We Don't Know

      Pretty much as predicted: we don't know who won the Presidential election.  I won't kid you: I was hoping for a blowout and I didn't care by who.  I'm not a big fan of either of the two main candidates* but I am a big fan of the orderly process of our elections and I was hoping for an outcome everyone could point to and say, "Yes, that guy won and the other guy lost."

      We didn't get that.  We've got two candidates who are (at the very least) busily projecting absolute confidence that they will prevail.  They both have lots of supporters who are emotionally invested in victory for their candidate.  And nobody knows who will win.  The clock is ticking and it doesn't wind all the way down for nine more days.

     It's a good time to be pleasant to everyone you meet.  It's a good time to restock the pantry.  It's a very good time to be patient.

      States count votes in idiosyncratic ways but the methods never involve leaving one person unwatched with a bucket of ballots.  Reform-era changes from over a century ago, Civil Rights-era procedures from over fifty years ago and memory of the "hanging chad" mess from the Gore-Bush election have driven the states to take very great care in coming up with a definitive, accurate and trustworthy result, with no possibility of cheating.  Let's give them time to find out what it is, to a level of confidence that the overwhelming majority of Americans will accept.
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* This will be difficult for many readers -- perhaps most -- to accept, but facing a choice between two septuagenarians who tend to wander off-message, seem to be stuck in the previous century, represent themselves in better health than they probably are and have Vice-Presidential picks who are not, in my opinion, ready to take on their boss's job, from fifty thousand feet I'm not especially happy with either one long before we get down to matters of policy and personal behavior.  The Dems and the GOP have been failing for decades to impress me with the suits they throw up for the big job and they're getting worse.