In the middle of composing a post on the large and small outrages that will inevitably happen today, Atrios got there first.
Obviously our election system is completely stupid and in an ideal world we’d have only a small fraction of all of these problems, but not all of these problems are evidence of massive conspiracy.
…adding, voting issues are serious, but the inability to distinguish between the important and the not so important obscures what the real problems are.
If you read only leftwing blogs today you will get the impression that outrages mostly happen to Democrats. Weirdly enough a rightwing blog reader will feel like he lives in an alternate universe where the opposite is true. By the end of the day either perspective will have a wealth of compelling anecdotes to bolster its case, because in a country with over a hundred million strongly opinionated voters there is room for incredibly stupid people on both shoulders of the bell curve.
Like Atrios said, investigating and punishing the genuine abuses (there will be those) gets easier if we don’t pull the fire alarm every time someone screws up in good faith.
jakester
Well, be that as it may, it’s a demonstrable FACT that the referees/umpires always make bad calls to the detriment of the team I’m supporting in a given athletic competition.
dave
Somewhat OT, but as of noon, the Dow is up 290 points. Hmmm…I wonder what Larry Kudlow makes of THAT?
KCinDC
Yes, I’m tired of hearing about vote flipping. Sure, if there’s a problem with the touch-screen calibration you may touch one candidate and get another, but clearly any machine like that is going to be taken out of service pretty quickly. It’s a problem, but not a conspiracy. If there’s a conspiracy, then the vote will register normally on screen but be recorded differently behind the scenes, and you’ll never know.
Tzal
I did not install adblock plus for some reason on this computer. But seeing Hugh Hewitt’s ad about his news program finally convinced me to install it. Thanks Hugh!
Incertus
@KCinDC: Which is even more of a reason to dump black box voting without some sort of paper backup. I look at it this way–what the uneducated voter sees as a problem isn’t actually a problem, but as long as it moves us away from machines that don’t fail well, I’m fine with using their outrage to get the change pushed through.
Dave
@dave:
Why, that’s good news for John McCain and a reminder of the genius of W. You didn’t know that?
Tsulagi
I’m thinking that’ll be a little more true today for our wingnuttian denizens. Probably already have their obit written: Death by voter fraud!
Kinda like the McCain campaign that bought and started running a “McCain knocked it out of the park!” ad in WSJ before the debate even took place. They see the big picture in advance.
As with stupid, never underestimate their capacity for ginned up outrage and persecution. The trifecta that fuels our patriot wingwankers. It’s got what they crave.
patrick
The part I don’t get, is how can we have a banking ATM system in this country that is accurate 99.99% of the time, gives a paper receipt of your transaction and is easy enough for any idiot to use and we can’t have the same thing in our elections.
This baffles me.
Punchy
Calling Tim F…..your logic, brevity, and obvious lack of hyperventilation is desperately required at the GOS….god damn what a fucking mess that place is today.
liberal
@patrick:
Very simple: getting voting right is much harder than ATM transactions. Why? No anonymity required in the latter.
KCinDC
Patrick, I’ve had problems with miscalibrated touch screens on ATMs, and I don’t see the menus as being any easier than voting (except that some places have a lot of ballot decisions). Also, your ATM transactions aren’t secret from the bank. Voting is entirely different. And we can’t have voting receipts because we don’t want to encourage bribery and coercion.
liberal
Tim F. wrote,
You’re wrong. In terms of wholesale effective disenfranchisement, the largest group of victims is city dwellers, who in some cases aren’t given as many voting resources (machines, etc) per capita, and who tend to vote Democratic.
tjproudamerican
John
You kept me sane since I discovered your site. I am a life-long striaght ticket Democratic Party Member.
It is very important that you remind your readers that there are abuses, silliness, venality, on both sides.
Broder has given a bad name to being rational, so let’s ask for ONE STANDARD for all stories.
You do that now, with humor and eccentricity. Thanks! It makes your blog an island of empassioned sanity.
tjproudamerican
straight line voter sorry for the typo
liberal
@KCinDC:
Not to mention that if it’s a true receipt that the voter takes with him out of the voting center, what good is it in a recount?
Every time I read the phrase "voting receipts" I get a goddamn headache.
Joshua Norton
According to the Repugs, McCain is going to win by a landslide. They have him leading in several national polls*.
*If by "several" you mean one and if by "national" you mean Missouri. And if by "leading" you mean tied.
Tlazolteotl
Like the Washington governor’s race in 2004. I sure hope the margin is enough this time that it can be resolved neatly and without all the gnashing of teeth!
MobiusKlein
The real outrage should be that our system of registering voters is a mess. While in the polling place today, I saw two people being denied a chance to vote – they thought they were registered properly, but for some reason they were not on the lists. (San Francisco)
One had last vote 4 years previous, so may have been dropped because of inactivity, or because the precinct boundaries changed, or something. Another I didn’t catch the reason. Not ascribing any malice to the poll workers, just that it’s too arcane it seems.
adolphus
In addition to the issues already mentioned, there is the issue of portability. ATM’s sit in one place and perform a minimum of regular functions. Come back next year and they will be the same, more or less. They are also tended and repaired by trained professionals.
Voting machines are portable, must pack up and stack in the back of some poor poll worker’s Subaru. Gets manhandled almost as much as luggage at the airport. The people in charge of operating them are paid volunteers who do it three times a year (tops) with months or year in between 2-4 hour training sessions. Plus, they have to be reprogrammed after every election and not just with new candidates and new ballot initiatives, but also to comply with new laws, rules, and improved procedures. And there are least 50 different sets of state laws they must conform to and each of those 50 have different fiscal or legal years so have different dates when new laws take effect. At the end of the day the machines have to be carried one at a time over to a phone outlet to upload the results (again, by people who receive minimal training per election cycle, sometimes online) to the central tallying spot.
If ATM’s operated under this same system, I doubt they could maintain their 99.99% efficiency rate.
I am not defending this system, but recognize the difficulty of what we need to accomplish here. It is herculean and I think we do it better than we give ourselves credit for.
jake 4 that 1
@Joshua Norton: Only Missouri is RealAmerica(R).
eyeball
Here’s some wonderful stuff from The Corner (k-lo at the polls):
… such class. such respect for fellow Americans who differ with you politically.
Chuck Butcher
I will take this opportunity to once again, while it is fresh in people’s minds, that waiting in line is a poll tax of sorts (R Maddow). There is a simple and secure and paper trail method used universally and automatically in Oregon – Vote By Mail.
dmbeaster
Re ATMs, they are probably much more expensive and beefy machines than your typical voting machine, and you need a lot more voting machines which probably puts a premium on cheaper machines.
Martin
One thing that Obama and a solid Dem majority can do is to pass national vote reform legislation. Hell, we could probably get an Amendment passed at this stage, the problems are obvious enough.
Nothing terribly controversial, but a national voter database, universal registration, requirements for voting machines/polling locations per population, and so on. Just meat and potatoes things that get rid of a lot of the noise around voting. If states need some money to make it all happen, put that in too – it won’t be very much and it’ll be very popular with the public. It’d make a pretty good first bill to introduce.
shep
"If you read only leftwing blogs today you will get the impression that outrages mostly happen to Democrats."
Well, they do live in the reality-based community. That’s the inner-city one with the caging, far too few voting machines and armed cops surrounding polling places. I’m still waiting to see the big DOJ and state AG effort to strip thousands of wealthy Republicans of their right to vote. Shorter: crappy voting systems and half-hour lines in the suburbs aren’t (comparably) "outrages".
aimai
I’m actually warden at my poll today (I’m on my lunch hour) and we are in the bluest of blue states and we want everyone to vote and we *still* don’t get it perfectly right. The system is just hugely klugey and the voters often inept (I voted here before, five years ago. I thought my son registered me. I wanted to vote absentee but then I decided to walk my vote in….etc…etc…etc…). As a serious dem voter it pisses me off because I think a lot of the problems arise from states treating voting as something that doesn’t need professional management. I’d like to see some social scientists and crowd specialists sit down with the voter registrar and the secretary of state and map out the number of steps the voter has to go through get securely registered, the number of hoops they have to go through to *stay* registered, and the number of hoops the wardens and clerks have to go through if there is any (any!) hitch in the name, location, timing, etc.. of the voter’s vote. For example: there is no reason at this point why each polling place shouldn’t have its own computerized list of voters. Why do we have to call the election commission, whose phones are ringing off the hook, to establish registeration for marginal voters? Why do we have to fill out three separate forms for a provisional ballot? Why is it so complicated to total everything up at the end of the evening. Voting should be fool proof *for the staff* as well as for the voters.
aimai
adolphus
I’m also a poll worker, though could not today. I agree with aimai on his assessment of many voters ability to know what they are doing as well as the priority this issue gets in most governments.
I just had an epiphany. Designing a new voting process should be contracted to Disney. Say what you want about their corporate ethics and kitchy consumerism, they are the world experts in crowd management and customer service. I took a short course at Disney University once and was astounded that they knew so much about their customers at their parks. It is almost creepy how much they study visitor behavior.
Just a thought.
Soylent Green
And if by "tied" you mean about to get K.O.ed by the turnout.
Martin
We have that here in the OC for early voting. It’s extremely cool. You go to any early polling place in the county, they look you up on a laptop connected to the registrar, give you a code and the code tells the voting machine what ballot to present you with for your precinct.
I understand they are looking to expand it for the regular election once they are sure they have enough backups to the system so that a network outage at the registrar doesn’t totally fuck the county.