19 minutes left to vote

[solarbird]

Voted today; walked to the polling station. This'll be one of the last times I do that, as King County is going all-mail in 2007. I have generally been opposed to this, as well as to electronic (touchscreen) voting, but with one positive exception: you have an absolute, unavoidable paper trail. To wit: yay!

Today I have another reason for being for it. They had an example touchscreen in the polling place for what they'd go to otherwise. It's a... wait for it...

Diebold touchscreen.

Of course. To wit: fuck no, and I repeat, fuck no. No easily-hackable, trivially openable, 30-second reprogrammable, malfunctioning, vote-shifting, built-for-fraud Diebold machines, period. So yay, going to mail-only balloting, I guess. Personally, I like the old-school fill-in-the-oval paper system we have now. It works just fine.

Turnout is very low. I suspect a few of the fundamentalist asshat judicial slate will get in as a result. To wit: dammit. But it'll be a while until we know, most of the ballots expected to be cast are expected to be cast via paper mail.

Today's (Tuesday's) Miles: 2.5
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1325.2
Miles out of Rivendell: 860.2
Miles out of Lothlórien: 405.2
Miles to Rauros Falls: 3.8

Yes, the walk to the polling station and back was rather tiring. But here I am, there and back again. And I even took my backpack (with a jacket and umbrella in it in case it got rainy and such) so I even had some cargo with me, making things heavier. And since I figured out I was holding my shoulder to avoid excruciating pain no longer there and stopped doing that, it's been hurting less. Go fig.

A couple of more articles that I didn't include in my previous post because I already had four and these aren't as to the point (click through for full articles):

[Canadian computer engineer] Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found. O'Connor concluded that "categorically there is no evidence" that Arar did anything wrong or was a security threat.

Another version in another paper:

OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

If you're for the kind of routine torture the President wants, this is what you're supporting. There's plenty of fault on the Canadian side in this, but it was the US who shipped him off to torturetown.

I'll end on a flower picture, to cleanse the palette:


Teacup Rose and Wall

Comments

[aerialscribe.livejournal.com]

Why don't you like mail-in voting? I am curious because you imply that above.

[aerialscribe.livejournal.com]

Oh and also....while King County might not officially go all mail-in balloting until 2007...one of the main reasons they decided to do that is because 4/5 of King County's population is *already* mailing in their ballots.

So, while voter turn-out might appear low in a polling booth, it might not be as bad as you fear.

[dpawtows.livejournal.com]

With mail-in, it is quite trivial to sell one's vote.

[solarbird]

Or hell, you don't even need "buying." It becomes trivial to "help" people - say, elderly people - fill out their ballots with whatever choices you want.

It's not as bad as the Diebold solution, but it's a step down.

[solarbird]

In addition to the comments made here by dpawtows, it becomes very easy for one person to apply pressure to another in a household situation to vote the way they want instead of the way you want. Guaranteed secrecy of ballot is, essentially, ended.

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

I have very little doubt that, if mail-in (or at-home online) voting had existed in the 80's, my Dad would have "helped" Daniel and I, so that we didn't 'accidentally' vote for the 'wrong' candidate. And patted himself on the back for being patriotic.

[aerialscribe.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I understand what dpawtows means by "sell one's vote."

As for household pressure to change a vote...I can't imagine that being a *huge* factor. How many righ-wing fundamentalist nut jobs are living in the same household as left-wing crunchy granola hippies? Anyone who's gonna apply that much pressure to a household member is going to be doing it whether they have the vote in their hands at home or as they walk up to the polling station.

Seems to me that the bigger concern is any kind of vote tampering once it has left our hands -- whether that be through the mail, in the ballot box, or in the electronic mystererious cyber space. Really if there are factions in the government that want to tamper with the vote, they'll find a way to do it whether it's on paper or not.

[solarbird]

Not just selling. See other comments to this same post, there are several objections being discussed here.

[dpawtows.livejournal.com]

Here's an example of how it could be done:
I'll go rent an office in downtown Seattle somewhere. I'll pay $X per ballot if folks come in and give me their signed ballots&envelopes, but WITHOUT marking up any candidate selections.

I can also see various social & religious groups that ask one to prove one's loyalty by telling members to fill out & seal their ballot envelopes at a meeting where it can be guaranteed that everybody follows the party line.

[mathmuffin.livejournal.com]

We have the no-paper-trail Diebold touchscreen machines here in Maryland and last week's primary election was a mess in a couple of places. In Baltimore the polls opened three hours late due to trouble getting the machines to work, so morning voters missed out. In Montgomery County (the richest county in Maryland) the Board of Elections forgot to ship the voter access cards with the voting machines so the machines were unusable and people had to vote on paper provisional ballots. I think there was some trouble in Prince George's County too. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/12/AR2006091200535.html
for an article. The machines seemed to work fine here in Howard County, but with those machines, there is no way to be certain that they did.

Erin Schram

[solarbird]

Yes, I had read about that. As I said, the machines are essentially built for fraud and election-rigging. It's an abomination.

[solarbird]

These are the versions with paper copies, but honestly, what does that even mean? At best, you'd only find differences in the case of a hand-recount, even assuming they print correctly to match what they're recording in the digital storage bank - something I would not assume at first glance, particularly not with repeated instances of Diebold employees coming in and making unauthorised software mods to the machines.

These machines are a disaster in the purest form and Diebold should be in serious trouble about now, but, well, big contributers to and supporters of the ruling party, and that's all that matters now.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I also dislike mail-in voting, except for the paper trail it creates. It just seems very easy to stuff ballots or otherwise game the system (say, by an employer or church or family member applying pressure for everyone to vote the same). It's also at odds with the collective civil virtue and ritual of voting in person. I've voted by mail once or twice, and each time I felt like my vote was less likely to be counted. I realize some of these reasons, but not all, are irrational.

As for electronic voting, I was appalled that they had the option at our voting place. The first thing out of the poll worker's mouth was a question as to which method I wanted to use. I chose paper, of course. It really irritates me that they're considering using electronic voting--Diebold in particular--anywhere.

We need to keep our current paper system that uses computer tallying for convenience, but with the official count being a handcount. In Canada and the UK, which both largely use hand counted paper ballots, official results are certified faster than they are here.

As for turnout--I was voter 118, and finished voting at about 7:30 pm. When I voted in 2004 there were more than double that number of votes when I voted first thing in the morning.

[solarbird]

firni saw someone show up at the local post office with dozens of ballots at once. I connect this to the fundamentalist (Faith and Freedom Network) benignly-named "Walk for Washington" vote-collection-and-delivery effort. I expect that shortly hereafter we will start seeing "Voting Night at the Church" efforts (or something close to them) at theoconservative churches, and church volunteers will collect the ballots for delivery.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

It's a lot harder for someone to vote their conscience when their entire religious community is pressuring them to vote one way. This is leading directly to a sectarian voting system. That works so well in, say, Iraq.

[solarbird]

Not just voting system - entire social system. They have a parallel culture in... well, most things, if they want to make the effort. They can avoid the non-theocon culture entirely without working too hard. For a long time, they didn't really realise they had this around them - they just assumed that everyone was like them, or almost everyone, except for a few Secularists and Diseased Perverted Homosexuals and such who had too much power and needed to be put down. That's why the most dangerous person I heard talking about this in their movement throughout the 1990s was a guest on CWA's radio show ("Beverly LaHaye Live) circa, um, 1997?) who actually understood that and was trying to explain it to Beverly LaHaye, and how they needed to learn to talk the non-fundamentalist language to expand their influence.

She wasn't getting it at the time, and I don't remember who the guest was, but I think he (and probably some other people thinking the same way) got heard. (I seem to remember he had written a book on the subject, which is why he was on the show.)