Two things about Tuesday

[mrissa]

1. If you are in the US and choose to vote on Tuesday, please look carefully at your method of voting. I don't mean your method of selecting how to vote, I mean physically, specifically, how are they having you vote in your precinct? Ask yourself: if there was a question of malice or error, is there some way that a nonpartisan group could recount my vote with some reasonable assurance that they were counting it the way I cast it?

This is not just important if the election doesn't go your way. Even if you're having the best election of your life and are thrilled with everyone who is elected from president to third assistant dogcatcher--even if every referendum you wanted passed and every one you didn't failed--the process is important to democracy. And while people may feel a lot more passionate about it if they feel their vote has been stolen and the results have changed thereby, it sounds a lot less like sour grapes to say, "I don't dispute the results of the current election, but I think we need to look at this in the long term and change how we're doing this."

(People outside the US: no, it's not standardized. It's not even standardized within a metro area in some places, much less within a state, much less within all of them.)

2. Here is my plan for Tuesday: normal morning consisting of internet stuff, PT, writing, couch time with poodle, workout, shower, lunch, PT. Then there will be voting. Then tisane. And then--this is important--I will stop reading lj until Wednesday morning. I will not turn on the news. If I watch anything on the television, it will be a DVD or perhaps the first period of the Wild/Sharks game.

Because here's the thing: there is nothing I can do at that point to change the outcome, and it is not a horse race. If someone edges ahead with the first few states reporting and then someone else surges with the next few and like that, me watching it happen will not change it. And me watching it happen doesn't change the results of the Wild/Sharks game, either, but at least our man Mikko is on fire this year, and he has such pretty hands. (Note for the potentially confused: this is not literal. By "pretty hands" I mean that he does skilled and sometimes unexpectedly elegant things with his stick and the puck, not that he should model rings and wristwatches.) I know that some people will be comforted by knowing as much as possible about the election as soon as possible. I think it'll be a better idea for me to think about something else. And if you find you're not enjoying watching the results trickle in, maybe it's time for you to make cookies or read a book or knit a sock. If you are, if liveblogging the election or sitting around snarking with friends is your thing, enjoy it. I'll catch up with what you had to say on Wednesday morning.

Comments

[redbird]

I promise that if I email you Tuesday, it will be on other subjects.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't mind e-mail straying onto politics so much, actually. Because it's not going to be, "So yesterday I went to the OHIO RESULTS ARE IN OMG grocery and they still didn't have any STILL ONLY 3% RETURNS IN PENNSYLVANIA DAMMIT clementines so I got tangerines instead...."

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

My state (Virginia) has heard so many complaints about electronic voting, that after this election they're re-instituting machines that can produce paper ballots. (And I was glad to hear it.)

[sraun]

I plan to be standing in line to vote when my polling place opens at 7am. With luck, I will have been there 20-25 minutes at that point and won't be too far back in line. Then it's in to work.

Where I shall read LJ, because the alternative is significant quantities of boredom. But I shall be skimming or skipping anything that looks like a political post.

I'll keep your thought in mind about voting procedure, and complain if need be. I haven't heard that they're doing anything different - the last time I voted (two years ago, IIRC), they were still doing optical scan voting. Which I approve of.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I think it'll be a better idea for me to think about something else.

Likewise. I'm going to be making a point of working on projects that won't require any Internet connection (or ignoring said projects in favor of reading in bed), so that I'm not tempted to click on half-trickled-in results that will just ratchet my anxiety level up to no purpose.

Oddly enough, I delivered a sermon on politics this morning and was complimented afterwards on having pleasant-to-watch hands.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

I appreciate my county. We have bubble sheets. I fill out a piece of paper, which can be counting by machine multiple times, or counted by hand, and is simple to fill out.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm used to seeing in Hennepin County MN, where I've voted nearly all my life (4 years in Massachusetts). The ballots seem clear to me, I don't know anything particularly horrible about the tabulating machines, and the stack of ballots is saved for auditing / recount. And at least two people I know are election judges, which means that "real people" are getting those positions, which makes it that much harder to pull any trickery.

I've generally been of the opinion that when my area produced stupid voting results, it was due to the unfortunate choices of the voters. Nothing's perfect :-).

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

For me, getting out the vote is comforting--and might make a difference. I understand not watching it, but the only way I won't is if I'm making calls to Colorado or something. My husband would call every five minutes to update me even if I didn't watch, so I can't escape the ups and downs.

I think it's going to be OK, though. The man has a smooth machine.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have a much broader set of interests in this election than just one fella, smooth machine or no. For example, there's some land I would really like to turn into a city park, and a complete loon we have to keep out of the county commissioner spot. So for me, OK-ness has many axes.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do too--Prop 8 in California, some local races, including a worse than loony off the charts fundamentalist Ayn Rand guy who managed to get the Democratic nomination for Senate here and is running against Lindsey Graham from the right. For good or bad, most of our truly local elections are held at different times.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I think you mean, "having many axes leads to OK-ness"!

(I actually would be happier if I had even one axe, for I have need of one for some yard things, but that is neither here nor there, especially in regards to elections, which I also am going to be hiding from on Tuesday as much as possible...)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I meant what I wrote, but I can also mean what you wrote!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I'll be watching. I'm probably not as oversaturated as many of the rest of you; the rest of the world gets a *lot* of news about the US elections, but it is still possible to avoid it if you wish, unlike in the US. (I didn't get oversaturated with Dutch or Taiwanese elections either, due to not understanding the language well enough to understand local news or commercials.) Keeping track of the results helps me feel a little closer to my country.

It will be odd, though. There are three sets of things I care about, so I'll be watching all day: how Pennsylvania goes, because it's still my home state and I care - that will be reported fairly early on, not later than mid-morning my time; how the overall Presidential election goes, and I really don't know when that will be in the bag; how initiatives in AZ and CA go, which won't be reported until the end of their voting days; and how the overall election for Congress goes, which won't be ummarized until the end.

It's also easier to keep track of it all in that the reports will be coming in when I'm awake and at a computer, not at a time when I'm normally sleeping.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Huh, you've finally presented me with a complete "I can't understand that view." (Note that means simply that it's completely foreign to my experience, not that it's Bad or Wrong or anything like that.) I LIVE for election nights. I love watching the returns come in. I want to be there when the election gets called (or even as happened in 2000, uncalled). It goes back to my first Election Night in 1968, when I was five years old, and my parents let me stay up to watch the news until the unheard of hour of 9 p.m. I still remember being bummed that I had to go to sleep while the election was still in doubt, and being worse bummed on the bus to school the next morning when I asked my Mom who won, and she told me it was Nixon. I can't imagine going to sleep knowing that one could know (again, as opposed to 2000, where I needed to sleep, of course, between Election Day and the Supreme Court's decision a month later).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have very low tolerance for TV journalism in ordinary circumstances, and part of the reason is that the endless repetition of the same two to four points makes me want to jump through the screen and throttle somebody. This is only worse on election nights. If I curl up with New Scientist or Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Roosevelt presidency, information will flow to me in a peaceful way that doesn't make me want to scream, "Say something different!" or "Say something sensible!" or "MATH DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT!" (These could be addressed by reading bruce_schneier on making_light for my coverage, but I can skim that for the interesting bits in the morning, no problem.)

Probably it makes a difference that the first two elections in which I voted were 1996, in which I didn't have a TV or internet in my dorm room, so following the coverage was not an option and I didn't miss it, and 2000, and we all know what happened there.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Yah.

[arkuat]

I thoroughly approve of your point 2 plan. I hope I have enough self-discipline to adhere to such a plan myself, especially since it would be good for me to get to my regular job on early Wednesday morning.

As for your point 1, in Oakland we get big thick paper ballots, with broken arrows (like this: <-- --) printed next to every possible electoral choice, including the write-in slots that are provided. To vote, we use a ballpoint pen to complete the broken arrow and make it a whole arrow next to our choice (such as, for instance, No on Prop 8, or Yes for Reb Kaplan). The ballots are electronically counted by optical scanners, and then, I presume (we are neither Florida nor Ohio here on the west coast) stored for possible future recounts by optical scanning, possibly by other mechanisms.

How do you vote in, um, the southern suburbs of the Twin Cities? Last time I voted in Minnesota was in 2002, and I was so distraught about Paul Wellstone's recent death that I paid more attention to the other people in line with me at the polling place (many of whom were similarly distraught) than I did to the electoral machinery we were all lined up to use.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We use the same optical scanner methods in my precinct that dd_b describes above. Thick black line with a pen on a paper ballot, scannable but also readable by human eyes, hurrah.

In Hayward (CA) in 2001-2003, we had completely computerized voting, and they separated us out by party affiliation, so there was no way to tell that our votes had in fact registered, and it would have been extremely easy for a corrupt election judge or two to "accidentally" wipe the votes of the people likely to vote against their personal inclinations. markgritter also tried to talk to one of the election commissions with some other computer scientists from Stanford. Ask him about it sometime. It was an alarming experience.

[laurel]

I suspect I'll be going to radio silence on twitter and everywhere. I might post, but won't even try to read things because it will just be too much.

It's not that I don't care, but . . . I get too annoyed by the ways in which so many people (both professional reporters and just plain folks) talk about this stuff.