TAKOMA PARK, Md.--Kurt Vonnegut handily won the 2007 Takoma Park Straw Poll, taking two out of three ballots.

"He may be dead, but think about it: Wouldn't a dead man as president be better than what we've got now?" asked Rickee of the Redwoods. "I would've voted for Jack, but he's getting a lot of press these days with the new edition of his book and all, so I thought it would be more fair to vote for Kurt."

Jack Kerouac took the final vote in the poll, finishing with an impressive 33 percent--better than Mitt Romney's feeble 32 percent "winning" total in the somewhat better-known Iowa Straw Poll.

"I've voted for Jack every year since 1971," said a long-time Takoma Park resident who claimed he forgot his name a few years ago after dropping three LSD tabs a day for three weeks. "I may not know my name, but I never forget to vote for Jack."

Apparently he did forget that no one bothered to vote in the 1983 and 1987 Polls.

"The Reagan years were total bummers," said an attendee who asked to be identified only as "the real doobie brother."

Prius Edelman, a 17-year-old rising senior at Montgomery Blair High School, said he voted for Vonnegut by accident. He said he'd intended to vote for Elric of Melnibone, the fictional albino warrior who has appeared in countless fantasy books written by Michael Moorcock. Somehow, he said, he got the names confused. "There's a lot of second-hand smoke going on here, if you know what I mean."

The Takoma Park Straw Poll has a long and somewhat hazy history. The first poll took place in 1963, and it was then that the organizers inaugurated the now-famous tradition that only non-living people (either dead or fictional) were allowed to participate. Gandalf the Grey defeated Gandalf the White by a margin of three votes to two in the historic first ballot.

In fact, those five ballots cast in 1963 were the second-most ever cast in a single event. Samwise Gamgee scored two votes in his 1967 win, and Jack Kerouac began an impressive run of three consecutive wins with ballot totals of one, two and one in 1971, 1975 and 1979 respectively. As noted earlier, no one voted in the next two events, but 1991 saw a resurgence in balloting as Yoda's two votes knocked off Ronald Reagan and Kerouac's single tallies.

"The vote for Reagan was allowed because, as everyone knows, he was a fictional character," said Suzy Creamcheese, a longtime poll organizer who said that she has cast but one vote--for Frank Zappa, who swept to victory in 1995 with a resounding 2-1 victory over Kerouac.

The year of highest balloting interest was 1999, when recently-deceased Allan Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs tied 3-3. Kerouac claimed the seventh ballot.

"The politicking that year was just hideous," Creamcheese said. "There were actually a couple of guys walking around and asking people to vote. Years of tradition almost melted away before my eyes. But then I popped another tab."

The 2003 Poll attracted the usual crowd of about a hundred. Two people bothered to turn in ballots, with Burroughs and Kerouac each getting one nod.

"That was more like the old days," said a spry older man who said his name was Jack Sprat. "It's much more fun to just hang out and experience people than it is to actually vote."

This year's event was the first to take place out of Takoma Park proper, setting up shop in the Electrik Maid community space in Takoma, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., that directly adjoins Takoma Park. Organizers credited the new digs with helping to attract the nearly 150 people in attendance.

The "Old Town Takoma in the house" call rang out a couple of times, receiving a murmur of support each time--which was something of an earthquake considering the extremely relaxed atmosphere.

"We're not here to do anything," said Creamcheese. "This is just our way of, well, I don't know, having fun or something."

Vonnegut is considered a strong contender for the 2011 Poll, though it remains to be seen whether he will have the staying power of Kerouac.

"Vonnegut used regular paper," said the man with no name. "Kerouac wrote 'On the Road' on a scroll, man. Think about it. The Dead Sea Scrolls were on scrolls. The Jews wrote the Bible on scrolls. If you want to write something important, you write it on a scroll. If the Constitution were written on a scroll, then jerks like Scalia wouldn't dare mess with it. Scrolls are power, man."

The man immediately sank back into his chair and didn't move until organizers turned on the lights at two in the morning and quietly informed Poll-goers that it was time to vacate the Electrik Maid. They shuffled out the door smiling quietly, perhaps happy to know that they had done their part to keep democracy alive.

Jon Worley would have voted for Eldridge Cleaver.