The 4th what? District? Where the hell is that? I've lived here most of my life and never heard of a 4th District. The city is divided into named districts. Even for our garbage/recycling.

Depends. My 100 (ok, I exaggerate. It's 99) year old house has, um a 175A panel and all modern wiring. Cost me $6k, took an electrician about a week, done just before we moved in (we'd expected it, and it means our insurance rate is low, too). It's got blown in insulation, done before I bought it, but essentially the same as my neighbor's 10yo house. And single-pane windows aren't that much worse than double on an old house. Unlike a modern house, they are generally inset about 4 inches. This isn't just aesthetic - there's a boundary layer that gets trapped, even in high winds, which is not the case with modern flush windows. Yeah, that's what those "cute" sills and frames are for - they're actually functional. More heat is lost to convection than to radiation, so don't put too much stock in your infrared pix. People weren't stupid 100 years ago, or even 1000 years ago. Oh, and cooling? Hah. Don't need aircon. Double-hung windows have a purpose, again it's not just aesthetics. Open both top and bottom, and the hot air goes out the top, sucking cool air in the bottom. You won't get better than outside ambient air temp, but that's usually adequate in the Pacific NW. And you get a constant air recirc and breeze,*even in a room with only the window open. Bliss. And I could go on about the gallery design of such houses.

Unlike my neighbor (10yo house again), I don't have mold growing on the drywall in my basement, the foundation's quite done settling, and my 1953 GE gas furnace, while not as efficient as his THIRD furnace, is definitely more reliable. With a programmable thermostat, my costs are low. I did have to replace a thermocouple once ($25). But I'm pretty sure, if you include the various replacements/tinkering he's had to do, it's WAY cheaper to run, even if it uses more gas.

Downsides: plaster walls. Hate em. Hard to put holes in. Hard to fix. Though they kill sound better than drywall. Erm, that's about it. I definitely spend less time and effort on repairs than my neighbors. But the, say, $10k and 2 weeks I paid/took to bring it up to code was much less than the price differential between it and a new house.

As an aside, most (not all) houses build during and after WWII, say to 1955 or so, suck really bad. The build quality and materials are significantly inferior to early 1900's houses, or to modern houses. They do tend to be leaky, drafty, and have all sorts of terrible engineering (flush, metal pane windows, leaky cripple walls, etc).

Plain English? Have you ever heard any of our leaders speak in plain English? Well, they can't understand it, either.

Because it's infeasible; in the US, generally all elections occur on the same day: federal, state, county, city, etc.. There may be fifteen presidential candidates (though you only hear of two or three), three senatorial candidates, two representative candidates, and so forth, for perhaps 30 or 40 offices. Judges, for example, are often elected, sometimes the head of law enforcement for the area (sheriff) is elected, various minor officials e.g. head of waterworks may be elected. This varies by region.

It's important to emphasize that the federal government does NOT run the election in any way; it's managed by individual states, even for federal offices. The reasons are historical.

There is a often also a referendum or three, to pass/repeal a law, there are measures to raise taxes to fund schools, emergency services. Why these often aren't directly government-funded, but are instead funded by locally levied taxes, is a long and tedious story. Suffice it to say, that's how it's done, it's not changing soon. Except, of course, there are some states that do it differently.

In other words, one of the biggest problems is that there are so many regional exceptions, any system has to be very flexible to accommodate the needs of 50 states, each of which is divided into multiple districts, each with their own particular needs or systems.

Each state, (sometimes subdivisions in each state) has different methods for doing all of these things.

When all is said and done, there can often be fifteen pages or more of choices to make.

Using the the 'X in the box' system would mean a ballot that was probably 50 pages long, and hand counting would be slow and tedious. Some states use optically scanned ballots with circles which are filled in by hand, but these confuse the same people who were confused by them in school.

In some states, using mechanical (and now electronic) machines, you can simply select the party of your choice, and vote for all of their candidates at once; but you still need to decide on positions (e.g. judges and commissioners) which are technically non-partisan, and so forth.

I'm not saying it makes sense, or that the system doesn't badly need reform, but at the moment that's pretty much the way things are. Electronic voting is the latest way to try and mitigate these issues. It's just being implemented very poorly.