Primary Day

So it's Super Tuesday in Maryland. BFD. To vote in the Maryland primaries, you must be affiliated with a political party. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which party I'm affiliated with.

I've opined previously that Maryland has zero - I repeat, zero - impact on the national presidential election. So I wasn't particularly enthused about voting for any of the remaining candidates. (Lieberman would have been my top choice if he were still in the hunt.) But we also had to vote for a US senator (incumbent and foregone conclusion), our congressional representative (another incumbent and another foregone conclusion), male and female delegates to the Democratic National Convention, and Board of Education.

As I approached the voting booth (actually Maryland's brand new and way cool system using the AccuVote-TS electronic voting machines) I found myself in a bit of a quandary: I was either going to vote for offices on which I would have absolutely no impact (Democratic nominee, senator, congressman) or for offices that I couldn't vote intelligently for because I didn't know the candidates (convention delegates and board of ed). So I adopted a strategy. I either voted for people I knew personally or for people who had the same last name as characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

It worked for congressman (Cummings) and several of the delegates (Tobias, Watson, Hamer) so I was able to vote for them. It didn't work for senator or board of education so I left those parts of my ballot blank.

The strategy also worked for Democratic presidential nominee. If you're a Sherlockian, you'll know who I voted for right away. If not, I commend your attention to The Valley of Fear.

I imagine I'll actually know what's going on come November and have a more robust strategy for casting my vote. But, hey, my Sherlockian strategy isn't any less intelligent than the strategies used by all those people who voted for Bush43.
K-