| Not that the absentee vote is likely to determine this election's outcome, but we in the punditry trade find ourselves consumed with interest in a particularly exclusive group of absentee voters: the farthest-flung citizens of our republic and members of our species. Awright, awright, we confess: It's less a case of consuming interest than of sheer journalistic desperation. Like megatheria foundering in a tar pit, the contenders for the highest office in the land have mired themselves in the dullest election campaign in memory, living or otherwise. Even the attack ads are uninspired; for instance, the best His Incumbency's keepers can do is to take up the sobriquet fastened upon the challenger by some anonymous underground wag: Senator Dribbleglass. Really mature, gang -- and what if the President catches you tuning in to Blues Against the Empire or Dateline Pellucidar? The (discreetly voiced) consensus of reporters assigned (or, as they prefer, sentenced) to the candidates' retinues is that they've died and gone to hell. We others are (almost) too ashamed to go on drawing pay for performing the onerous, odious, otiose task of reading meaning into the candidates' virtually interchangeable evasions, obfuscations, and insults to intelligence. We must cast about for topics possessing at least tenuous relevance to politics and nebulous value as curiosities. I hereby call dibs on the Silurian age. The folks there--members of various scientific research teams or the U.S. Navy support contingent, and registered voters all--don't solve the problem of what's to provide copy later in the week, but they suffice for now, and isn't that what news is about? Anybody with a short attention span (actually a survival trait in this campaign) will thrill on being reminded that about one thousand men and women live and work either 400 million years in the past or else on an alternate earth in another universe entirely. Which is it, long ago or far away? Depends on whose theory you prefer. A clear majority of the expedition's paleontologists and geologists and such hold the opinion that they literally are time travelers into the prehistoric world of the Silurian age, and they have the trilobites to back it up. "On the contrary," say the physicists who superintend the so-called "Space-Time Anomaly," by which means everybody has got from here to there or from now to then (depending). With minimal prompting, they proceed to tell you, and to show you reams and reams of math they claim backs them up, that time travel is impossible, therefore, the Anomaly can only be a gateway to an earth-like planet infested with trilobite-like critters, orbited by a moon-like satellite, and itself orbiting a sun-like star in a universe very like our own. In practical terms the distinction probably doesn't matter, but, politics being what it am, conceivably the difference could make a difference in the (which is to say, our) world. Conceive along with us here: imagine that the election somehow generates enough interest among the electorate at the last moment to become what political scientists with fancy degrees term "a squeaker," a la Hayes/Tilden, Bush/Gore, etc. Those absentee votes from the Silurian age become crucial. The world or, anyway, the candidates and their keepers wait with bated breath as the ballots are hurried by time-machine or pony express into the eager if none too clean hands of election officials. The count is made, the cry rings out, "Another continuum heard from!" and the winner is declared. Then the fun truly begins, as attorneys for both parties argue speciously about the legitimacy of the thing. Oh, we could kill our own premise outright by citing the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. UOCAVA provides that members of the U.S. armed services and merchant marine and their families, as well as non-military U.S. citizens living abroad, may vote while away from their place of voting residence, wherever stationed, within or without the United States. Sounds simple enough. But we still have x amount of copy to turn in, so let's conceive that the side which has come up short in the ballot count asks, "Are the expedition members actually living abroad?" and follows through with, "If they're actually in the Silurian age, which falls well outside the calendar year, are they not in violation of UOCAVA's 'not earlier than' restrictions on registration requests and the receipt of absentee ballots?" |
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