Election Time: Republicans Win

It’s silly season again in America: a Presidential election year.  If you don’t know that, you must really be living under a rock.

As I did four years ago, I’ll post my thoughts about how I vote online for all the elections I can participate in: national, Congressional, Indiana-wide, and local.  That way, you can do more than curse the ignorant Americans for their choices; you can possibly influence at least one.

Local races look to be more boring than usual this year, because neither of Indiana’s Senators is running this year.  Fishers trends strongly Republican, too, which makes a lot of the other local races uncompetitive.

But that’s not why I said the Republicans win.  I figured I’d be able to watch the speeches from the conventions at my own convenience online, so just now I tried both sites.  Here’s what the Democratic convention site told me:

We’re sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn’t compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:

Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5).
Compatible browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.

That’s because the Democrats chose Microsoft as their official technology provider, and Microsoft chose to deliver all video using their Silverlight technology, which doesn’t work on Linux (yet).

And what are the Republicans using?  Good ol’ YouTube.

Yes, I’ll probably be able to find the important Democrat speeches on YouTube.  But how easy will that be?  And how many of the obscure Democrat speeches will I be drawn into watching just out of curiosity?  I’ve already listened to portions of Fred Thompson’s and Joe Lieberman’s speeches–because it was so easy.

Advantage: Republicans.