Just as more than 11 percent of registered voters, I have cast my ballot already.

President George W. Bush spoke here in central Florida recently. I couldn’t attend (to atone for missing him at Unity), but felt civic, so I voted. It was the second day of early voting here in Florida.

Narrowing down an opinion here is difficult. I’m now off the table, so to speak. If I weren’t a journalist, I could put this divisive election behind me. That feels good - like I suddenly have de facto armor to deflect the landslide of ads presented to Joe Floridian over the last two months.

Now, candidates wage a winless war in my mailbox and on my television set. Presumably, the RNC and DNC have raided the voter registrations for addresses. I moved to this state just 18 months ago, and I still rarely get unexpected mail addressed to me.

Early voting has pluses. Single mothers and the elderly, for instance, stand to benefit from a wide voting window. That window here spreads the election over two weeks.

Still, as a regular voter, I do feel a bit out of phase. I’ve read several Associated Press and The New York Times stories quoting early voters, but none have delved into the psychology vis-a-vis other elections. Most of them, like me, fit into the “eager” voter category. Do they feel relieved to have settle the election for themselves, or is it anticlimactic?

Either way, I look forward to Nov. 2. Working an election charges news-hounds like myself.

A preemptive federal lawsuit was filed Wednesday against Amendment 36 in Colorado. The plaintiff, Jason Napolitano, calls himself a “registered voter” in the Associated Press story.

He seems, on the surface, to have no real political ties. The main opposition group, Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea (gotta love that), denies involvement with him, saying they plan to take their chances on Nov. 2.

His suit asks a federal judge to rule the proposal unconstitutional before it goes up for a vote. No word yet on whether or when it will get a hearing.

In other strange U.S. election news, witness the Guardian newspaper’s Operation Clark County. The London news outfit sees fit to spur readers into writing letters to voters in the Ohio county.

“Writing to a Clark County voter is a chance to explain how US policies effect you personally, and the rest of the world more generally, and who you hope they will send to the White House,” the Web site reads.

It’s simple: Guardian readers enter their email address in a box on the Web site, and they receive the name and address of one Clark County voter.

Recall that Ohio usually lands pretty high on talking heads’ lists of “swing” or “battleground” states.

This AP article says that, on the first day, 3,000 Britons took the paper up on it. It also says that a Guardian reader poll (likely not scientific) showed they favored Sen. John Kerry over President George W. Bush by a three-to-one margin.

Now, whether even one voter in Clark would be swayed by a random letter from a Brit remains to be seen.

The electoral college bears a special look in advance of the upcoming 2004 presidential election.

First, the background. The link above has one of the clearer explanations of the Electoral College that I’ve seen. In part, it reads:

The Electoral College insulates the election of the President from the people by having the people elect not the person of the President, but the person of an Elector who is pledged to vote for a specific person for President. Though the ballot may read “George Bush” or “Al Gore,” you’re really voting for “John Smith” who is a Bush supporter or “Jack Jones” who is a Gore supporter.

Each state selects a number of electors equal to the sum of its senators and representatives. The 12th Amendment in 1804, along with the gradual calcification of the two-party system, helped create the winner-take-all system we have now.

Now consider this: In Colorado, voters November 2 will consider a ballot initiative, Amendment 36 that would award that state’s Electoral College votes proportionately based on the popular vote. For example, suppose President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry split the popular vote there with a 55/45 percentage breakdown. Bush would count five of the state’s electoral votes, and Kerry would take four. It would effectively thin that insulation between the popular vote and the President.

Proportional distribution isn’t new. Nebraska and Maine have variations. The first two electors go to the winner of the state and the remaining electors, three and two respectively, follow the majority votes in the states’ congressional districts.

The ballot initiative in Colorado to award electors based on popular vote stems from reactions to the 2000 fiasco that happened in Florida. Recall that, in the end, ballot counting, which had dragged on for weeks, was stopped when the Supreme Court intervened. A 5-4 decision put Bush in the White House.

(When I took media law in college, my professor told me that 5-4 decisions amounted to “weak law,” but that’s another post.)

It’s interesting to note that, had this initiative been in place in 2000, it’s likely Al Gore would be running for re-election now, instead of Bush.

Fast forward to 2004, and some Coloradans, like many Americans, hold a visceral grudge about the 2000 results. The wording of this initiative, whatever the idea’s merits, proves troublesome.

The election certification process referred to in paragraph (b) of this subsection shall apply to the ballots cast for presidential tickets at the November 2, 2004 general election and at general elections held after 2004 at which presidential tickets are on the statewide ballot.

That means if the initiative passes - admittedly, a long-shot - the 2004 election, if it is as close on Election Day as it appears now, could face court challenges. Those challenges would move within weeks or days to the Supreme Court. No one can predict how that body might rule on the merits of a speculative case, but one could reasonably guess that Bush would enjoy four more years.

Regardless of conjecture on an outcome, consider the mechanism. A judicial outcome for the 2004 election would make two in a row - both attributable to the structure of the Electoral College.

Is this the way American’s want to elect their presidents? The prospect of flawed electoral mechanics leading to a judicial review a second time should scare advocates of representative government. We can do better.

Court intervention diminishes the votes of everyday people. Take my vote away once, shame on you. Take it away a second time, shame on me.

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the value of the Electoral College. As I understand, its intended purpose is to offer balance - to subtly amplify the voices of rural areas and heartland states. The theory holds that, without it, mainly coastal population centers like New York City and Los Angeles would have a bully’s say in who sits in the Oval Office.

But, if court challenges become clockwork every four years, does the clumsiness of the Electoral College supersede any remedy it may offer?

Monday night I put together the toughest 1A I’ve done in my short (18-month) tenure as a copy editor and page designer.

Sunday midday, two boys in Crystal River, southwest of Ocala near the coast, began a terrible game of gun play. It ended with one of them, a 13-year-old, shot in the chest at point-blank range. He died. Police have brought manslaughter charges against the boy who held the gun, an 11-year-old.

The Star-Banner put a skeleton of the story at the top of Monday’s front page. For Tuesday’s paper, which I designed, our reporter on the story fleshed it out with details from police reports, and heart-breaking reactions from the family.

I’ve put together some pretty gruesome Iraq war packages, but avoided pictures showing bodies strewn in the wake of bombings. I’ve seen photographs of the aftermath of suicide attacks in Israel, where the assailant’s head sits awkwardly on the debris-covered ground. I’ve seen pictures of people butchering dogs for food out of desperation in Liberia. I’ve winced at pictures of bloated bodies floating in the wake of Hurricane Jeanne in Haiti.

But, nothing quite prepared to see the picture the family submitted of this dead teen. It showed the 13-year-old frozen in a smile that his family won’t see again in life.

I’m not the story here. Still, I wanted to share some of the thoughts I had while putting together the front page of Tuesday’s newspaper.

• I kept imagining the reactions of both families picking up the newspaper from their driveways in the morning. Would the alleged shooter’s family feel it was fair? They didn’t comment for print, and the reporter wrote that media camped outside their home for much of Monday. Would the victim’s family feel the story was respectful?

• What kind of bravery and sensitivity did our reporter and photographer have to muster in order to work with the family to do their jobs?
• Was the work I did at the end of the process respectful of both families, the reporter and the photographer?

Of course, answers to all of these questions are subjective. As a designer, the only thing I can do is my mindful best.

Michigan State University did me a favor by requiring sensitivity training for budding journalists. Still, this experience has helped me understand the chasm between theory and practice.

Anything worth doing is worth taking time to do with due thoroughness. As much as I enjoy the tabula rasa that is blocletters, other demands on my time have squeezed it out over the last few weeks.

Most of those demands help keep shingles over my head and other assorted bills paid. Paying work also helps supply vitamin caffeine, a necessary nutrient.

Blocletters, of course, doesn’t pay. Not that I’m complaining. Part of the thrill in blogging is the sheer love of writing - for myself. This site, like most of its ilk, has a design that forces the writer to produce. If I don’t write, readers get a blank page.

I get a blank page.

That thought is a sword of Damocles gently scratching at my forehead. You see, like many would-be writers, I spend a lot of time trying not to write. The intention to write sits good and true under it all, but then I sit down to the keyboard.

Fingertips aimlessly nudge the keys, not pressing through to make characters appear on the screen. Then, I recall that I need to do laundry. Or the phone rings. Maybe the dishes need doing.

My conscious mind feels uneasy, grabbing for ideas. It can get the better of my subconscious drive to put pixels where they count - out of my head and where people can see them.

Blocletters, for me, provides a way around that pang to do anything but write when I intend to. But, the guilt mechanism isn’t fool-proof. I should know; I’m a fool who needs to just find the time to write more often.