Next-to-last post on LJ
I've decided I'm moving over to Dreamwidth to restart a public blog in the next 2-3 months. I'll post the address once I've actually created the account. It'll be at least a few weeks. Right now I'm getting over a sinus infection, next week is packed with audits and three new projects at work, next weekend I'm flying to Seattle for a venture capital conference, and the week after that I'll be in Pomona for Thanksgiving.
I took this whole week off from my regular job to spend Monday through Wednesday of this week serving as an election judge for Adams County. Monday was 10 hours of setup, Tuesday was 20 hours of running around making sure operations were running smoothly, and Wednesday was 6 hours of takedown. I got 11 hours of sleep in those 3 days, hence my being sick. It was pretty intense; nobody at our voting center had any experience, but there were two phones (a land line and a county-issued mobile) with direct lines to the "War Room" staffed with two dozen election law experts who answered all the questions for the 46 voting centers throughout the county.
Overall, my pessimistic/fearful expectations were pretty far off. Our only behavioral issues were that the Republican poll watchers tried several times to interact with voters, and the Democratic poll watchers kept trying to ask the judges questions. (The watchers are only supposed to interact with the supervisor judge when inside the polling facility.) You have to figure you're doing something right when your biggest issues are with the people who are there to make sure there are no issues.
I also have no worries now about the voting machines Adams County uses. I don't think I could explain all the checks and logs and inspections we go through in less than 45 minutes, and I'm pretty tired. The TL;DR is that would take an extraordinarily large, cross-party conspiracy to tamper with even one machine. As a voter votes, a copy is printed behind a glass barrier for the voter to inspect; this is kept with the print cartridge and shipped back to the county. We also print two more copies of the final tally. One is placed on the windows of the voting facility for about a week following the election, and one is wrapped around the machine's memory card and put inside a sealed bag by at least three judges, no more than two of whom can share a political party. We first go with the contents of the memory card for speed in counting, but if margins are closer than a certain amount determined by state law, or if a candidate or the Secretary of State challenges the results, we go with the paper copy inspected by the voters at the time of voting rather than what's in the memory card.
So, I'm not worried about how we do voting machines here. That's not to say all voting machines are awesome. Last-minute software patches in Ohio? Yeah, shady as fuck. Antivirus software and internet connectivity? You fail at life. But Colorado is good.
As far as the results, I'm very pleased with the presidential and Senate results, and MD/WA legalizing gay marriage and CO/WA legalizing marijuana were icing on the cake. More women in the senate than ever before too; I'm less impressed with that (20% is still pathetically low), but any improvement is undeniably good. I wasn't too surprised at the results, though - Nate Silver successfully predicted all but one state in the 2008 elections, and got every single one right this time around. It's all statistical models (unless, of course, he's a witch). If you don't have any interest in applied statistics, I won't bore you with the details. But if you do, check out his blog. He's a very skillful and lucid explainer of why he picks the models he does, and how they work.
I'd like to believe that the election results were because US voters are finally coming around to the ideas that we ought to care for one another, and let all people love each other the way they want to, and stop feeding the monstrous for-profit prison industry, but I don't. I do think US voters are shifting to think all these things, but the reality of campaigning is that the victor belongs to whichever party has maximal ad penetration combined with the more comprehensive, more organized ground campaign.
Case in point: Breitbart (not a credible source on many things) quotes a Romney campaign insider who blames Orca, a disastrously malfunctioning smartphone app, for get-out-the-vote failures in, among other places, Colorado. This app would supposedly work by having Republican poll watchers stand at the greeter judge station and listen for voters giving their names, then check them off on a database in their phones. This app never worked at all in Colorado (oops). But there's more. Many county clerks in Colorado prohibited smartphones and other recording devices from all their voting centers (double oops). Most damning, Colorado voters who (1) come to vote in person (2) without the card that was mailed to them by the county clerk fill out a form with all their information, rather than giving it verbally to election judges. Since Orca relies on poll watchers overhearing names, it wouldn't have accomplished anything in Colorado even if it worked and were allowed. This wouldn't have affected the outcome of the election. But as I told my old cryptography professor on Facebook, Romney may have lost Colorado, at least, because of his campaign's top-down, copy-and-paste approach to local politics. The Democrats won, not because more people agreed with their principles (though I think that is true for at least some results in CO), but because Democratic campaigns were more organized and actually got people to vote.
That's a big problem. And my friend Z and I have a big idea to fix it, hence the venture capital conference next weekend. (Totally off topic, but Z claims Washington only legalized gay marriage and marijuana usage to distract the world from the fact that Twilight happened there.) I'll share more when I can.
Until then, I'm going to politely decline to smoke a joint, because that shit is kind of nasty, and celebrate this week's victories for all my non-heteronormative friends.
I took this whole week off from my regular job to spend Monday through Wednesday of this week serving as an election judge for Adams County. Monday was 10 hours of setup, Tuesday was 20 hours of running around making sure operations were running smoothly, and Wednesday was 6 hours of takedown. I got 11 hours of sleep in those 3 days, hence my being sick. It was pretty intense; nobody at our voting center had any experience, but there were two phones (a land line and a county-issued mobile) with direct lines to the "War Room" staffed with two dozen election law experts who answered all the questions for the 46 voting centers throughout the county.
Overall, my pessimistic/fearful expectations were pretty far off. Our only behavioral issues were that the Republican poll watchers tried several times to interact with voters, and the Democratic poll watchers kept trying to ask the judges questions. (The watchers are only supposed to interact with the supervisor judge when inside the polling facility.) You have to figure you're doing something right when your biggest issues are with the people who are there to make sure there are no issues.
I also have no worries now about the voting machines Adams County uses. I don't think I could explain all the checks and logs and inspections we go through in less than 45 minutes, and I'm pretty tired. The TL;DR is that would take an extraordinarily large, cross-party conspiracy to tamper with even one machine. As a voter votes, a copy is printed behind a glass barrier for the voter to inspect; this is kept with the print cartridge and shipped back to the county. We also print two more copies of the final tally. One is placed on the windows of the voting facility for about a week following the election, and one is wrapped around the machine's memory card and put inside a sealed bag by at least three judges, no more than two of whom can share a political party. We first go with the contents of the memory card for speed in counting, but if margins are closer than a certain amount determined by state law, or if a candidate or the Secretary of State challenges the results, we go with the paper copy inspected by the voters at the time of voting rather than what's in the memory card.
So, I'm not worried about how we do voting machines here. That's not to say all voting machines are awesome. Last-minute software patches in Ohio? Yeah, shady as fuck. Antivirus software and internet connectivity? You fail at life. But Colorado is good.
As far as the results, I'm very pleased with the presidential and Senate results, and MD/WA legalizing gay marriage and CO/WA legalizing marijuana were icing on the cake. More women in the senate than ever before too; I'm less impressed with that (20% is still pathetically low), but any improvement is undeniably good. I wasn't too surprised at the results, though - Nate Silver successfully predicted all but one state in the 2008 elections, and got every single one right this time around. It's all statistical models (unless, of course, he's a witch). If you don't have any interest in applied statistics, I won't bore you with the details. But if you do, check out his blog. He's a very skillful and lucid explainer of why he picks the models he does, and how they work.
I'd like to believe that the election results were because US voters are finally coming around to the ideas that we ought to care for one another, and let all people love each other the way they want to, and stop feeding the monstrous for-profit prison industry, but I don't. I do think US voters are shifting to think all these things, but the reality of campaigning is that the victor belongs to whichever party has maximal ad penetration combined with the more comprehensive, more organized ground campaign.
Case in point: Breitbart (not a credible source on many things) quotes a Romney campaign insider who blames Orca, a disastrously malfunctioning smartphone app, for get-out-the-vote failures in, among other places, Colorado. This app would supposedly work by having Republican poll watchers stand at the greeter judge station and listen for voters giving their names, then check them off on a database in their phones. This app never worked at all in Colorado (oops). But there's more. Many county clerks in Colorado prohibited smartphones and other recording devices from all their voting centers (double oops). Most damning, Colorado voters who (1) come to vote in person (2) without the card that was mailed to them by the county clerk fill out a form with all their information, rather than giving it verbally to election judges. Since Orca relies on poll watchers overhearing names, it wouldn't have accomplished anything in Colorado even if it worked and were allowed. This wouldn't have affected the outcome of the election. But as I told my old cryptography professor on Facebook, Romney may have lost Colorado, at least, because of his campaign's top-down, copy-and-paste approach to local politics. The Democrats won, not because more people agreed with their principles (though I think that is true for at least some results in CO), but because Democratic campaigns were more organized and actually got people to vote.
That's a big problem. And my friend Z and I have a big idea to fix it, hence the venture capital conference next weekend. (Totally off topic, but Z claims Washington only legalized gay marriage and marijuana usage to distract the world from the fact that Twilight happened there.) I'll share more when I can.
Until then, I'm going to politely decline to smoke a joint, because that shit is kind of nasty, and celebrate this week's victories for all my non-heteronormative friends.