Heather K. Gerken

I’m not going to say that I enjoyed reading this book. I vote occasionally but, at most, I investigate which of the candidates rates most dismal when selecting an option. For you see, my interest in politics peaked during a few years spent in Memphis, Tennessee. The main issues of the day encompassed major international issues such as Monicagate all the way down to the most dismal lot of City Councilors that any mentally disturbed fiction writer could possibly dream up. My interest ended abruptly on 07, November 2000, for any number of reasons.

I will say that I’m a bit of an impulse library patron. In a hurry, there was something about the cheesy “As Seen on TV” graphic style of the cover that compelled me to grab this one. The book’s relative thinness didn’t hurt. Because I’m about as attuned to political election machinations as your average Papua New Guinean, I don’t really know how to review this except perhaps in a dumb, hypothetical Q and A form (and, yes, I acknowledge that in no way should I even add my two cents to this, but I got nothing else going on):

Q: Was the implied promise of digging up dirt on various municipalities by the goofy, bullet-point cover fulfilled? You know, all that Ballot Box #13 and hanging chad crap…

A: No, not really. I still don’t know within which states my “vote really counts” nor who has the “shortest lines.”

Q: So…the book sucked then? What gives with the four stars?

A: As usual I didn’t do the requisite research of looking at the table of comments before diving right in. So I’m an idiot but I repented by reading the whole thing. It’s basically a proposal for a unified indexing system that can reign in many of the inconsistencies of election methodology, issues, etc. across all the different municipalities. If we’re a nation that historically respects state and local rights, then a more European centralized system will likely never gain traction. That’s great but instead we’ve evolved this chaotic, Wild West network of individual election systems that preclude any serious investigations into the inevitable registration, polling place, and ballot-counting problems, Gerken proposes a system that can serve as an armature with which to compare and appropriately coordinate the disparate municipal systems. This is about establishing a matrix or matrices to be utilized to measure and compare most or all of the various aspects of the process regardless of the particular local protocols.

Q: Good God that sounds dull. So was this like some lengthy Excel document of percentages, formulas, rankings, and other mind numbing data?

A: Well, it wasn’t overly dull because she does not have the details formalized. This is more of a reform manifesto without much in the way of specifics. She envisions a living system that can’t be predetermined by one lawyer and can constantly evolve in the face of inevitable inconsistencies. Really it all seems logical and, other than three typos, this was extremely well written.

Q: So it was significantly better than this stupid imaginary conversation?

A: Yes.… (meer)