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BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!!
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BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: BK Date: 13 Sep 02 - 09:46 PM Damn Straight! abt Pacifica... No cheers are possible abt this this topic, BK |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: Elektra Date: 14 Sep 02 - 01:53 PM I registered here in Florida in 1992 and my "race" has *always* been on my voter card, although I too question the need/motivation. While I can understand how the government might want to keep track of which parts of the populace are actually registering for _internal purposes_, I see *ZERO* reason why race should be part of the "public record". Or party affiliation, for that matter. Again, _internal use_ is understandbly necessary for things like primaries...(Although I have my doubts about that as well, it's a whole other topic, LOL.) What's the bloody point of a "secret" ballot when I am (theoretically, at least) compelled to wear my party affiliation on my sleeve? Not that anyone couldn't at least discern my race clearly just by looking at me, and if asked (and sometimes even when not) I make no effort to conceal where my political sympathies lie. ;-) However -- someone dealing with me *personally* is quite different than categorizing me as a name on a list. More importantly, for some people political affiliation is very personal, private, and NOT an acceptable topic of discussion. Then again, I have *very* strong feelings about privacy rights in general. :-)
As to the electronic voting booths, we have had them in my county since at least the last local election & IMNSHO as a voter I found them simple and easy to use. However, as to the ultimate accuracy I can make no statements. ;-)
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: michaelr Date: 14 Sep 02 - 02:08 PM Yes, Bobert and Elektra -- long live Pacifica! PBS and NPR have gone over to the dark side, and programs like Democracy Now (which is also airing on quite a few Public Access TV channels) and Free Speech News are the last beacon of democracy in these gloomy days. Here are some links: democracynow.org worldlinktv.org Kep up the good fight, everyone, and remember: If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention! Cheers, Michael |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: Don Firth Date: 14 Sep 02 - 02:11 PM "If the United States can establish free elections in Afghanistan, why can't we establish free elections in Florida?" -- Daniel Schorr Don Firth |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: DougR Date: 14 Sep 02 - 02:47 PM Nope, Michaelr, I wouldn't want to see Pacifica stifled in any way. It would be nice, though, if the media that does have a political agenda would make it known to it's listeners. Too few do. I wonder if you folks get the same NPR that we do? You think they have made a turn to the right since Bush has been president? You MUST get different NPR than we do out here. They appear to so far left to me (and particularly The Diane Rheme Show)they are almost off the page! If you are looking for something more left than NPR, you're going to have to invest in a shortwave radio. DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: The Pooka Date: 14 Sep 02 - 09:29 PM Folkie folks, let's not allow our disagreements with the Bushies/Repubs (which I share) blind us to facts & cause us to blame everything on them. (1) Lyndon B. Johnson's landmark civil-rights legislation, the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and subsequent amendments thereto), *required* certain states, including Florida, to record race on voter-registration records---as a means of checking, statistically, on racial discrimination in registration practices. Such laws are still in effect. Nonwhite voting, virually nonexistent in much of the South through 1964 (thus did the White Man's Candidate, Barry Goldwater, win *87.5%* of the total vote in Mississippi! and 48% even in less-ante-bellum Florida), has skyrocketed in the decades since, and hundreds of black candidates have been elected: because the Feds can check the record in comparison to the census data. The Voting Rights Act has been called the most effective civil rights bill ever passed. (2) Party enrollment records are necessary for the many states where only party members may vote in the party's primary to nominate the party's candidates---a restriction which *parties* may impose, if they wish, pursuant to their constitutional rights re freedom of association, according to an ongoing line of court decisions. (3)I don't know about the all-Republican-votes screwup in that county cited; but remember, these were internal party *primaries*, not a D vs. R election. *Sounds* like maybe the computers were designating the D primary tallies as R --- a recoverable error as long as the candidates' names were correct. (??) (4) Look: Florida fouled up, at more than the minimum predictable level. Clearly more work is needed there. BUT, if we insist on a quick, massive changeover to a whole new voting & tallying system, as Florida did --- the good old American gnostic deus-ex-machina, modern-technology-is-salvation philosophy ---then there *IS* going to be a Baseline Unavoidable Screw-up Quotient, first time out. Inevitable. Get used to it. Elections administration & equipment---and voters' behavior---is no more *perfectable* than any other human activity or manmade device; e.g., automobiles, plumbing, policing, brain surgery, street-sweeping, airport security, folksinging, news reporting, website maintenance, war. Not everything is a deep dark conspiracy. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: The Pooka Date: 14 Sep 02 - 09:47 PM Re my above rant, full disclosure: I'm a career state Elections Officer. So, my bias is in favor of my professional brethren. (Siblren? Sistern??)/ Anyway, for those interested in dreary reality as distinguished from the joys of political condemnation and gnostic perfectionism, here's a good article (from a very non-Bushie newspaper btw)--pasted in full 'cause I dunno how long it will stay on the website: washingtonpost.com Fla. Vote Uncovers a Problem: Overwhelmed Poll Workers By Dan Keating Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 14, 2002; Page A0 Florida discovered this week that spending $100 million did not eliminate the weakest link in its election system -- poll workers overwhelmed and turned off by the increasingly complex demands made on a group that has traditionally been mostly retired seniors. Voting precincts opened hours late and counts were delayed because poll workers did not show up, did not know how to deal with the demands of managing sophisticated computer-based voting machines or quit in the middle of the day. "Your service support is a bunch of 70-year-old volunteers, who, if they don't feel like working or are confused, won't work. They walk out. That's essentially what happened," said Stephen Ansolabehere, co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Study, created after Florida's 2000 fiasco. The state notorious for voting problems was just the worst victim of a national trend. Election supervisors say they struggle to recruit volunteers and are left holding the bag when trained workers do not show up or quit. Election reform and fancy new technology do not solve the problem, they make it worse. Demanding rapid change nationwide could spread Florida's problems. "What almost killed Florida was this unholy thing that has developed where we're seeing larger and larger numbers of poll workers not show up," said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center in Houston. "We're seeing higher numbers of no-shows than we've ever seen before. Any state that changed a lot of its stuff. If you expect too much of poll workers, they get overwhelmed and they're not sure if they can do the job and they just don't show up. "Federal election reform might create the same problem by changing everything at once. Politicians have to remember that implementation is important and you can't just edict changes and expect it to come off automatically." Conny McCormack, who has been running elections in Los Angeles for seven years, fears new demands from Washington. "Elections are in danger of collapsing under the weight of their own complexity," she said. "There have been so many new laws passed in states; the accelerated rate of change has created a new environment, yet we have the old structure. Look at the polling place and it's the same faces, the retirees. The new [touch-screen] equipment is too heavy. I saw an 80-year-old poll worker lifting these things of out his car. I'm not going to ask my 80-year-old volunteers to do that." McCormack was in South Florida on Tuesday to watch the implementation of new touch-screen voting booths first hand. Poll worker problems are not new to McCormack. For her primary election in March, she had recruited 25,000 volunteers, but 20 percent bailed out. "It was abdication," she said, "defection at the level of a meltdown." What saved McCormack was another growing trend: replacing volunteer poll workers with government workers on loan from other departments. County employees offer a stable pool of workers who have some technical competence and are used to following bureaucratic procedures. Several supervisors said that the historic pool of volunteers is, by definition, people who would not otherwise be working on a Tuesday. "The people available to work Election Day do not have the skills that we need," said Sharon Turner Buie, director of the Kansas City Election Board. "Recruiting is almost impossible. As everyone knows now, it's a nationwide problem. The problems are not the equipment. It's the people who have to work it." For Tuesday's Florida primary, Miami-Dade election supervisor David Leahy turned to county employees to help in his precincts. But Leahy's plan was overwhelmed by too many changes at once. Reapportionment of legislative districts was only completed in Florida in mid-summer, contributing to confusion about where people should vote. Leahy needed someone with a laptop computer in each precinct to look up the names of people who swore they were registered to vote but were not on the voting list at that polling place. Because the database search was considered the more complex chore and training time was limited, the county employees were trained for searching registered voters, but not trained on booting up the new touch-screen voting equipment. Last-minute changes in instructions for starting the touch-screen equipment then created chaos with the volunteers. In Maryland, Prince George's County had a smooth transition Tuesday to touch-screen voting. Linda Lamone, administrator of the State Board of Elections, said Prince George's had a large crew of roving technicians from the county's computer department as well as other county employees working the polls. Kansas City and surrounding counties encourage companies to make a civic contribution by loaning employees to work at polling stations or encouraging workers to use vacation days. Connecticut, Ohio and some other jurisdictions recruit high school or college students, including those too young to register to vote, to volunteer at the polls as a public service project. Election officials fear that increasing complexity has all but killed the traditional system. "We've added provisional ballots and the new voting equipment," said Lamone. "We have various new federal laws, new electioneering requirements on where they can be. They have to make sure people don't wear inappropriate things in the polling place. It's no longer this sort of neighborhood thing where everybody knows each other and go down to the local fire hall kind of thing. We were short the number of people we should have had on Election Day in probably 75 percent of Maryland jurisdictions." The task force that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) appointed to make recommendations for solving the 2000 problem explicitly noted that technology was not the shortcoming {ndash} people were. As he began his examination of the latest Florida mishaps, Mark Pritchett, executive director of the task force, said most reformers had been enthusiastic about the broad changes, but were not interested in the nitty-gritty of applying them at the local level. "It doesn't matter what technology or what rules you have in place," he said. "It won't do any good if you don't have good people on the ground doing it. I found it hard to believe that poll workers wouldn't even show it, that they would come that late. It bolsters the argument that we need to get government workers out doing other things like running the machines." © 2002 The Washington Post Company |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: michaelr Date: 14 Sep 02 - 10:21 PM Thanks for that perspective, Pooka. What state do you work in? Doug, it appears to me that all one has to do to discern anyone's political agenda is to listen to them. Pacifica's is as clearly stated in their programs as is Rush Limbaugh's. As to your other point -- from where I'm sitting, NPR is only slightly left of center anymore. You must be waaay over in Limbaugh land! ;-) I'll skip the hugs cos I think Bobert's got you covered. Cheers, Michael |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: The Pooka Date: 15 Sep 02 - 11:51 AM michaelr, yer most welcome. Thanks for considering the humble bureaucrat's perspective. :) I'm in Connecticut. If you can stomach more blah-blah Pookaranting on this dull subject, plus a link to my agency's website as an extra added attraction (HAHAHA!), see the thread on "U.S. Election System". --Imperfectionist Pook |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: Bobert Date: 15 Sep 02 - 12:30 PM Pooka, et al: I can apprciate what you have shared with us *but* I'm still wondering about using race as an identifier and not social security numbers on purging a hughly disporportionate number of black folks from the voting roles in Florida. One would think that with a right as important to the survival of the democratic process that before stripping one of his or her such right that election officials would take at least one step beyond the color of one's skin. Now, when one looks at the 57,000 people who were stripped of their rights to vote in Florida who were disporportionally of minorities who voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic ticket, it is no wonder that in a state with a Bush in the Governor's mansion and a hard liner Repub running the election, there are more than just a few raised eyebrows. The appearance of a "fixed" election may indeed be more than just an appearance. Doug: Well, my friend, give this some thought. You are hearing over and over from folks on the other side that NPR is in a sprint to right. What, do you think we are imagining this, or what? Heck, it's funded by a government that has had no problem intimidating its critics. Ask Tom Daschle, after he was all but branded a traitor by the administration for not goose-stepping in time. So here, as far as a lot of us are concerned, we have Pacifica, which is looking more and more like the Alamo. The liberal media? Ha! Your guys are so scared that the one danged thing is going to get by you, like anything that is pro-human for the working clas, that your guys cry like babies. I mean, their is no compromise coming from your side. None. Nada, Zip. You guys got your extremeists, and your "boogie men", and your war drums, and your neoMcCathism in full force and you're not going to give up until labor is goosesteeping to and from the assembvly lines singing, "we love the boss". Hmmmmmm? Beam my boney, Wes Ginny butt up while I sing, "take this job and shove it", thank you Not bad for a Sunday mornin', Bobert.. Feel better? Not really. Bobert |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: The Pooka Date: 15 Sep 02 - 12:53 PM Bobert: OKOKOK. Good points, well articulated. Not bad at all at all, of a Sunday mornin'. (Now, it's off to Mass wit' yez :) But please try to feel better. Florida, and the Republic, will survive. Trust me. (Mmmwa-ha-haaa...) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: DougR Date: 15 Sep 02 - 01:29 PM Pooka: Thanks for posting that article. DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: The Pooka Date: 15 Sep 02 - 01:32 PM DougR, y'welcome. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: bob schwarer Date: 15 Sep 02 - 02:30 PM Remember that Dade and Broward counties were the only two to use this particular voting system. Elections are run by the COUNTIES. The Supervisor of elections in each county is in charge. The county can choose any system they wish. If Dade county bought a bummer that's their problem. Even the New York Times clone here in Polk county says in their editorial today that the Dems are blowing smoke trying to pin the blame on Bush. Bob S.
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Subject: RE: BS: Florida: voting falls flat again!! From: DougR Date: 15 Sep 02 - 03:33 PM Bob: Stop raining on Bobert's parade!!!! :>) DougR |