As DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recently observed: Not content with denying D.C. residents congressional voting rights, Congress has gone out of its way to silence us by placing a rider in the D.C. appropriation that keeps residents from lobbying Congress or country for their rights," she wrote. This insult added to injury should be enough to send residents to the polls to vote on Tuesday in a primary whose purpose is to tell the country what most Americans do not know, according to opinion polls: that Congress denies voting rights to the citizens of its own capital. The New York Times is more dismissive of the primary: This is, alas, a nonbinding beauty contest. But it relates the case for representation in simple and inarguable terms: While Wyoming, population 494,000, has one representative and two senators, Washington, population 571,000, has none. One wonders whether those half a million people would have gone without a vote for so many years if more of them were White. FirstPrimaryBlog has the latest on tomorrow's primary, including guest statements from Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton in support of, respectively, statehood, congressional representation, and one or the other. Five of the candidates - including Lieberman - made the shameful decision to withdraw from D.C.'s primary, leaving Dean, Sharpton, Kucinich, and Mosely-Braun. My prediction is Dean comes in first, Sharpton second.

Two weeks ago I suggested that the number and variety of candidates in the California recall made a dramatic case for instant run-off voting. I suggested how IRV might play out in a race between eight of the 100+ gubernatorial candidates (a hundred year old woman from Long Beach, a busty porno star, a cross-dresser in pink, a soul food restaurateur, an angry car salesman, a techno geek, a student too young for whiskers, and a structural engineer worried about earthquakes, as described in a piece in the Times). I was gunning for the cross-dresser, a real radical with a progressive vision for California's future, who lasted four rounds before being eliminated. My second choice, the unreconstructed liberal Democrat with the soul food restaurant (let's note for those following along at home that these politics are only my projections onto the candidates based on the aforementioned NYT sentence - wouldn't want to hurt anyone's chances by endorsing them), made it all the way to the last round, where he lost to the busty pornographic film star - one assumes it was because of the breadth of her policy platform. Now it turns out someone else - several someone elses actually - had the same idea, and the patience and talent to follow through with it. Go visit the folks at RecallSanity and vote for Governor the way it should be done here here. Yeah - you can rank all the candidate's from 1st through 135th choice. And who said the internet wasn't any fun? And yes, the eight described in my little demo are on the list - but since the Times didn't list their names, your guess is as good as mine as to who's who. After you try it (or, better yet - there are 135 names to get through), e-mail or call CA Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and show him what democracy looks like. And if you go through with the on-line vote, e-mail me to let me know how you ranked them. Or, Dad, just to say hi...