Luckily I don't have cable and rarely watch local stations on the antenna so I was spared the marathon of ads. And without a land line I avoided robo-calls. As for my state - both campaigns pulled out within days of each other (a couple weeks ago) and besides mailers I only saw one canvasser (for Obama) as I was walking out the door to go up the street and do my early voting. But yeah, I'm glad it's over too.
All politics aside though - I was thinking today about how our voting process really plays out and I started crunching some numbers. This is what I came up with (and I'm not trying to start a debate here. Just an observation of how our voting process actually turns out in an election like this):
The popular vote spread of 2,789,572 is not insignificant (roughly the population of Chicago), but magnified by the electoral college: 2.214% spread in the popular vote = 23.420% spread in the electoral college (including FL going for Obama, which accounts for 4.363% by itself). But the popular vote spread of the population of Chicago would equal a difference of nearly NINE TIMES the population of New York (8,244,910 x 9) in the electoral college.
Looks like ~61% turnout overall - much better than a decade or two ago. But still......the number of eligible voters who DIDN'T VOTE - 81,667,546!!! That puts us behind something like 120+ other countries in voter turnout. Ridiculous.
Again, "good one one ya mate" to all who went out and participated in our democratic process (FWIW).