It's election time in Romania: we're choosing our members of parliament next week. For the first time we're voting directly for individuals instead of party lists and the streets are full of banners with huge pictures of candidates.

I don't follow local news much, but prominent local bloggers are mounting an awareness campaign, trying to get people to think about whether they should vote, and digging up publicly available information about candidates. The general mood is that poilticians are corrupt thieves but they can't all be equally bad. Some people think "what's the point in voting?"; I say, take a look and pick the lesser evil, it's the only way to make things better.