Voting

Happy election day! I hope all of you who are US citizens have voted or are going to.

I sent my ballot yesterday. I hadn't received my absentee ballot, even though I had received the ballot for the primary a few months ago. So I called the county board of elections, and got a nice woman with a familiar accent who told me they had sent it out, but if I hadn't gotten it I could download the federal back-up write-in ballot online.

Since she had my address right in front of her, she asked me if I was calling from France, and when I said I was, she said, "Oh my God!" And at the end of the conversation, she wanted to know if I could see the Eiffel Tower from where I lived. I told her that I couldn't, but that I could see its searchlight at night. (I'm relating all this just to emphasize again to my European friends just how much Paris is romanticized in the states... :)

Anyway, JD hadn't left work yet, and agreed to print out the ballot for me in the cause of furthering democracy (he thinks that elections in the US are needlessly complicated, which of course they are. Or rather, they're complicated in part in order to make sure that not everyone's vote is counted. Note that the US does not meet the Carter Center's standards for fair elections). I met JD at Gare de Lyon, where we had coffee, and then I went off to the main post office in the rue du Louvre to get my ballot postmarked.

I think I spelled "Hillary" wrong (i.e., like Hilary Putnam).