November 10, 2000
Friday, October 15, 2004, 11:30 PM
NYT Headlines: "President Could Be Picked Without Florida". Good thing too, considering the mess we have this year with the hurricanes taking away mailboxes so that folks can't get their absentee ballots!

Also, "Close Vote Uncovered Flaws, Experts Say". The lead paragraph:

"The controversy swirling over Florida ballots in the still-uresolved presidential election has drawn back the curtain on what election experts have long been saying: that the American voting system is no system at all."

On Novebmber 10th, a county-by-county recount of the vote in Florida was underway, to be completed by Tuesday, Nov. 15th. They were supposed to have been done the night of the 10th, according to a request by Florida's Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, but some counties weren't able to finish by that deadline.

Meanwhile, "in Austin, Nashville and Tallahassee, the two sides accused each other of politicizing the Florida situation..."

Well, we're certainly above that this year, aren't we, boys and girls? Glad to hear it!

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Voter Registration -- Cheap, Fast...
Friday, October 15, 2004, 10:43 PM
I went down to the Alameda County courthouse today to change my voter registration, so that I'd be able to vote in Oakland, where I now live, instead of in Alameda, where I moved to by crap shoot when I left Montreal.

In the software industry we have a saying: cheap, fast, or good, choose two. That is, you can have a piece of software developed cheap and fast, or fast and good, or good and cheap, but not all three.

So back to the voter registration. It was fast: 5 minutes, and 4 of those minutes were me waiting for the woman at the window to dig up the little voter guide and sample ballot booklets. It was cheap, in fact, free to me. So was it good? Or will I wind up at the polling place being given one of those provisional ballots which are discarded about 95% of the time, or which only list the statewide and national races, as they do in a number of places?

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November 9, 2000
Thursday, October 14, 2004, 10:54 PM
It was like having an upchuck-in-your-bed-cause-you-can't-make-it-to-the-toilet hangover for the second day in a row. We woke up to the unbelievable: no one knew who won. Here's the headline of the day: "Bush Barely Ahead of Gore in Florida as Recount Holds Key to the Election".

Best phone conversation excerpt:

"Mr. Bush told Mr. Gore that his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, had just assured him that FLorida was his, according to Gore aides.

'Let me explain something,' Mr. Gore said. 'Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this.' "

This year, it seems that the CEO of Diebold is the ultimate authority.

An editorial by Akhil Reed Amar called for the abolition of the electoral college. Here we are, four years later, with the same bad system, oh, except that now we have deployed many more electronic voting machines where a recount becomes nigh on impossible.

It had been over a century since the last time that no one knew who one for over a day after the polls closed. Perhaps this will become the new trend: election by lawsuit, to be determined sometime in late December. It could be worse. It could be election at gunpoint...


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Poll watching
Thursday, October 14, 2004, 10:19 PM
Yesterday I signed up to do poll watching. Or perhaps I'll be taking hotline calls, or be part of some mobile response team. These are some of the many options at the "Voter Protection Center"; see voteprotect.org for more information and to sign up yourself. The software lets you look at your task list, see who else is going out in your area, and all kinds of other goodies. Unfortunately, the only three tasks I seem to have are to fill out the three skillset questionnaires, and I did that already. I should enjoy my boredom; it'll probably get plenty exciting in a couple of weeks.

And speaking of polls, this year the Voter News Service is out of business. Instead, the AP will be the only source for vote counts. Don't f*ck it up, guys! (The full story is here.)


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Nov 8, 2000 -- the Day After
Wednesday, October 13, 2004, 09:39 PM
The NYTimes front page headline: "Bush Appears to Defeat Gore; Hairbreadth Electoral Vote; Hilary Clinton Goes to Senate".

The subtitle to that article: "Florida is decisive". How true that was, we would only learn later.

A poll conducted by the Voter News Service showed that about a fourth of the voters "rated honesty a more important consideration than experience or an understanding of the complex issues of the day... those people tended to vote for Mr. Bush".

What will this year's exit polls show?

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