Presidential Commission on Election Administration Talks About the REAL Problems With Election Technology

The findings are so important and affirming that I am just going to let Nate Persily, Research Director for the Commission, speak for himself.

The principal recommendations of the commission are:

1) modernization of the registration process through expansion of online voter registration and state collaboration in improving the accuracy of voter lists
2)improving access through expansion of pre-Election Day voting, and selection of suitable, well-equipped polling place facilities, such as schools
3) endorsement of tools to assure efficient management of polling places, hosted at the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project and available through the commission’s Web site;
4)reforms of the standard-setting and certification process for new voting technology to address soon-to-be antiquated voting machines and to encourage innovation and the adoption of widely available off-the-shelf technologies.

The issue of long polling place lines is an illustrative example. Media reports on long lines focus on battleground states, and usually the most populous counties within those states. National surveys, such as those conducted by Charles Stewart, have identified “problem states” where respondents report long wait times. What we need, however, are nationwide wait time data at the polling place level. As anyone who has visited Disney World with a child can attest, calculating wait times does not involve 21st century technology. But until we have every polling place in America using their stop watches for similar purposes, we will not have a clear picture of the location of the line problem and its multifarious causes.

The same can be said for any number of issues, such as the failure to count provisional, absentee and military ballots, accessibility of polling places, and perhaps the easiest and most important, the performance of voting technology. The lack of a nationwide data infrastructure hinders the kind of institutionalized learning and feedback loops that will allow our system of election administration to learn from itself. If the report of the Presidential Commission can push election officials to take even this minor, clearly nonpartisan step, it will have made a substantial, long lasting contribution to improving the voting experience.

Unrelatedly, I have been watching Scandal and House of Cards this weekend as soooo many people begged me to. I'm not gonna say they're not addictive, but we're got enough voting drama right here in real life.















Unrelatedly, I have started watching House of Cards and Scandal, so

Wake the Fuck Up!!

If you haven't seen this, good because that means I am not the last one, but you need to watch this right now then you need to share it with all your friends. Not only is it clever and hilarious but it so accurately captures the problem with voter apathy this season. Do people not see that this election is actually more important than the last one? And yes, fellow nerds, I mean 2008 not like last week or 2010.

So this is amazing and it is sponsored by the Jewish Education and Research Council, which also brought us The Great Schlep and Sarah Silverman's latest Voter ID piece. Can't think of two groups I am prouder to be a part of. I'm kvelling!!!

Website Here.
Safe for Work version here.

There Is No Such Thing As Not Voting

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
- David Foster Wallace

When I read this quote I nearly cried because it articulates so well something I have been trying to convey for years. And I am rarely out-loquated. I am by no means a tattoo person but if I ever did get a tattoo that didn't wash off with soap and water, it would have to be this. I knew I had to share it everywhere I could, starting with you.

That's One Way to Do It

Recently a good friend asked me HOW with all the (mis)information out there one can responsibly can choose a candidate. I'm working on a piece on the subject, but the gist of the matter is to pick a way and go with it. The first story in the clip above is how one of my favorite authors solves the problem.

You Say You Want a Revolution...

You know what I hate? I hate the influence that money has in our political system. I hate that people in our country are dying because they can't afford adequate healthcare. I hate how obscenely rich or well connected you need to be to run for public office. I hate that where you're born and how much money you have has more to do with where you go to college than how smart and driven you are. You know what else I hate? Occupy Wall Street.

Let me explain. My pro-empowerment credentials are pretty bona fide. I'm going to school for civic engagement. But Occupy Wall Street is not about that. It's not about...anything. And I don't mean to say that it's about nothing. I literally mean it's not about any one thing.

'We meet every day to decide what our demands are,' said Hero Vincent, 21, an artist and singer from Charlotte, N.C., who has been here from the beginning. Not allowed to use amplified sound, the protesters have devised their own means of communication. Each speaker says a sentence, and then everyone else repeats it, so it ripples outward. Decisions must be by consensus. Hand signals convey responses. For instance, holding your palms upward and wiggling your fingers means approval, while holding them downward means disapproval. Level hands mean uncertainty. " Uhuh....

People are angry, and I get that. They feel the government isn't listening and I get that too. That is a HUGE HUGE problem. It's one I plan on spending my life trying to solve. But what is the mission statement here? What are they hoping to gain? How will they know when they've won? Good community action involves goals and accountability. Even if your goal is public awareness, you have to know what you're making people aware of. NYT: "Not all of them can articulate exactly why they are here or what they want. Yet there is a conviction rippling through them that however the global economy works, it does not work for them." Well that's kind of broad...

President of the "make liberal activists seem irrational and annoying" movement, Michael Moore, thinks this lack of organization is a good thing.

"There's no or­ga­nized group with dues be­hind this. This is lit­er­ally an up­ris­ing of peo­ple who have had it. The great thing about what they're doing is that the work ahead is not as dif­fi­cult of other move­ments. Dur­ing the civil rights and other move­ments the ma­jor­ity of Amer­i­cans were not with them. That's not true right now. The ma­jor­ity of Amer­i­cans are re­ally upset with Wall Street.You have al­ready got an army of Amer­i­cans who are just wait­ing for some­one to do some­thing and the some­thing has started."

The protest may be annoying but people who compare it to the Civil Right Movement or the Arab Spring are DISGUSTING. Our system is far from ideal, but nobody's shooting at us. We are free to practice or not practice our religions. Our government is not deliberately creating starvation or systematically killing its own people. Despite what these guys or the Tea Party might tell you, and however imperfect, we live in a liberal representative Democracy with civil rights and freedom of speech and expression. Note that the worst accusations of policy brutality involve pepper spray and are being investigated.

Occupy Wall Street reminds me less of an organized movement and more of my Freshman-year-of-college-liberal-angst. And as enjoyable as that self-righteousness was, when I started working at Gay Mens Health Crisis the summer after the 2004 election, and met real people who had actually been forgotten by the government, I got over it. My clients there had a disease that the government had known about and denied, or blamed them for. They couldn't afford both their medication and food. They couldn't legally recognize their relationships. Disenfranchisement isn't a hat you try on between classes. To wit:

"Another speaker, an African-American, let everyone know that the occupation has a lack of diversity and not many in the hood that he is from know what they are doing. He explained Mayor Bloomberg just cut funding for subsidized housing so 12,000 will be out on streets. Latinos, Asians and blacks are ready to mobilize if the people in Liberty Park just talk about issues they want to talk about, he said. 'Too little of us are here because we don’t understand what this is all about,' he added. Then he said, 'You all look like a bunch of white kids who just lost their trust funds.' He told the crowd that black people have been having problems with student loans since the civil rights movement."

Here's how the Occupy Wall Street protesters are described in the New York Times:

"Most of the demonstrators are in their teens or 20s, but plenty are older. Many are students. Many are jobless. A few are well-worn anarchists. Others have put their normal lives on pause to try out protesting and see how it feels....'I’m angry because I don’t have millions of dollars to give to my representative, so my voice is invalidated,' said Amanda Clarke, 21, a student at the New School. 'And the fact that I’m graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in loans and there’s no job market'...Their politics zigzag wildly. An unemployed schoolteacher calls herself a fierce independent, while an employed teacher is a conservative. An anarchist photographer wants libertarianism to be reclaimed by the left. ..Sid Gurung, 22, a student at the New School who enlisted because he said he was 'extremely disappointed and angry that I have no future.'"

Watch the video. This thing is like a holy pilgrimage for unhelpful whacktivists. You know, the kind that "helpfully" make their own literature and want to meet face to face with the candidate.Speaking of which, I'm tempted to go down there and take a poll. I wonder how many of these protesters voted in the last election... or plan to vote in the next one. Not that voting is a unilateral solution to the country's problems, but it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the process and problem with the way our generation tries to mobilize that anyone would think this is more effective.

"We don't have one central argument," said Jed Brandt of Brooklyn. "We have a lot, but the basic issue is our democratic structures are broken in this country." No argument here. But standing in an FDR mask on Wall Street isn't going to do it. When you start a 'movement' with no end game, no accountability and no message other than "Look at me!!! I'm angry," you make those of us who have goals and have a point look bad. If this was what political action was, if this was what Democracy was, I wouldn't want to take part in it either.

And by the way...when was the last time I was this worked up over a crowd of knee jerk upper middle class liberals who were more interested in self-congratulating than in actually creating quantifiable change? I'll give you a hint.

“'I’ve got my sleeping bag and my pad. I was told not to bring a tent so I left that at home,” said activist Ben Green, who flew in from out of state to camp here day and night. He had a simple message for the US president: “He’s backed out of everything he promised in the campaign. It’s like he’s asking to lose the next election.'”

If President Obama loses his base in the next election, it's not going to be Black people or Jewish people, it's going to be people like Ben who don't have an appreciation for the way things work and didn't understand what they were fighting for in the first place.

Vicious Cycle

Excellent article by a former Republican operative shared by my friend Alec. It highlights the vicious cycle of voter suppression and voter apathy that plagues our country and allows the GOP to succeed.

On voter apathy: "There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn."

On the media's portrayal of politics:"This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters."

On voter suppression: "Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students."