Given the defeat of Questions 2 and 3 in Tuesday’s voting, the leaders of Biddeford and Lewiston are going to have to find a sounder economic development plan than “playing the house odds.”

Since Massachusetts and New Hampshire are planning up to nine new casinos between them, Maine’s present gambling parlors will have enough to worry about without three more on this side of the Piscataqua.

It’s unlikely all will survive. Gambling in America has always run on boom-and-bust cycles, and there are many indications nationally that this cycle is trending downward. Which casinos, if any, will be around in 2020? Place your bets now.

Turning to Question 1, if you’re going to lose, I guess it’s good to lose by a substantial margin. Getting your head handed to you by the electorate is a marvelously educational experience.

So those who still think, as I do, that the election system remains vulnerable to fraudulent voting must rethink how they might address that danger.

Is the problem real? Sure it is. A couple of weeks ago, even a former Democratic secretary of state, Matt Dunlop, admitted that Election Day registrations offered clerks no time to check out prospective voters.

And once anyone votes, there’s no way to sort out illegally cast ballots from legal ones. So how else to address ballot security?

The answer is on the table in Augusta, but after Tuesday’s vote, it will take a bit of political courage to turn to it, even if it is the right thing to do. However, if Republicans and the type of responsible Democrats who recently helped get Voter ID passed in Rhode Island act in the coming legislative session, this state can still assure the sanctity of the ballot.

Asking voters to show a valid photo ID — a driver’s license will suffice — at the polling place will help guarantee that only registered, legal voters are the ones casting the ballots they are entitled to cast.

Don’t drive? Motor Vehicle offices can offer ID cards for free. Can’t get there because of a physical problem? States with ID requirements now send out mobile teams to seniors’ residences and nursing homes to provide them.

True, some will manufacture the claim that requiring an ID somehow is aimed at minorities. As if there is some special reason that ethnicity, religion or place of residence makes it hard to acquire the kind of identification that anyone needs to operate a motor vehicle, board an airplane, visit relatives in Canada or merely cash a check.

OCCUPY THIS: The assorted philosophers, philanthropists and other benefactors of humanity who populate Occupy Wall Street have been spreading their good will and generous deeds of friendship in many cities.

Until recently, the movement was doing well in the polls — perhaps because the national media were concealing much of its sleazy side. But news of that sleaze, first reported by alternative media, is surfacing in other outlets, and the movement has been dropping in recent polling (down to a 35 percent favorable rating in a Nov. 7 UMass-Lowell/Boston Herald national poll).

True, the tea party is doing worse. But the media have covered it exactly the opposite way from the soft way it has handled OWS, so that’s not surprising — even though the tea party is thoroughly middle class and only focused on making government more affordable.

Sources for updates on OWS include the Twitter hashtag #OccupyFail and the website OwsExposed.com. Also, check out the “OWS Rap Sheet” compiled by blogger Jim Nolte at Andrew Breibart’s BigGovernment.com website. So far Nolte is up to 189 separate incidents, with such headlines as “Flier at Occupy Phoenix Asks, ‘When Should You Shoot a Cop?”‘ (Oct. 28), “Occupy Portland (Ore.) Protesters Sing ‘F— the USA”‘ (Oct. 15), “Occupy Baltimore Discourages Sexual Assault Victims from Contacting Police” (Oct. 18), “Occupy Boston Protesters Arrested for Dealing Heroin — with Six-Year-Old in Tent” (Oct. 23), and from Los Angeles, “Roundup of Overt Occupy Anti-Semitism.”

That’s not counting major riots in Oakland, Calif., and fights in many places with police and passersby (including two San Diego food cart operators whose carts were sprayed with blood and urine Nov. 7 after denying protesters free food).

Things are so bad in New York that Zuccotti Park now has a guarded tent to keep women safe from roaming rapists.

Yeah, we know, these are the acts of “outsiders” and “fringe groups.” Funny how the tea party could hold rallies with hundreds of thousands of people and never have a single run-in with police — let alone rapes.

On the lighter side, an Occupier rally in Chicago was bombarded by sheets of paper from office windows. Protesters were reported to be “outraged” when they saw what the sheets were: applications for jobs at McDonald’s.

M.D. Harmon is a retired journalist. He can be contacted at mdharmoncol@yahoo.com.