You can't win it, if you don't vote in it!

This is what we need to do: encourage more people to vote because of personal gain instead of a sense of civic responsibility. I'm sure these new voters will research the issues and candidates carefully, too.

As an aside, someone should let Randal know that there is a great deal of lightning in Arizona, which is why The University of Arizona has one of the bigger atmo-sci departments in the country.

If the general election in 2004 is a guide, when more than 2 million people voted, the 1-in-2-million odds of winning the election lottery would be far better than the Powerball jackpot (currently about 1 in 146,107,962) but not nearly as great as dying from a lightning strike (1 in 55,928).

“People buy a lot of lottery tickets now,” Mr. Osterloh said, “and the odds of winning this are much, much higher.” (And most of the time there is not much lightning in Arizona.)