"Yes, grandchild, it was old folks versus new machines way back there in double-naughty. Bless be, it is only now that I can laugh about it. The fight over the top job lasted forever. The one who ended up with it not only did not get a majority but also he supposedly got fewer votes. A lessor people might be still in revolt. Yes, child, the vicissitudes of politics can be strange to behold."

Votes do the changing while vicissitudes are the changes being done. The words are sort of second cousins. They are very much alike in more than meaning. Most people fail to exercise either one.

I apologize for not having statistics to illustrate the word use but there are statistics galore to illustrate voting habits. It's a financial thing. Few people get paid to keep up with word use but lots of people get paid lots and lots of money to keep up with voting habits. Or, to be more accurate that would be lack of voting habits. Voter apathy has been documented, chronicled, commented and condemned so much and so often that as a subject it is generally relegated to the status of lamentable ignorance.

I suspect that the reason that voting is so largely avoided is that it takes some effort. I can assure you, however, that voting is a lot easier to do than trying to work vicissitude into your everyday vocabulary.

In the interest of fairness, however, I do believe that there are some cases in which voter apathy can be a good thing. I have a cousin who never votes. In his case I think that is a very good thing. He takes pride in his lack of voter participation with platitudes like: "Don't vote. It only encourages politicians." He also takes pride in littering the highway with his empty beer cans. He claims he is "providing work for the poor." Those are his amusing ideas. The more so because he even takes credit for dreaming them up. Some of his serious ideas, however, can be so morbid that, quite frankly, the possibility that he could in any way influence the way the world works terrifies me. He is the kind of person I would prefer to give the wrong driving directions to the polls. There is an ongoing conspiracy around here to keep his keys away from him not only when he drinks but also when the polls are open.

Instead of doing things to generally encourage voting, They seem bent on complicating the whole process of voting to the point of distraction. By They I mean those who control the mechanisms we use when we vote. For simplicity I call them the powers that be or, better yet, just They with a capital T.

I have reached the conclusion that the reason voting is being made to be more difficult is that They believe it is easier to control fewer people than more. It seems just good sense that the more complicated and the more difficult something is to do then the fewer the people will be that do it.

But They don't stop there. They want the voting to be quicker. The less time you have to spend doing the actual voting the less time you have to use your own mind. You see They have spent so much time and money making up your mind for you that They don't want you messing up Their ideas. This is a really big and complex conspiracy.

The problem gets worse. They have a lot of unwitting accomplices. These day a lot of normally intelligent people, thinking that they are proving their cleverness, go to such lengths to replace simplicity with new and amazing technological wizardry that the interest of expedience gets washed away by waves of absurd complexity. The situation is a lot like the preceding sentence. Those forty-one words easily can be replaced by six - smart people often screw up simplicity. As a form of proof, I remind you that our founders would have had a hard time even imagining the difficulties exhibited by Florida residents during the last national election.

"Honestly, Mr. Franklin, the vote count down there was unavoidably delayed due to hanging chads. You know, an advanced case of pregnant paper contours."

All understanding of expedience was completely lost during that election. A group of bespectacled homeroom teachers could count quicker and better than those new high tech machines. That clouded incident did, however, have a silver lining. It provided lexicographers with a marvelous opportunity to create a useful new word. I will be quite disappointed if that fiasco does not spawn a new entry in at least the American dictionaries. Wouldn't it be nice if we could refer to a bollixed count as a florida and have the meaning completely understood by future generations? I push for this addition to our lexicon mainly because my brother lives in Florida. He is quite the genius so I need all the help I can get when - well, you know what I mean. But then I digress.

The sad part is that all this effort to speed up the election process is unnecessary. After all is said and done, it is such a long time before the winners take office that the emphasis on a speedy vote count seems silly.

The rules were written so that someone on horseback could gather all the information necessary from outlying areas, return it to a central location with ample time left over for a leisurely count before the winning candidate took a slow carriage to the inauguration.

We can blame the present day rush for voting results not on any real need for increased expedience but on a threat to powerful egos that was brought on by the much earlier advent of another bit of technology. Nowadays the government folk feel pressure to stay ahead of the TV news. This is strange but understandable in a twisted sort of way. Serious men of importance can not be expected to relinquish their visions of grandeur to a bunch of talking heads without a fight.

But, it is a very nearsighted battle. It simply is not possible for the government folk to win. The TV folk are not restrained by the need for stamped as certified results. As soon as the voters walk out of the polling place the TV folk just ask 'em. Poof, as if by magic, they have their results. And they don't even ask them all or go to all the polling places. They wave pages of formulae as proof and then just guess. They consider it an educated guess, but it is just a guess none the less.

Even though it has proved itself to be less than accurate, early outcome reporting has become so accepted and so fast that it has created a whole new problem. West Coast participation in national elections now seems superfluous. The clock factor allows for such early outcomes that a lot of people on the West Coast don't even bother to waste the time to drive to the polls. California's importance is being reduced back to the playground status it once held. And that, Mr. Watson, is the real conspiracy.

You see, there are a goodly number of folk who believe that keeping California completely out of any national equation is a very good thing. There exists a huge and secretive conspiracy along the same lines as helping my cousin not to vote, only on a much grander scale. It is too early to tell whether this conspiracy is a replacement for or an addition to the plot to sink California into the ocean.

The latter was a dandy idea for some but it meant losing my sister so I wasn't for it. She's a great cook, a certified chef even. Keeping her vote from counting - now that's a different matter. But again, I digress.

All in all the voting experience has been getting just a little more than absurd. And, it is starting to get personal. The real problem, as I see it, is that us good folk here in Texas stand a chance of getting caught in the Florida - California crossfire. Their problems have made things so difficult that we must triple-check our voting systems for bugs - accidental or otherwise. Notice that is triple check, not double check. We here in Texas aren't satisfied with bigger and better. If there are gonna be problems ours must be the worst.

Early test runs on our new machinery have revealed votes being tallied for a different candidate than the one for whom they were intended. This is not good but if every vote goes wrong for one election candidate then just chalk it up to a bug and fix it. If every tenth or so vote goes the other way, now that's cause for some serious consternation. They just might have discovered something really sinister being afoot. Pooh-poohs about paranoia should be ignored. Double, triple, quadruple or as many checks as necessary are called for until definite blame can be placed.

That snafu seems just a little too much like a nefarious variation on the infamous graveyard precinct polling. At the end of the day the total vote count jives but there is no live hand count to show anything went wrong. The real loser wins and no one - except the perpetrators - is the wiser of a discrepancy nor how one might have occurred. Finally, when people just are beginning to forget past Texas shenanigans, we definitely do not want that bug crawling back out from the rug under which we hid it.

As if that were not enough, test runs also discovered the omission from a local ballot of an unopposed candidate. Such an omission would seem likely to cause no more real damage than a bruised ego. But, be ye not fooled. Herein lies the real conspiracy, the true test of Texas diligence and where a triple check becomes a serious necessity.

At any cost, we must guard against the possibility of an unopposed candidate coming away with no votes at all. That election could end without a winner for lack of even one vote. Talk about a protracted court case. And the embarrassment - Mercy! Such a flagrant display of voter apathy would shove Texas under the dunce cap in place of Florida and make any and all political conversations with my brother absolutely impossible to bear. That simply would not do.

Fie on progress, forget all about conspiracies and ignore all mention of anything so complicated as vicissitudes. Texas is in dire need of your assistance. If only in an unopposed election - expend just a little bit of effort and vote!

But please, don't give my cousin his keys until after the polls close.

patrig