Keep Austin Weird”, goes the slogans on T-shirts, hats, bags in the capital city of Texas in the United States. For those landing in Texas for the first time, it may mean a lot of things: church choirs singing religious hymns in a restaurant-cum-bar, cowboys and rodeo shows, or the fact that almost everybody is elected here, from a member of the state legislature, mayor, sheriff, the chief law enforcement officer, the county judge—everyone.
The slogan recently hit the headlines in local newspapers with a debate on what they call the “Texas Two-Step” system here. Under this people vote twice in a day—in the ‘primary’ in the day and in the ‘caucus’ in the evening to choose the Democratic Party nominee in the presidential election. Of course, they also vote the same day to choose the Republican nominee, but Republicans vote only once.
Think of Dr Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi hitting the poll trail to secure people’s mandate on who should be the Congress nominee for prime minister. And here Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were living out of their planes to secure people’s votes to become the Democratic Party’s candidate for the November elections—when Texans will vote for the third and final time to decide whether they want the Democratic or the Republican nominee as their President.
Secretary of State Phil Wilson, acting as Chief Election Officer for Texas, looked askance when asked about the incidence of violence in such a fiercely contested election. “Say it again! Did you say violence?” Wilson said in dismay at a meeting with visiting foreign correspondents in Austin. And then there were guffaws. “No, we in the United States respect and value the sanctity of our votes,” Wilson assured. Local television channels were soon seeking out this correspondent to seek some elaboration on his “interesting question”.
Later, over lunch at a restaurant in Houston, a 21-year-old intern in City Mayor Bill White’s office had some words of consolation. “It’s really getting bad even over here. You know I was going somewhere the other day and I saw some guys tearing Hillary’s billboards downtown. This is horrible. What is happening with the people in this country? Are they going crazy?” she wondered.
At the Travis County High School polling station on March 4, Robin Schneider, a schoolteacher in her fifties, took leave for the day to persuade people coming to the polling station to vote for Obama. She was no political activist. “I am a citizen. He is concerned about rising housing foreclosures, about the billions of dollars being wasted in Iraq when people are jobless here,” she said.

... contd.