Hungry Blues

Though electronic voting issues are not the ones I consider most important, I have been trying to understand them. Going from immersion in Civil Rights Movement history to reading about voting technology and exit polls is like waking from dreams of a more perfect democracy to swirling wisps of anecdote and statistical analysis. Civil Rights Movement history has everything to do with our current concerns about voting, but today it's not my focus. Instead, I'm a little more concerned with simply following and understanding the news. Many of the developments are about technology and statistics and are shot through with quotes from academic experts. It can be difficult to keep a handle on the sound bite versions of lengthy studies. Sometimes I wish I had Morpheus from The Matrix to hand me a red pill and guide me to truth.

To help sort things out, I'm going to look at some of the analysts and studies, especially the oft-cited Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, but let's start with some not so recent news.

Bev Harris, Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne uncovered a major election fraud story more than a week ago, and nobody in the mainstream press seems to care. Harris reported their findings in Volusia County on Tuesday night, November 16. There has been minimal coverage in Florida newspapers (here, here, here, and (a good editorial) here) and none as of yet in a newspaper with national circulation. Thom Hartmann at the progressive news website Common Dreams is the only nationally syndicated journalist who is actually reporting the details.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable.

"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud."

That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."

You should read the whole thing and listen to the audio of Hartmann's interview with Harris (though his writing is superior to his interviewing style).

Until there's more coverage of this story, Hartmann's somewhat sensationalistic tones (though with material like this, what's sensational?) test the validity of Keith Olbermann's well-documented dismissal of claims that the media is ignoring election fraud stories. Nonetheless, you have to appreciate Olbermann's healthy blend of skepticism and a genuine, hard-nosed truth-seeking. His Bloggerman posts tend to include a good blend of media analysis and round ups of news about election problems. To his credit, Olbermann looks beyond possible election hacking scandals to other things as well, like the problems with provisional ballots and unreasonably high undervote numbers in Ohio.

Though Olbermann is covering a range election problems, his examples of other coverage in the mainstream press are primarily around machine failures and possible tampering. These stories, while undeniably urgent, appeal to our 21st century Matrix-inspired paranoia that the whole system is an illusion. As long as electronic voting technologies are not transparent and verifiable, such paranoia is well founded. But if journalists and activists only get as far as waking the general public to the need for DREs with paper trails and open source software, then their consciousness-expanding red pill is really the blue pill Morpheus offered Neo: if you take it, "the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe," but your elections are no closer to being democratic.

This is why the organization Demos, which has a broader agenda than Harris' Black Box Voting (and more measured tones), is "concerned that a preoccupation with whether the vote was hacked will detract attention from some of the very real problems that plagued Election 2004." Here's the Demos Election 2004 post-mortem on Ohio and Florida:

In Ohio, election officials have started counting the 155,337 provisional ballots cast in that swing state.  On November 10 -- their first day of wading through a total of 24,788 provisional ballots -- officials in Cuyahoga County said they found 1,749 valid and 917 invalid ones.  But most counties are not keeping, or at least publicly disclosing, a running tally of the provisional ballots being counted.  It is unlikely that we will know how many of these votes will actually count until December 1, the official date for certifying Ohio's election results. 

Meanwhile, reports from Florida suggest that the majority of provisional ballots cast in that state have been rejected -- many cast by people voting in the wrong precinct. "I was not happy with rejecting the ballots of those people who went to all the trouble to register, went to the polls and went through all the other hoopla and then, because they voted in precinct 1028 instead of 1064, their vote didn't count," said Judge Barry Cohen, Chair of the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board.  "The law is clear, but the law is not right," he said.  Florida Senator Robert Klein concurred.  "We're in a computer age. You should be able to vote in any precinct," he said. "We're acting like we're in the dark ages because we can't overcome technology issues. To me this is elementary computer technology. These things can easily be fixed."

And here's the Demos short-list of serious problems in those two states and elsewhere:

1.      Long lines at the polls -- waits of 3-5 hours in Ohio were not uncommon -- which effectively disenfranchised many people. 

2.      A shortage of voting machines, which exacerbated delays at the polls.

3.      Absentee ballots that were never received by thousands of voters.

4.      Problems with voters being erroneously purged from the rolls.

5.      Differential standards for voter ID, and for accepting voter registrations and provisional ballots.

6.      Persistent attempts at voter intimidation and suppression.

Yet in their vehemence to keep us focused on problems that lie outside the technological, Demos gets vertiginously close to falling back into the Matrix. Their able minded Neo who would lead them out is actually the shape shifting agent of the Matrix, Mr. Smith. To support their position, Demos tells us

a new report on Election 2004 by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project [pdf] concludes that, "there is no evidence that electronic voting machines were used to steal the 2004 election for George Bush. The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet appear to be selectively chosen to make the point. Much of that analysis appears to rest on early exit poll results, which were bound to be highly volatile, given the nature of exit poll methodology."

The folks at Demos would do well to read the rebuttals to the Caltech/MIT report (here and here). More to the point, the folks at Demos should take a look at the 2001 final report [pdf 652KB] of Florida Governor Jeb Bush's Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, Standards and Technology, which led to the electoral reforms Florida undertook after the debacle of the 2000 election. One of the recommendations of that report is that Florida counties adopt optical scan voting machines as a uniform technology throughout the state. The chief basis for the Task Force recommendation is none other than an earlier report by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project [pdf 44KB], which found that optical scan voting machines have "the best average performance of the newer methods." Scrutiny of Florida's 2004 election returns by Kathy Dopp has left many observers wondering if Florida's optical scan machines were hacked. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project might be feeling a little defensive right now.

If I sound a little glib, then it may be worth burrowing a little deeper down the rabbit-hole. On the one hand, the Florida Task Force report overstates the strength of the Caltech/MIT preference for optical scan technology. On the other hand, the problem is not what machines they recommend but that their focus is so narrowly limited to a single aspect of technological function. While their research is valuable, and has been the basis of an important study at Harvard, it only evaluates the integrity of optical scan and DRE voting machines from the standpoint of observable ballot spoilage (ballots cast but not counted). As the Harvard study has shown, the spoilage data call into question the integrity of our democracy. But this data does not tell us what we need to know about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

While the Caltech/MIT report acknowledges that the ballot spoilage rate for "electronic devices is forty to seventy percent higher than the incidence of residual votes [i.e., spoiled ballots] with the other technologies," such as the older lever machines, the researchers believe that the differences in machine performance

reflect how people relate to the technologies, more than actual machine failures. State and federal voting machine certification tolerate very low machine failure rates: no more than 1 in 250,000 ballots for federal certification and no more than 1 in 1,000,000 ballots in some states. Certification serves as an important screen: machines that produce failure rates higher than these tolerance levels are not certified or used. We believe that human factors drive much of the “error” in voting, because the observed differences in residual voting rates that are attributable to machine types are on the order of 1 to 2 out of 100 ballots cast. Given the stringent testing standards for machinery in use, these differences are unlikely to arise from mechanical failures. (17)

In other words: See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

There is ample evidence that both optical scan and DRE machines are subject to failures that are not detectable by the current testing standards. EllenTheisen of VotersUnite.org has carefully researched the role of the ballot definition file (BDF), essential for every election, which is never subjected to outside review:

BDFs are unique for each election and define all the races and candidates for each precinct. BDFs tell the voting machine software how to interpret a voter's touches on a screen or marks on an optical scan ballot (including absentee ballots), how to record those selections as votes, and how to combine them into the final tally.

Programming election data is a very complex process, especially in counties with hundreds of different ballot styles, and a single error can jeopardize the outcome of an election. Some election districts lack the technical expertise to prepare BDFs, and instead depend on the vendor or outside programmers for the preparation. Others prepare the BDFs themselves. In both cases, however, BDFs undergo very little testing and no independent audit before being used to determine the results of an election. Little wonder that many serious election disruptions have been caused by ballot definition errors. Other BDF errors have probably gone unnoticed, and some may have affected election outcomes. . . .

If BDFs are flawed, a hand recount of the original ballots is the only way to detect the error. Recounting optical scan ballots by running them through an optical scanner a second time typically shows the same results as the initial tally. But recounts cannot be conducted for DRE systems, because there are no original ballots to recount.

Accurate election results require accurate BDFs. Some counties have hundreds of ballot styles, and each one must be programmed correctly since a human error in any definition could be magnified by the number of voters using that ballot.

Pre-election testing is completely inadequate. Optical scanners are tested by running a small set of test ballots —hardly enough to test every possible combination for every ballot style. Testing on DREs may involve simply pressing each button on the screen to make sure they all work correctly. Testing has failed to detect the many election data errors that have disrupted many optical scan elections. If an error occurs during an election, new data is created and used to tally the final result, but there is no way of knowing if the new data is correct.

The extreme complexity of election definition data, the complete lack of security procedures used to create them, the hopelessly inadequate testing: these problems raise serious questions about the accuracy of electronic vote counting — on both DREs and optical scanners.

Furthermore, in order to ensure the accuracy of ballot data, an independent review must be performed on every BDF for every election in every voting district for as many years as the machines are in use. Since each election-specific BDF is created immediately before each election, both the time constraints and the costs are significant. (emphasis in original)

One might want to allow that the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project came out with its report in 2001 and Theisen's work came out just this year. But Theisen's study, and other documentation of flaws in electronic voting machines, seem to have had little influence on the recent work of the Voting Technology Project. In September, as we approached this year's election, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project came out with an "Online petition for American voters." It reads:

We, American election workers, election supply vendors, voting technology researchers and advocates have worked hard for the last 4 years to improve election accuracy, integrity and security. We are convinced that there is no precinct in America now that has not put effort into making their voting technology and process more careful and transparent than in the past. Most of the worst technologies have been replaced. Where they have not new processes arein [sic] place to help ameliorate problems.

Our public debate shows that none of us think the job is done, still, we all believe it is the best it has ever been. While we expect and work to uncover problems, we are convinced that the crucial work for all of us now is to turn out and vote. Work with us to make this the greatest turnout voting year in the history of America.

As far as the Caltech/MIT folks are concerned, the broken system has been fixed—not perfectly, but pretty well: the observable problems that led to public concern after the elections in 2000 were all technological and were therefore easily remedied by changes in equipment. According to these scientists, the largest problem is not the integrity of the system, but that the voters screw up because they don't have confidence in the available technology. The main thing, therefore, is to shut away our fears and turn out and vote.

Scientists who study the internal security mechanisms of the software, rather than the externally observable failure rates, have been singing a different tune. In the week before election day, Avi Rubin, the first computer scientist to gain access to the Diebold proprietary (i.e., secret) source code, sounded this alarm:

Technical glitches and malfunctioning machines - the kinds of problems that occur with any computer system - could result in the loss of votes in unrecoverable ways. Worse, these fully electronic machines could be rigged - undetectably, because of the complexity of the software that runs them.

While we can never eliminate the possibility of tampering with elections, the impact of an attack on a DRE system would likely be more serious than the results of tampering with traditional mechanical voting machines or paper-based systems, such as optically scanned ballots. This is because a bug in the software of an electronic voting system, whether accidental or intentional, has the potential to skew results in more than an isolated polling place or two. It could impact the vote totals on many thousands of machines in hundreds of precincts.

While Neo uses his mind to engage in superhuman combat against programs inside the Matrix, it is both a source of power and an essential vulnerability that his mortal body is back on Morpheus' ship, the Nebudchadnezzar. As in key moments in the movie, the answer to how we can reach our desired end is a human rather than technological one. The problems with the machines that I've been discussing are not with the technology itself but with sloppy implementation. In fact, the technologies, whether lever, punch card, optical scan or DRE, are all only as good as implementation allows. According to one of the studies commissioned for the Carter-Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform, even punch card ballots—which Caltech/MIT calls the "worst" technology—can be quite reliable:

Although Los Angeles widely used the notorious punch card ballots, the city initiated an intensive voter education program in the wake of the 2000 experience and succeeded in reducing the number of residual ballots in the 2001 mayoral election to about 1 percent, down from the national average of about 2 percent the previous year. Virginia, which already had an uncounted ballot rate below the national average in 2000, also cut its level in half in 2001, largely by instituting new technology that enabled voters to verify and correct their ballot choices if necessary, even if they used punch card systems. . . .

Thus, the 2001 elections reinforce evidence that the type of voting machinery employed is not necessarily the most significant factor affecting the rate of spoiled ballots. Even the alleged main culprit of the 2000 debacle, punch card ballots, performed well when voter education efforts were undertaken in Los Angeles and when they included technology that allowed a voter to double check and correct his or her vote, as in Virginia. By contrast, only New Jersey replaced punch card machines with little apparent effect. New York City was able to improve the performance of its thirty-eight-year-old lever machines to some extent by investing in poll workers. (emphasis added)

There are potential logistical and financial challenges to implementing any of the technologies in question. Careful study is indeed necessary to determine the method(s) most practical for our needs at all levels of the electoral process, precinct, county, state and nation. It ought to be the case that what we already know about the routine malfunction of democracy in our elections—bad machine standards, wildly disproportionate rates of ballot spoilage for African Americans, voter roll purges, vote suppression, understaffed polls, poorly trained poll workers, language and accessibility barriers—would be cause for universal alarm, a declared state of emergency. As with other injustices inside our own borders, the basic problems of practicality and cost are a barrier to swift remedy, while Bush has a free hand to allocate billions of dollars and tremendous human resources for the machinery war. The 2002 Help America Vote Act was announced as a broad scale remedy, yet it has not been properly implemented or funded, and the letter of the law is being twisted to thwart the spirit of the law. Short of proper reforms, grassroots activity can go a long way towards redeeming the mechanisms of our democracy: droves of non-partisan poll watchers and citizens asking their local elections officials to implement responsible protocols for voting machine operations. The One who can destroy The Matrix is, in fact, The Many.

Check out the transcriptions from the public hearings on vote election irregularities in Ohio: here and here. Just one example:

Jerry Doyle, Franklin County:
“I voted at precinct 13, and I got there around a quarter till nine, and I didn't get out of there until about ten minutes to one. And there is a lot of, you know, my wife and I, we both went to vote, and so there is a lot of people, elderly people behind me that couldn't stand, that was in worse shape than I was, and they were not offered any assistance, and I thought that was wrong, you know. And I was there for all of that time, over four hours, and I wasn't offered any assistance, you know. And there was a lady about three, four people behind me, she was arguing on her cell phone, I guess to her employer, and she asked, she said well, I have been in this line for two hours, you know, and it looks like it is going to be another hour, and she was telling him -- I am telling you what I heard her say, you know, she was on the cell phone. And she said, I will make it up, the time I lose, no matter what, or no matter how long, I will make it up, please let me stay here, and I guess he said no, because she got very upset and she had to leave to protect her job, you know.”

If you don't see it while you're there, follow the links over to Columbus, Ohio's Neighborhood Network, which has a page with video and audio from the public hearings and video from the polls on election day.

check out Ohio's Free Press , which is providing some very good coverage of the voting problems in that state.

To better understand what the BOE [Franklin County, Ohio Board of Elections] did on Election Day, consider the following analogy. The near east side of Columbus needs four buses to move the population to the downtown business district. Each bus will move 100 people. At the start of the business day at 6:30am, there are only two buses running and another one with a dead battery. After a few hours, the third bus is put into use. Finally, towards the close of the work day at 6pm, a fourth bus is deployed. The Central Ohio Transit Authority then reports it had four buses operating by the end of the business day. What matters is not how many buses, or voting machines, were operating at the end of the day, but rather how many were there to service the people during the morning and noon rush hours.

Questions remain as to where these machines were placed and who had access to them during the day.

Pacifica reporter Evan Davis reported that a county purchasing official who was on the line with Ward Moving and Storage Company, documented only 2,741 voting machines delivered through the November 2 election day. The county’s own documents reveal that they had 2,866 “Machines Available” on Election Day. This would mean that amid the two to seven hour waits in the inner city of Columbus, at least 125 machines remained unused on Election Day. Ward holds the exclusive three-year contract to deliver voting machines in Franklin County. . . .

The Franklin County Board of Elections reported that 68 voting machines were never placed on Election Day. In addition, Franklin County BOE Director Matt Damschroder admitted on Friday, November 19, that 77 machines malfunctioned on Election Day. . . .

In precinct 1-B [of Columbus, Ohio] where there were 1,620 registered voters, a 27% increase in voter registration, the precinct had five voting machines in 2000 and only three in 2004. Where did they go? Out to Republican enclaves like Canal Winchester, where two machines were added since 2000, for a total of five to service 1,255 registered voters? Or were they re-routed to Dublin 2-G where 1,656 registered voters apparently needed six machines, twice the number of Columbus’ 1-B? . . .

In Cleveland, where a public hearing was held on Saturday, November 20, there was a different pattern of voting irregularities. These include heavily Democratic wards with abnormally low reported rates of voter turnout, three under 20%. In Precinct 6-C where Kerry beat Bush 45 votes to one, allegedly only 7.1% of the registered voters cast ballots. In precinct 13-D where Kerry received 83.8% of the vote, only 13.05% reportedly voted. In precinct 13-F where Kerry received 97.5%, the turnout was reported to be only 19.6%.

One explanation comes from Irma Olmedo, who provided the Free Press with a written statement of her activities in the heavily Hispanic ward 13, which contained the three low voter turnout precincts.

“Ohio does not have bilingual ballots and this disenfranchises many Latino voters who are not totally fluent in English . . . there were 13 poll workers at the school and none knew Spanish. Some could not even find the names of the people on the list because they couldn’t understand well when people said their names. . . . Some people put their punch card ballots in backwards when they voted and discovered that they couldn’t punch out the holes. They had not read the instructions which were in English, that they had to turn the card around in order to vote,” Olmedo stated.

Olmedo translated at precinct 13-O, where 90% of the votes were for Kerry and only 53 votes were counted. The turnout of 21% was due to the lack of Spanish instructions and the misspelling of names: “I noticed that one named Nieves was misspelled as Nieues and the pollworkers were not able to find his name, these people were told to complete a provisional ballot because their names were not on the list.”

In Cuyahoga County, according to the Secretary of State’s website there are 24,788 provisional ballots, most of them from the city of Cleveland, not its surrounding suburbs. Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell served as Co-Chair of the Bush/Cheney Ohio reelection committee.

There also seems to be an abnormally high vote count for third party candidates who received less than one-half of one percent of the statewide vote total combined. For example, in precinct 4-F, the right-wing Constitutional Law candidate Peroutka received 215 votes to Bush’s 21 and Kerry’s 290. In this precinct, Kerry received 55% of the vote where Gore received 91% of the vote in the year 200. These numbers suggest that Kerry’s votes were inadvertently or intentionally shifted to Peroutka.

(Read the whole thing.)

I've been working on a longish post relating to Bev Harris' revelations in Volusia County, Florida, which I hope to post sometime today. It disturbs me that though the story has been out for nearly a week no newspaper with national circulation has covered it. There is, however, a good editorial in the local Daytona Beach News Journal. The editor hits just the right non-partisan notes while calling for Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe to do the right thing.

Update: Ruth points out in the comments that I ought to link back to Sinfest. His stuff is really good, and it's not syndicated anywhere. The link for the comic in this post is here.

Some people have been unwilling to cover allegations of election fraud until there is some "credible evidence." Looks like they and rest of us internet conspiracy theorists better get cracking, since I, for one, am sure this story from Volusia County, Florida is just the beginning. This item comes via Heather Baum, a Civil Rights Movement activist and Election Protection get out the vote organizer who is in touch with Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.

Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.

Here's what happened so far:

Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up our Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" she exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. We didn't back down.

Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it to us with a smile, but I noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.

I asked to see the real ones, and they told us for "privacy" reasons we can't have copies of the signed ones. I insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give us copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to our attorney). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and we arranged to come back this morning to review them.

Lana Hires, an employee who gained some notoriety in a Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing us in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested we go to the warehouse.

Kathleen Wynne and I showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 this morning. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered us out. Well, we couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. We stepped out and they promptly shut the door behind us.

There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. I looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at us. We drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.

So, we went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. I decided to go look at the garbage some more. Kathleen videotaped this. A man came out and I immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.

A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. We then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.

We collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it for us, for our public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."

Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and we all stood around discussing the merits of my public records request.

They finally let us go, about the time our film crew arrived, and we all trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.

We began to compare the special printouts given to us with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. We also found some that didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Hmm. Which was right? Our polling tape, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or theirs, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?

Well, then it became even more interesting. Lana Hires took it upon herself to box up some items from an office, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. She took them to the back of the building and disappeared.

Then, voting integrity advocates from Volusia and Broward, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.

So, we compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given to us, unsigned, and we found several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Kathleen went to the car and got the polling place tapes we had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there told us that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge us extra for the time we took looking at the real stuff they had withheld from us in our FOIA. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.

Andy then went to get the GEMS server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.

We then all agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia.

Bev Harris
Executive Director
Black Box Voting

Together with Andy, and Kathleen.

xxxooo

Update: Here's where Bev Harris first posted the above, earlier tonight.

Sorryeverybody.com made me laugh. It made me feel better. It also made my heart hurt. A lot.

This blog is about and inspired by my father. He was one of the many, many true patriots who worked hard and took great risks to make America live up to the promises of its democratic ideals. It's incredibly painful to be witness to the dismantling of their numerous accomplishments. And it's barely begun.

My father had a knack for mentoring people in the age set about 20 years younger than him. One of his younger friends wrote this to me in an email yesterday: "And, just for a sweet bit of info. in difficult times--your parents taught me more about friendship than anybody else in my life, a lesson I will never forget." That's part of the work right now, teaching each other about friendship.

Those of you who don't know me in real life don't know that my wife lost her job on Friday. If you haven't read my about page, you may not know that I've been the stay at home parent, taking care of our son (now 21 months old) during the day. On Wednesday morning when I heard the awful news about our elections I said to myself, when I start working outside the home full-time I have to do political work. What else is there to do now?

Ruth and I have decided that it's my turn to work outside the home and her turn to spend the days with our little guy, so it looks like that imagined future work life may start sooner than I thought.

Tonight when my yoga class was over and we were all putting on our coats to go outside into Cambridge's unseasonable cold I was talking to a classmate who is also looking for work. I remembered that she was trying to get out of academic research and into something in the nonprofit sector. I told her the decision I came to on Nov. 3. With a look of instant recognition, she said, "we should talk," and we exchanged contact info. I hope this is contagious and that there are others of you out there networking, too. We've got a lot of work to do.

Something to consider if you're among the newly radicalized. Look around for the folks who fought the battles before this one. They've got things to teach us. Also, they need our friendship and we need theirs.

Love,

Ben

At Corrente:

Conceding before the votes are all counted ("No retreat, no surrendur") trashes the voting process: It says the long lines are OK, the intimidation is OK—since those are the Republican tactics that made it necessary to do the math instead of waiting for, um, the facts.

If Kerry wanted to spare the nation trauma, he could have said why he thought the result would be a Bush win, and delayed his official concession 'til the Constitutional process was complete. That would have sent a better message.

Last night on the Civil Rights Movement veterans list-serve, this came in from the President of the Virginia State University Branch of the NAACP. If you've paid any attention, you know this was not a unique occurrence.

Virginia State University NAACP
1 Hayden Dr.
Petersburg VA, 23806

To Whom It May Concern:

On November 2, 2004, there were over 100 students who complained to the Virginia State University Branch of the NAACP about being turned away when voting at Ettrick Elementary. I (Shaunt’e Reese President of this branch) returned to the voting site with 10 of the complaining students and met about 8 more who were there to see what the reasons were from keeping the students from voting. Apparently during validation, which was the 2nd week of August, the Student Government Association were registering students to vote and providing absentee ballots. However, the students never received their voter’s card nor their absentee ballots so when it was time to vote they were unable to and they were not in the system as being registered at all. I asked one of the gentleman who was working the polls about the provisional ballot and he told me that they can do one but then he also stated “ I am going to tell you straight up and I’m not going to sugar it up but the provisional ballot is not going to mean anything because it won’t count because they are using it to shut the students up”. Immediately I was outraged, disgusted and felt extremely deprived of my right to vote. I called 1877-OUR-VOTE and told them the situation and they took the complaint and said that they would get back to me. I am hoping that something like this can be dealt with because I would not want to see this happen in the next 4 years to come.

This is from AJ at Small Hands. Her brother Aaron was just shipped to Iraq last month.

In a murderous time
The heart breaks and breaks
And lives by breaking.

--Stanley Kunitz

Well.

I feel completely nauseous and disappointed. I do not renounce the Democrats, as some do. I still despise the Republicans and everything they stand for.

For some reason, I am thinking of the movie, The Pianist, and how in an insane and barbaric and murderous time, the main character (Wladyslaw Szpilman) refused to die, refused to relinquish his humanity.

We must do our work. We must fight the forces of imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious fanaticism.

The news of Bush's victory has been demoralizing. Yesterday was an emotionally exhausting day for me and for most everyone I know. As I've been touring around the blogs I read, I've found a couple of Ampersand's posts to be what I most needed to hear. From yesterday:

But you know? The fight goes on. And if Kerry had won, or if Measure 36 had failed, then the same fight would still have gone on. Sure, the playing field might have looked a little different, but our opponents wouldn't have rolled over and died. They would have played on, getting every victory they could. We need to do the same. And those of us who are far enough left so that we want to transform society, not just win elections - our fight really doesn't change that much depending on who's in the White House.

Bush was president last year, and we didn't despair, we didn't give up. Next year Bush will still be president, and I for one will not despair, will not give up. Why should I? Nothing has changed.

Get drunk. Get joyful. Get laid, if that's what you're into. Get high. Get giggly. Get dancing. Get some damn sleep already. And then get back up, and get active. Get ready to get started, because the next four years will need you more than ever.

And today:

Let me admit this right up front: this sucks. It's depressing. And it makes things harder for the immediate future.

The big mistake the Democrats, and most of the left, made was to believe that by winning elections we will change the country.

Just the opposite is true. It is only by changing the country that we will win elections.

We need to stop thinking in terms of winning elections, and start thinking about persuading more of the country to believe our ideas. If we do that, elections will follow.

What does that mean for the left? We still lack an effective left counterpart to the Heritage Foundation and the Fox News Network; by which I mean, we lack effective institutions dedicated not to pushing our candidates but instead to pushing our ideas. And that's killing us.

Some lefty blogger just sent me an email saying that we should say "We're preparing for 2006 and 2008 and 2010 and 2012 now." To which I say, stop thinking in terms of even-numbered years. We need to build institutions that change the way our society thinks, and if that program doesn't fit into a two-year electoral cycle, then throw away the cycle. . . .

In 1984, marital rape was still legal in most states and not even Walter Mondale would have dared come out in favor of civil unions. In 2004, even with control of all three branches of government, pro-lifers are waging war on "partial birth" abortions because they don't think they can win a fight against the other 99.9% of abortions. Massachusetts has same-sex marriage, and with the failure of the FMA that's not going away.

I'm still thinking about what this all means for reproductive rights, for lesbian and gay rights, for women's rights, and for gender freedom in general. I'll be posting more about this in weeks to come. But I remain confident that - despite hard times to come, despite Bush's re-election, despite the loss of gay marriage measures throughout the country, and despite the Supreme Court's likely change in the next few years from "bad" to "Holy Fuck!" - the momentum of history remains on our side.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan won re-election, and the world seemed pretty hopeless. Look at all that's happened since then - not all good, but real progress has been made. Not all of the next twenty years will be good, either - but that doesn't mean that we can't move forward a lot between now and 2024.

Measure in generations, not in elections.

League Of Women Voters Fact Sheet

1) Your Ballot, Your Vote Don’t panic if you registered to vote but your name is not on the list. Get help from a poll worker to make sure your vote is counted. You may be directed to another polling place or given a provisional ballot.

Provisional/interim/conditional ballots are intended as a safeguard for voters whose eligibility is in question on Election Day. These include those whose voter registration is in doubt, those who may have been erroneously purged, or first-time voters who registered by mail and have I.D. problems.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that provisional ballots be counted if the voter is eligible to vote by state law. However, some election officials have chosen to apply standards for counting provisional ballots that are unrelated to voter eligibility, such as casting the provisional ballot in the proper polling place and filling out the enclosing envelope correctly. Provisional ballots are the safety net so that no voter coming to the polls will be turned away.

However, provisional ballots should not be considered a backup for poor polling place operations or a catch-all for all problematic situations. Election officials should make every effort before the election to reduce the need for numerous provisional ballots, by improving the registration system and by other means to allow the voter to cast an ordinary/regular ballot. Too many provisional ballots will increase the post-election administrative burden on election officials and delay election results.

2) I.D. – Don’t Go Without It You may need to show I.D. To be safe, bring your driver’s license, or a paycheck, utility bill or government document that includes your name and street address.

HAVA requires that first-time voters who register by mail present I.D. prior to voting on Election Day unless the state has already verified their identity. Unfortunately, many states have gone further, and are requiring all voters or all first-time voters to present I.D. In addition, while HAVA says that the application of the new requirement must be “uniform and non-discriminatory,” many states have neither established mechanisms for ensuring uniform and non-discriminatory application, nor informed the public as to what forms of I.D. are acceptable in their state. Because this is a new requirement, it could lead to problems such as unequal and discriminatory treatment, and ultimately lead to wrongful disenfranchisement on Election Day.

3) Writing on the Wall Look at the signs at the polling place for directions on how to use the voting machines, a list of your voting rights, and instructions for filing a complaint if your rights have been violated.

Voters will face many changes in the polling place this year. Many will experience new procedures, some will see new equipment, others will see the same equipment as before but now wonder if they failed to cast their vote properly, and many will be first-time voters. To address these realities, HAVA also requires that basic voting information be posted in the polling place. Election officials should work with design and usability professionals to ensure the readability of the information they’re providing in the polling place. Information/instructions should be written clearly and simply and provide illustrations. Voting machine instructions should include how a voter can review his or her ballot, and how to check for overvotes and undervotes. And, information regarding what constitutes a spoiled ballot and instructions for securing a new ballot should be provided.

4) When in Doubt – Ask Poll workers are there to help you. They’ll show you how to work the machines and give you a provisional ballot if you need one. If you’re at the wrong polling place, they should tell you how to get to the right one.

Poll workers are volunteers from the local area, who are committed to helping voters. Ultimately, the successful administration of elections lies in the hands of poll workers. However, in too many cases, there are too few of them and/or they have not received the necessary tools from election officials. Such tools include appropriate training, easily searched reference information to answer questions, and the official list of all voters, with their polling place identified, for the election registrar’s entire jurisdiction.

5) In and Out You probably won’t have to wait too long. But even if the line is long, don’t leave without voting. The outcome of this election will be important!

Many voters state that they don’t have time to vote and that’s why they haven’t participated in the past. Creating a sense of a positive voting experience and giving voters the tools they need to achieve this – such as the League’s 3 Ways to Make Voting a Breeze – will go a long way in increasing voter turnout. The League is urging TV and radio stations to help with this by giving regular updates on Election Day on wait times at polling places in their area.

AND

Know What to Do if You Experience Election Day Problems

Call toll free --- 1-866-Our-Vote --- to report problems and to receive advice on what to do. This hotline is being operated by the Election Protection Coalition, which is composed of many organizations including the League of Women Voters.

Copied whole cloth from Josh Marshall. One of his readers is working the polls in Florida.

Still in Florida.

This was one of the most moving, meaningful days of my life.

My job is to get people to the polls and, more importantly, to keep them there. Because they’re crazily jammed. Crazily. No one expected this turnout. For me, it’s been a deeply humbling, deeply gratifying experience. At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa -- a heavily democratic, 90% African American community — we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote).

Here’s what was so moving:

We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important.

And there were tons of first time voters. Tons.

Aside from some hassles from the Republican election commissioner ( … [ed.note: Here the letter writer describes various shenanigans intended to exacerbate the difficulties of waiting hours in line to vote. I’ve censored this detail to preserve the anonymity of the writer.], I actually had an amazing experience. No, actually, in a way because of that I had an amazing experience. Because these people know that the system that’s in place doesn’t want them voting. And yet they are determined to vote.

The best of all was an 80 year old African American man who said to me: “When I first started I wasn’t even allowed to vote. Then, when I did, they was trying to intimidate me. But now I see all these folks here to make sure that my vote counts. This is the first time in my life that I feel like when I cast my vote it’s actually gonna be heard.”

To see people coming out — elderly, disabled, blind, poor; people who have to hitch rides, take buses, etc — and then staying in line for hours and hours and hours... Well, it’s humbling. And it’s awesome. And it’s kind of beautiful.

Sometimes you forget what America is.

I think there’s hope

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