It’s taken some time to mentally process the results of the election. For me, this election was a bit of a shame. Not because California failed to become the first state to legalize marijuana. Not because Christian activists were able to convince Iowans to oust judges. Not even because Iowa City’s 21-only ordinance failed to be overturned.

This election was awfully dreary for me because the only candidate to run on an “I’m not a witch” platform, Christine O’Donnell, failed to get elected.

It takes a certain kind of honesty to put yourself in the public eye and state your religious beliefs like O’Donnell did. She could have just said that she was an evangelical Christian and called it a day, but she took that extra step to separate herself from the school of witchcraft and wizardry. This is like the kind of transparency of government that the American people voted for in the 2008 presidential elections and have for the most part failed to get.

While government raw data is now available on Data.gov and Obama’s very recent Controlled Unclassified Information policy has rescinded Bush-era policy based on secrecy, I still am unsure if Harry Reid is currently or has in the past been a dabbler in witchcraft.

With this cloak of invisibility that shrouds most of the federal government, Americans have been left to speculate what the government is up to. Are they torturing terror suspects? Are they tapping my phone line because I checked out a book about al-Qaida from the public library? Do they have secret ties to the Ministry of Magic? We just don’t know.

So then where does this leave us? What I propose is not a witch hunt. If I learned anything from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” it’s these two things: Daniel Day-Lewis plays a much better oil baron than a witch, and witch hunts are only really good at finding people who aren’t witches. What I propose is implementing a government-wide system based on the highly scientific nomenclatures used by the Harry Potter series.

Take Lisa Murkowski from Alaska for example. To beat Joe Miller and be elected to the Senate as a write-in candidate, the first since Strom Thurmond in 1954, she has to at least be a half-blood witch. The distinct similarity between Murkowski’s write-in ballot and Harry Potter’s mysterious entrance to the Triwizard Tournament could also suggest that she is a pure-blood.

Then you have Sharron Angle of Nevada. There is no mistaking Angle for a witch. With an 11-point lead over Harry Reid coming out of the primaries, Angle managed to lose by more than 5 percent of the vote. This would place her safely in the world of muggles.

With O’Donnell, you obviously have a non-witch. She has time and time again showed ineptitude, whether it’s knowing what is in the Constitution, a basic cornerstone of the tea party, or her understanding of onanism. Her previous inference that she dabbled in witchcraft further puts her in with the undesirable company of Argus Filch. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, O’Donnell is a squib.

Maybe these ties to witchcraft are a bit convoluted, but after such a sound defeat of issues that I feel strongly about, it sure has been easy to get obsessed with the upcoming premiere of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.” Maybe I’m just happy that there’s something to look forward to besides a lame-duck presidency and more tax cuts for the wealthy.

If there’s any kind of sign that the future will get better, it’s going to be found in crowds of Ron Weasley and Harry Potter look alikes outside movie theaters on Thursday night.