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March 25th, 2009 To-Do List:

1. Work at Company for my salary.
-Check
2. Train.
-Check
3. Buy food.
-Check
4. Vote in the Elections.
-Check
5. Read some of the top Newspaper Articles.
-Check
6. Write an article for my newspaper.
Wait, what?

This is in incredibly daunting task for me. What do I write about? There are so many things to chose from. Politics, Economics, Military, nothing in particular. Those are just to name a few. Then of course there was creating a logo for my newspaper and actually getting a name for it that wasn’t crap-tastic(I mean, Citizen’s Journal? Come on). Settling on a twist of my Rockband 2 Band Named(Silent Elipses) I went with Not-So-Silent Elipses. Pretty clever, right…? Now that that’s squared away, I just have one more thing to do: Actually write an article.

This article’s topic:
Raising Minimum Wage!

Wait, wait! I didn’t mean it. Promise.

This article’s real topic:
Election Page Format

Number four on my to-do list was a real important one for me today. I had one of my soldiers running for congressman of New York. Citizen Dru. Not only did I vote for him because he was in my platoon of the USNG, but because I liked and agreed with his platform. He also wasn’t afraid to get a vote by force(that is, messaging everyone online in New York). In addition, he is very active and will hopefully make New York a great state that doesn’t just have zombies as inhabitants. If anyone reads this, be sure to vote for him!

Ready to cast my vote, I eagerly clicked on the link on the eRepublik To-Do list to get to my local polling place. Ignoring the other candidates, who were classified as under qualified, I clicked the blue vote button by Citizen Dru’s name. So far, so good. After this, I find myself navigated to another page. I expect to see Citizen Dru at the top of the list, but he is in second place. What? Why is that? The other candidates weren’t even qualified, for crying out loud!

Suddenly, a strange feeling of déjà vu washes over me. Hadn’t this happened before? In some other time; In some other life? It dawned on me that I had had this same thought process at last month’s elections. That I had placed my vote, hoping for my candidate to be at the top of the list, just to not find him there. At that point, I realized that I wasn’t looking at the elections for New York anymore… I was looking at the elections of all of the entire eUS. But I didn’t care at that moment who had the most votes out of all of the candidates out of all of the states; At that moment, I only wanted to know who was winning in my state!

It was terribly confusing for me both times. And now, to see the results for just New York, I had to sift through the links to all of the other states’ elections before finally finding the needle in the hay stack. The diamond in the ruff. The… Ok, you get it. My point is: The elections page is quite poorly thought-out. For the congressional elections, anyway. I had to actually instruct one of my friends on how to vote. This is something that should be easy, painless, and bring a sense of pride and joy! Instead, it is rather puzzling to first-time(and second-time) voters.

I propose a Congressional Election Page RE-VAMP! There should be a link at the top for Your Region’s Results and another for The All Regions Results. These should be placed somewhere along the top near the existing menus. This would provide one-click access to what we really want to know, and avoid the taxing strain we would have to put on our index fingers in order to click those few extra times to get through the menus.

Now, a few parting words:

FIX THE IMPERFECTIONS
OF THE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS!