Municipal elections

Just a quick note on municipal elections which are held in two weeks time. Like everyone knows, the local elections are the most important ones for regular citizen. All those issues their are dealing with in the municipality will most likely have some kind of effect on your. So voting in these elections count - at least for me.

I have always have a biased view on elections and voting. On one hand I consider voting as every citizen's responsibility: if you don't even try to make a different and vote, don't bother to complain how everything is wrong. Then on the other hand, there's very little visible change and progress going on in politics and the way things are done, whether it is on local or national level. So this leads us to the conclusion that I vote so I can freely whine about the cost of public transportation and the condition of local health care :P

The only question left is who to vote? The Internet is full of different kind of polls and devices which are trying to help us to decide to whom to give our vote. Though one thing is missing: a LOVE calculator. As a teen we used to calculate the love percent for a certain couple by using the letters of their names. You count together every L, O, V, E and S letters and then eventually you have the percentages. Like this:

Matti Vanhanen (our dear PM)
Jutta Urpilainen (young chair of the Social Democratics)

LOVES
10110
1121
233
56 %

Their percentages are quite high considering the fact they just had a row in the Parliament about the finance of public health care ;) But still I wouldn't see them voting one another...I know it's a silly way to decide which candidate to vote but so are most of the other ways as well. Depending on which service you use you'll most likely to get completely different candidates each and every time.

Well, based on the system I shouldn't vote the candidate I gave my vote last time since we got only 1 percent! But whether I follow the system or not I'm not that sure I'm going to vote him anyway. He made it to the Parliament last spring and though he has behaved himself quite nicely there he still managed to be a part of the election finance scandal we had after the parliamentary elections.

So I'm keeping my eyes open for every option available. Any suggestions, anyone?

PS. Almost forgot to whine about a certain newspaper's policy on publishing running candidates' opinions on the Letters. It really ruins my morning to find them in every single paper. Do you really have to give them an opportunity to advertise their views for free? They have campaign ads and web pages for that, for heaven's sake!