Independent of the actual result, one clear message to the rest of the world is that the US is simply incompetent at running elections. After 2000 one might have expected some improvement, but no: if anything it’s worse. A crazy patchwork of laws (whatever happened to “Equal protection”?) selectively applied; untested and unreliable machines; incompetent poll workers; running out of ballots; insufficient polling places. See this IHT report on overseas’ observers for one example, or the E-Voting Experts blog for more. And don’t tell me that it only affects a few voters, or that it’s an inevitable side-effect of the size of the country. Japan, UK, Germany, France… all make this stuff work at comparable scale with virtually none of these problems. When a city provides two voting machines for 1100 registered voters (Columbus), or halves the number of polling places in the face of significantly increased registration, that isn’t a “scaling problem”: it’s either incompetence or (worse) a triumph of partisanship over democratic principles. The ends don’t justify the means.
Listen guys, it may have been cute to spend a couple of hundred years pretending that you were just a bunch of agrarian sovereign mini-states, like Swiss cantons, but it’s time to grow up. Uniform laws. Uniform standards. Voting systems that work. Guaranteed provision of enough ballots, machines, and polling places for ALL, not just the people you expect/want to turn up. Absentee ballots sent out on time, not three days before the election. And voting spread over Saturday and Sunday – what’s the rush? (Although mandating an 11 day waiting period for counting provisional ballots is also ridiculous.) Try taking a few lessons from Venezuela, for instance. Or Serbia.
America may be the world’s second largest democracy, but don’t hold yourselves up as a role model.
Huh?
Israeli Woman Motorists Dance Nude in India?: “India’s northwestern state of Rajasthan has punished local officials after residents complained a group of Israeli women motorists had danced in the nude near a town revered by Hindus, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.”
Why punish the “local officials”, I wonder? /me shakes head
Fulbright got it right
From Tuesday’s Guardian: “Stuck in the middle” by David Clark:
Almost four decades ago, during the Vietnam war, the great liberal, Senator J William Fulbright, captured more eloquently than any recent commentary what is at stake in today’s US presidential election. There were, he said, two Americas: “One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good humoured, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.”
It’s time to choose.
New blog on e-voting
There’s an interesting new blog on E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts. Sample issue under discussion: “Suppose, hypothetically, that I knew of a vulnerability that would allow someone to corrupt vote counts or interfere with voting on some e-voting system being used in tomorrow’s election. And suppose further that it was too late to get the vulnerability fixed. What should I do?”
(I’ll be watching the RSS feed.)
A statistician's gut feeling
From the Princeton Meta-Analysis of State Polls: ” Just for the record, my gut estimate of the likelihood of a Kerry win is about 6-1 in favor.”
Update: “Predicted electoral outcome (11/1/2004 noon EST): Kerry 323 EV, Bush 215 EV“
Quote of the day
From Gary Kamiya’s article in Salon.com, American nightmare: As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, “The Iraq war … was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist.”
(And the rest of the article is well worth reading too.)
It's a small world: The Votemaster
For some months now one of my “must read” web sites has been Electoral-Vote.COM. (Me and over half a million others every day!) I’ve watched the maps showing the aggregated results of recent opinion polls, I’ve read “the Votemaster’s” pained accounts of wrestling with different algorithms for aggregating, averaging, aging, and presenting the data. I’ve even contributed a few bucks to support the effort. Through all this, I had no idea who “the Votemaster” might be, until today. In the Votemaster FAQ , all is revealed: “My name is Andrew Tanenbaum. I am one of the 7 million U.S. citizens living abroad. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. […] I can write fairly complex software. I wrote MINIX, the precursor to Linux, for example.”
Ah, that Andy Tanenbaum! “Mister Minix.” Now where did I put my battered copy of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation?
Lucy's
We’ve lived in various places over the last 30+ years: a year in Hayes, three years in Newcastle-on-Tyne, four years in Chesham, nineteen years in Foxboro, and now four years in Brookline. In all that time we’ve never really had a “local”: a regular place to hang out and eat or drink. In England the “local” is usually a pub, but our nearest pubs in both Newcastle and Chesham were dismal places. And Foxboro was the kind of dormitory suburb without a centre, where most socializing happened at the homes of friends and neighbours. Oh yes, we’ve patronized various restaurants, but we never got to know the staff as friends.
But here in Brookline I think we’ve found our “local”: a really nice, interesting, friendly restaurant called Lucy’s. OK, it isn’t very local – it’s up at Coolidge Corner, about 4 miles away. But over the last year or so we’ve found ourselves eating there more and more often, or simply stopping in for a cocktail and a chat. The food is really good and always imaginative. This afternoon we were shopping at Coolidge Corner, and we found ourselves rearranging our schedule in order to be at the door of Lucy’s when it opened at five. We had a martini and chatted with Mitzi (the proprietor) for about half an hour before heading home to deal with the trick-or-treaters. Sure feels like a local to me.
Lucy’s. Recommended. See you there.
Halloween evening
It was one of the warmest Halloweens I can remember recently, and we’d put a carved and painted pumpkin outside, so I decided to sit outside to receive the trick-or-treaters. Although we got a lot of kids this year, they tended to come in gaggles, so I took a book out with me. I actually spent the time reading chapter 2 of Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind on Supervenience and Explanation. Supervenience is one of those cool logical/philosophical tools that leaves you wondering how you ever got by with fuzzy notions like “depends on”. Mind you, I am having difficulty working up a lot of sympathy for some of Chalmers’ ideas about consciousness – specifically, I can’t see why he finds phenomenal consciousness “surprising” and “troubling” – but as Dennett says, “explore before you deplore.”
Not your grandfather's Vatican…
With the blessing of the Vatican, two Italian theologians have just published a book on sex for Catholics, entitled It’s A Sin Not To Do It. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a way to get the faithful to increase the Catholic birth-rate; far from it. It’s much more expansive in scope. For example, as the Telegraph reports, the book “unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse”. How times change. Mentioning something like that in the Catholic school I attended back in the early 1960s would have meant six of the best. (But I thought Catholic teaching was supposed to be inerrant and eternal….
)