The election circus is finally over and Obama will get another four years.  I have to admit that it was a little fun listening to the Republican/ conservative Romney supporters who were so depressed.  Many conservative commentators were predicting a big Romney victory and their predictions were way off.

Intrade proved to be right again.  It is not infallible, but it seems to be the best “poll” that there is.  Intrade had the chances of Obama winning at about 67% just before the election.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned much, if at all, in the mainstream media, is that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson broke the one million vote barrier.  He looks like he will just miss breaking the one percent barrier though.  If his positions had been closer to Ron Paul, then I think he would have easily broken the one percent barrier.  I will have more commentary on this in a future post.

I didn’t vote because the lines at my precinct were astronomical.  I don’t have hours out of my day to waste for something where my vote will have no effect.  Perhaps I would have waited if Ron Paul were running in the general election, but that was not to be.

So with the long lines I saw, I thought that it was a big voter turnout.  But it turns out that it is just another thing where government is incompetent.  Why should a voting line take hours?  You can have hundreds of people filling out a ballot at the same time.  Do they not have enough workers at the polls or are they just run really inefficiently?  Anyway, it is so symbolic of bureaucratic idiocy.

Despite the long lines I saw, voter turnout was actually down.  While I’m sure not all of the votes have been counted yet, it still looks to be quite significant.  You can see the 2008 results vs. the 2012 results. According to this article, voter turnout was down by as much as 13 million people from 2008.  This is quite significant.  Now, certainly some of this can be attributed to Hurricane Sandy from the previous week.  However, it wasn’t just low turnout in New York and New Jersey.  It appears that turnout was down in most states.

I think this should be good news to libertarians.  It means more people did not feel obliged to vote for the lesser of two evils.  It means that more people did not want to endorse the status quo.

Let’s face it.  Obama just won re-election in the face of a terrible economy.  This just shows that the Republican Party put up a real dud.  Aside from the general economy, the issue that Obama was the most vulnerable on was Obamacare.  Yet, how could this be legitimately challenged by the inventor of Obamacare?  There are two Americans who have signed legislation to mandate the purchase of health insurance and those two people happened to be the main choices for president.

To be fair to Romney, I don’t think most of the other Republican candidates would have faired better.  Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain, and Santorum all would have lost, and probably even worse.  Perry might have had a shot if he had improved his debate skills.  Ron Paul would have had a chance at beating Obama too, but the Republican establishment would pick Obama over Paul any day.

So we will have four more years of Obama.  This may seem depressing, but I will give some good news about this in my next post.