the form of a check that is meant to offset the increased property tax.

We had to vote to allow New Jersey to do set aside and give out about $450 million dollars to research projects involving stem cells. I applied for a couple million bucks myself in hopes that the process for receiving grants is just as corrupt as the process for assigning mayors.

We had to vote on something involving farmland preservation, Green Acres, Arnold the Pig and Eva Gabor. I might have that a little confused. I fell asleep trying to read that resolution.

Finally, we had to vote on whether or not the New Jersey State Constitution should keep the words “idiot or insane person” in describing people who are not mentally qualified to vote. Seeing how the simple act of choosing to live in New Jersey voluntarily seems pretty much assures that you are an idiot or insane, it would seem to me that no one in the state would be allowed to vote. I chose to delete that phrase from the New Jersey Constitution because it was redundant.

All in all it was a pretty exciting voting day. You could feel the anxiety in the air almost everywhere you went. For example, I stopped and got a cup of coffee on my way to work and this heated argument broke out right in front of me between the clerk and a customer:

“Hey, you owe me another quarter in change!”

“Oh, sorry. Here you go.”

“Thanks… Have a good day!”

Woah! We New Jerseyans sure take our politics seriously! I don’t know the final percentage of people who turned out to vote in this vital local election cycle, but I’m betting we broke the single digit!

It’s good to be an American.