Voted today...

My first non-food-related post, I guess. I voted absentee today. If you're in Maryland, you probably should too. I do not trust the voting machines, I'm sorry to say. I work with computers, and know how easy it is to manipulate them. So I filled out my absentee ballot today at the Baltimore County Board of Elections. Both the leading gubernatorial candidates - here they are Maryland guv Bob Ehrlich (R) and Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley (D) - are urging Maryland voters to go absentee, due to the irritating problems we had on Primary Day in Baltimore City and several counties (not that I had any part to play in that; I don't belong to any party, so I'm not allowed to vote on Primary Day).

The most surprising thing was that, as I asked, there were 10,000 people that had signed up to do absentee balloting so far this season, with three weeks to go before Election Day. The usual number? About 2,000.

To at least loosely tie this in with food, they had a bowl of those melt-in-your-mouth mints there, but I didn't take any. I just snarfed down the can of Pepsi One I had in my car.

[UPDATE: NOVEMBER 12 - As we all know now, Mayor O'Malley won. The final tally of absentee ballots statewide, not countywide, was 190,000 for the 23 counties and one independent city of Maryland. At least 130,000 were returned for counting, including mine.]