How to vote in less than 10 minutes

THE BETTER PART of college students — and I use that phrase loosely — don’t vote.  National, state and municipal policies have negligible effects on their respective constituents.

Seeing as that last sentence is a blatant lie, I think it’s in everyone’s best interests to tell you how to vote this election and in 10 minutes or less.

I’m not saying anything about which candidates to support, I’ll just share how to vote for them and how I manage to get done within a quarter hour every time, by hook or by crook.

As I write this, I have a genuine Santa Clara County absentee ballot. Because the candidates on the state level are the same, you might be able to follow along pretty well.

Obviously, if you know nothing about the candidates, then all you have to go on is their names.

Names go a long way in being able to tell how trustworthy someone is.

If someone has a funny or eccentrically ethnic name, vote for him or her. This way, when the elected officials somehow manage to screw something up, you have something to laugh at, however bitterly.

Interestingly, it turns out the Republican candidates get the upper hand on this.

“Dick” Mountjoy and Chuck Poochigan, U.S. senator candidate and state attorney general, respectively, both have mighty funny two-meaning nicknames, for one thing, but the surnames are what really do it for me.

Voting for someone with the last name Mountjoy might be enough for me, but he shortened Richard to “Dick.” You might say that he adopted the nickname “on top of it all,” but that’s going too far into double-entendres for our family audience here at Pastiche.

If someone has a simply awesome name, vote for him or her. A good example is in the race for state controller. I voted for Donna Tello for one reason and one reason only: she’s either a famed renaissance artist or a Ninja Turtle.

I think Ninja Turtles would make mighty fine controllers. I don’t even know what the job entails, but I know that, through thick and thin, the ninja turtles will lead us to the future, bipartisan leaders every one of them.

They would be tough on drugs and crime, while fighting for the rights of the news media and reporters named April.

By the time I finished that half of the ballot, I had six minutes left to go, leaving just enough time to carefully yet haphazardly choose my officials by their funny names, but not necessarily enough for voting on ballot measures.

With only a limited amount of time left to go, I decided to let all the potential judges become judges, I voted for Michelle McKay McCoy for what should be an obvious reason by now and I trusted Pamela Parker for Campbell Union School District Board Member because she just might be Spiderman’s long-lost sister.

Moreover, I determined Buck Polk was a man’s man just from his name, and that it was just too awesome for him not to be Governing Board Member of the West Valley-Mission Community College District for Trustee Area 2.

When I got to the hotly contested mayor’s race for San Jose, I went with my instincts and voted for Cindy Chavez.

More literally, my instincts went with voting for someone my dad is passionately voting against, but that translated towards a Chavez vote.

Thanksgiving is going to be interesting this year, but that’s really only incidental to my civic duty, a civic duty I must complete with only two minutes left to vote on a whole sheet of propositions.

My dilemma was solved as soon as I found my cache of coin. With “Yes” as heads and “No” as tails, I finished just under the wire, conclusively proving that it is possible to speed vote.

Better yet, I can sleep tonight knowing that democracy is served.

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