I am very stupid.

I move to Miami-Date County, probably the most notoriously corrupt voting district in the United States.

The very phrase "Miami-Date" should recall Bush v. Gore, butterfly ballots, roadblocks, people wrongly purged from the voter rolls for having names that sound sort of like the names of felons, the whole megilla. W.'s smirking face on TV on election night 2000 saying things like, "it looks bad now, but I spoke to my brother, and he assures me that we won Florida."

Instead of getting an absentee ballot from East Lansing, which I've never had any problems doing in the past, I decide to "play it safe" with deadlines by just registering to vote here.

Worse yet, I don't even register Republican like I should if I want them to proccess my voter registration.

I even filled it out at a table set up by the UM Student Dems, meaning that it was bundled in with a pack of registration forms that I'll betcha got, shall we say, much closer scrutiny than any that might have been collected by the UM Student Republicans. (Remember Ken Blackwell's infamous refusal to honor registrations turned in from MoveOn's voter registration drive because the paper they were printed on was too thin.) Ironically, in the only race I was paying much attention to, I wasn't even going to vote for Dem Senator Bill Nelson, who after all voted for the torture bill and is, like Rep. challenger Katherine Harris, a supporter of the war in Iraq. I was going to vote for anti-war independent candidate Brian Moore. Too bad Lester Sola and his pals at the Miami-Dade Elections Department didn't know that.

So really, what do I expect?

Somehow, even though I should have seen it coming, I'm still upset by this.

I just got a letter from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department saying that they "couldn't" proccess my voter registration form because I didn't fill in something I damn well specifically remember filling in, since I had to think about it for a minute at the time.

Granted, there's no way to be sure that it's not just massive, inexusable incompetence, but given the relevant recent history in this county and the circumstantial evidence, I've got my doubts.

Since I wasn't smart enough to, say, make a photocopy of my voter registration form before I turned it in, so there's no way I can contest it. In the land of Jeb Bush and Mark Foley, thriving organized crime and right-wing Cuban exiles, the spirit of Katherine Harris lives on. The almost comically corrupt south Florida elections system keeps on ticking.

So I won't get another chance to vote against these bastards until 2008.

I wonder how many other people in likely-to-vote-the-wrong-way demographics in Miami-Dade got the same letter, delivered after it's way too late to re-register without a time machine.