On voting

I get to comment on voting because I tried a new (to me) method here in the District. Well actually I voted on electronic machines in the primary too, but that was a light test and didn't highlight the problems. As someone who voted on a touchscreen machine with a voter verified paper audit trail I can verify that the paper audit trail is not worth much. At least speaking as the voter I had to trust that it was recording the right thing because I could barely read it and it scrolled too fast to do so anyway.

I think the bigger problem is that the electronic machines are clunky and expensive and you can't scale them and people don't know how to run them. Long line? Too bad, we only have six machines at this polling place and some of them are set for different precincts. Now if you have paper ballots that's no problem. Set up some more tables on the other side of the gym and voila more voting stations. Everyone from the same precinct? No problem. You can fill out any ballot at that table.

Now electronic machines do have a couple of advantages. They can have big clear font and accommodations for people with visual impairments. Most importantly I think they can help avoid certain voting errors like overvoting (where you vote for more than the allowable number of candidates in a race), undervoting (not voting in a given race or measure, of course you don't have to vote in every race), and just plain messing up a paper ballot. All of those situations lead to a person's vote not counting.

But in my opinion those aren't good enough reasons to use electronic machines. They flat didn't work very well in the recent election here in DC. I suspect their expense is likely to keep poll administrators from having the funding for really good paper ballots too.

I think the long lines that discourage people from voting at all are a much worse problem. Those wait times (up to 4 hours during some of the early voting periods, and I heard directly from people who waited more than an hour on election day) prevent more people from voting than would conceivably lose their votes due to ballot errors.

So in the future I'm going to register as a permanent absentee. I've tried the voting machine thing and I don't like it. Despite the civic fun of going to a physical polling place I think Oregon's civilized vote-by-mail system is a much better way to run an election that really eliminates artificial barriers to voting. And I think our record on voter fraud issues is pretty good too. Plus there's a paper trail. What's not to like?

If you want more commentary on the concerns regarding electronic voting machines, here's a piece by Brad Plummer on the Washington Post. Generally I think the concerns of deliberate electronic fraud are probably pretty low. But given what I saw in DC I'm more concerned about the machines just messing up on accident and people not realizing it and not knowing how to fix them.

I wanted to analyze voter turnout in the context of electoral votes but I couldn't find the data easily. So that's going to have to wait until I get around to copying each state's numbers off the Huffington Post. In the meantime here's a factoid for fun: Voter turnout was 126 million, about 93 million eligible citizen did not vote.  Apparently the hotshots at the Center for the Study of the American Electorate put out a report but I guess they only gave it to reporters since I can't find a copy online. As an interested data geek I don't approve. What good is your research if you don't share it? They are at American University if you want to give them a bad time too. And no they don't get hyperlinks because they don't have any recent information on their webpage.

I bake for hurricanes

As you know Sandy visited last weekend. I meant to post about it sooner, but here's some really brief info. Maybe more later? Anyway no problems for me. I stayed home from work for two days and had to mop water off my balcony, but that was about all. Just lots of wind and rain.

So I made monkey bread!

It's the sticky, gooey one. I figured I shouldn't pour butter and sugar over the whole batch so I made a normal loaf too. Then I shared it with the neighbors which was a good excuse to meet people.

Here's a Sandy shot from my room. You really can't tell much about it other than cloudy.

So that was about all. Go look at the NASA satellite photos. They are way cooler.