Makes a Most Careful Count

(Summary for if you don’t have time to read this whole post:  I am angry but you should still fill out your Census form.)

You may have heard the recent ads on the radio or elsewhere trying to persuade you to fill out the 2010 Census form.  The one I heard most often said something like (coudn’t find a transcript online, going from memory here), “Imagine that our town has a hundred children.  We need about five teachers to teach them and two school buses to pick them up for school.  But what if our town grows and now we have hundreds of children?  Without the Census, we wouldn’t know how much we’ve grown. 

Cincinnati Endorsement Compendium

Update (November 15th, 2009): The link below doesn’t seem to be working; so, on the off chance that anyone is still looking for the election results, you can find them here instead.

Update (November 3rd, 2009): A local news station offers running tallies of today’s election results.

If you happen to be a Cincinnati voter, and if you’re planning to vote in this fall’s off-year elections (coming up next month, Tuesday, November 3rd, polling places open from 6:30 a.m to 7:30 p.m.), at least if you’re like me, you’re wondering, How am I supposed to choose among all these candidates I don’t know anything about?  If you occasionally listen to the radio or watch TV or read anything even somewhat related to current events, it’s easy to have an opinion every four years or so about the presidency, etc.  Unfortunately, unless a candidate aggressively mails me multiple fliers about himself (which one of them is doing two of them are doing!), I find it more difficult to form an opinion on Mr. Smith J. Smithson of North Avondale, not only because I’ve never heard of him, but also because the areas of public policy he has “positions” on aren’t things like war and abortion but things like how the city should collect unpaid parking fines and whether the public schools should continue “CGCS benchmarking”, which I’ve also never heard of.