So we were lucky enough to go to Sacramento Tues night - TG, BG (who is home on leave for two weeks) and I - where we got to watch the election results at the Secretary of State's office. The things you have to do when you don't have TV at home...
...and I was looking forward to standing around watching as crises flew up and were swiftly dispatched; the intent buzz of seriousness filling the building as the creaky mechanics of electoral politics were brought to life.
Particularly this year. Because as a result of Secretary Bowen's insight and courage, California was the first state to take a stand on the deeply flawed electronic voting technology which had become pervasive by 2006. And we pulled the plugs on them. She decertified the bad machines, came up with security measures for the not-so-bad ones, and the county election officials screamed bloody murder, saying that they wouldn't be able to manage high-turnout elections without the systems.
So how was it?
An island of calm. Kind of boring. We wound up watching Comedy Central (funny!), because when we walked around, there was nothing exciting going on, except for lots of people working calmly. One of the help line workers took a call while we were there. A voter wondered how long the lines at her polling place would be. Seriously, that's the kind of stuff that happened all night. I chatted up several lifers - people who had been in the office for years - and they were beaming at what a smooth election it had been.
Sadly, smooth running doesn't make for great drama. But it does make for great elections. So hats off to all the workers - from the nice ladies in my neighborhood garage polling place to the county officials to the state staff to the Secretary herself, whose judgment in pushing back on the use of these machines was validated last night.
Now we need to get rid of them in the rest of the country. If you don't live in California, reach out to your state legislators, your Secretary of State, your Governor and ask why you can't have elections that run as smoothly as the one here just did.
Smoothly, accurately, transparently.
I'll have more on elections tomorrow, including a (friendly) challenge to election conspiracy theorists on the right.
About the credit card fraud, fake registrations, refusal of Democrat state officials to vet fake registrations, or something else?
Those machines have a very low profile here in Illinois. At my polling place there was only one in evidence and no one opted to use it as far as I could tell. The word is definitely out about those fraud boxes around here and has been for quite awhile.
You might mention to your friend the SoS that her new results website sucks in a rather major way - it was taking literally several minutes to load last night. When it did, the info was OK - I particularly liked comparing the voting results on the props with the page showing which counties had reported and how much. I saw that Alameda Co. (Oakland) was very late reporting anything (still - they always seem late).
I never did get the maps to load. The older website seemed to work fine in past elections. I don't know what they did, but they should un-do it.
I noticed today they had gone to a results only layout that showed only the final outcome on each race, without the county by county break down. It loads faster, but doesn't have nearly as much info.
Yeah - they had network outages on one of their two providers (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say who it was) and are still having problems. Close your browser or dump the session cookie and try again...
A.L.
I thought much of these problems were to have been solved by now in regard to the machines. Wasn't there a standard imposed after 2000? Can anyone verify this?
I don't think voting machines caused propblems. I think there was plenty of registration fraud, but no much more than usualy. We just plain got out butts kicked
RE Nachines. I remember there was some law mandating electonc machines right after the mess in 2000. Ironic that it turns out paper is the way to go (well, there is a really really slick combined paper/electonic method that would work very well, but COST)
Me? I live in NYC, where we still use lever machines
Thanks for that fine post, Armed Liberal. This is pure good news.