![[banner] Gerald Klaas for Senate '98](../images/banner.jpg)
06-02-98: Voted early this morning. Spent the day like any other workday, down at the office, talking to my computer. Bar-be-qued some teriyaki chicken on the backyard grill for dinner, then settled down with my wife and stepson about 7:30pm to start watching the returns coverage. At about 8:05pm, I logged into the Secretary of State's website to check out the early (i.e. absentee) returns. I already had 560 votes! That's a quarter of the way to my goal, and they hadn't started counting precincts yet. Incredible. Watched coverage on channel 3 long enough to notice that they are following the same delusional thinking as The Bee, that they don't need to cover third party candidates in their coverage. Switched over to channel 10 to see that they're doing the same. Only channel 13 seemed to understand that the "blanket" primary has changed the rules, and was showing all candidates in all races. Bravo to you KOVR. By 10 o'clock, returns were showing me with over 2,000 votes. I'm a happy camper, and am going to bed.
06-03-98: Jumped out of bed and logged onto the Internet. With 100% of precincts reporting I got (drum roll please) 4,227 votes! (2.7% popular vote) That's great. Even though The Bee didn't so much as mention my name in the 4 articles they published on this race, even though I spent some $1,300 on this race while my opponents spent up to $500,000 on this race, I still attracted over 3,000 cross party voters, and that's assuming that all 917 Libertarians who voted in the county voted for me. There are 3 times as many major party members who voted for me as there are Libertarians. What a great press release that'll make! Obviously the voters want to hear from third party candidates.
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