Morning Ed: Politics {2016.10.04.T}
The creator of Pepe the Frog is voting Hillary and Katy Perry and Madonna are… whatever.
Toby Young is skeptical that a broad-left anti-Tory coalition is going to succeed. Which would be good for the Tories, because they may be heading into a civil war over Brexit.
Go, Maine, go! Next up, primaries!
Terrell Jermaine Starr explains how elderly black women may put Hillary Clinton in office.
Hillary Clinton is going after my vote so hard I am getting to the point that I would feel bad not giving to her.
See, computerized voting never actually seemed like a good idea to me.
Given that it’s one of the Trumpiest states in the country, Democrats holding the governorship of West Virginia would be quite the accomplishment.
I haven’t dismissed any friendships, or had any friends dismiss me, over Trump support. But there are some relationships that aren’t going to be the same.
Katy Perry: I’d vote for naked Katy Perry! Confession: I’d vote for any reasonably attractive naked woman for Pres if they campaigned and visited my door. (Nicole Kidman Pleaaaaaase! or Emma Stone.)
Dismissed friendships: I wouldn’t call a bunch of DC insiders who work together “friends”. Real friends don’t shaft each other like that over supporting a candidate. Now, being in the DC insider’s club is different. If you’re in the game you play to win and punish those who side against you, which is what this was all about. Getting screwed is expected, or should be, and I don’t have any sympathy. However, those who’ve been dismissed have the opportunity, should the wheel turn round, to get some payback-I would expect nothing less, and neither should those that did the original dismissal.Report
I’m pretty sure I have zero friends who support Trump.
I mean, that should surprise no one. But still, I place a high value of friendship and loyalty, but not an infinite value. Other things also matter. My question would be, if someone I know supports Trump, like for real, then what kind of loyalty can they have to me?
It is this: while Trump has not hitched his wagon to anti-trans hate the way that (for example) Cruz did, he certainly is no friend to LGBT people. At best he’s been willing to profit from our media presence. He has said what he needed to say when he needed to say it. That said, during his campaign he has gradually switched more toward an anti-LGBT footing, for all the obvious reasons (namely, the Republican party has effectively become a hate group).
So yeah, it’s the courts and the legislator and all of that. I understand (to some degree) the anger of the wwc, but Trump is a human trainwreck. He is accelerationism. He promises a world where me and mine cannot thrive.
So, fuck that guy.
Vote Clinton. Vote third-party. Stay home. Whatever. If you vote Trump — really I cannot be your friend.Report
Ideological purity feels so good, doesn’t it? The lovely purity of righteous uncomplicated hatred.Report
It’s certainly not ideological purity, inasmuch as there is a fair amount of disagreement in my social circles about economic policy and such. Certainly I have plenty of friends who are “pro market capitalism” (as such) along with plenty who are further to the left.
On the issues of naked anti-LGBT bigotry — I mean, yeah, I have zero room for those who hate me. Should I?
I have no friends who are literally Nazis. Likewise I have zero friends who support Trump. That’s not ideological purity. It’s just a rejection of the manifestly terrible.
My point, the republicans literally crossed the Godwin’s-law-stops-working line with Trump.Report
In the two years of this election season, I can think of only one person who might be a Trump voter in my circle. Everyone else is decidedly pro HRC or anti Trump (ie HRC). I’ll never ask if this friend will vote for Trump because I don’t care. His vote decision is irrelevant, especially in a state that will go for Hillary @ 90% or so. I’ve only been asked who I’ll vote for once. No one in my circle is going to change their mind. None of us are interesting in trying to convince each other either way re voting. It’s a non issue.
V, you see acceleration. If you’re going over the cliff at 100 mph or 80mph does it matter that much if you’re not able to get off? Screw it. I’m enjoying the ride while I can.Report
I’ve heard it said, many times, that real life Washington isn’t “The West Wing,” It’s “Veep.” With less attractive people.
If you haven’t seen “Veep,” think “Seinfeld” or “Larry David Show,” set in Washington, with full profanity. I watched three episodes, found each and every character so awfully self-centered, petty, and just plain pointlessly mean to one another that I lost sight of the humor and gave up on it.
If that’s what real Washington is like, then that goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so difficult for Congress to do much of anything.Report
Trump will at least fix the “less attractive people” part.Report
Well, I will say that if Trump wins, the First Lady will be the hottest first lady ever….
Of course that’s not saying much…Report
Jackie Kennedy was gorgeous.Report
Meh.Report
I find Michelle Obama quite attractive. As @mike-schilling points out, Jackie Kennedy was also very easy on the eye while she lived in the White House and had a smart fashion sense too.
These women were a little old for my demographic group by the time they got to be First Ladies, but as ladies of a certain age go, both Roz Carter and Nancy Reagan were on the good side of the good looks power curve. (Recall that Nancy Davis was attractive enough to make it in Hollywood before she married Ronald Reagan and they went into politics.)Report
Oh, I totally agree about those former first ladies being attractive back in the day. I was talking about current first ladies. And, no, I don’t find Jackie all that attractive and I sure don’t find Michelle Obama attractive. But hey, everyone has their own preferences.Report
Then you should check out that website of Eleanor Roosevelt’s girl-on-girl action.Report
Link?Report
Sorry.
Julian Assange was supposed to reveal it this morning, but totally let me down.Report
I agree with Mike. Also, Melania is a woman who made herself more unattractive with plastic surgery.Report
That was more McCain’s wife, who permanently disfigured herself with plastic surgery “to make her look younger”Report
Melania hasn’t quite gotten that far, but she looks like she’s started to get the same cat surgery as Maureen Ponderosa.Report
Not necessarily.
I mean, they’ll probably be more momentarily attractive, for the brief time before they say something. At least for me, ugly words coming out of a person’s mouth are generally enough to instantly cancel any initial attraction I might have felt on the basis of a person’s looks.Report
It’s like watching the World Series back when Tim McCarver was broadcasting it. Turn the sound off.Report
See also: Al Michaels; Jimmy Roberts; Johnny Miller.
Just keep yer traps shut boys and look pretty for the camera. Please!Report
Bob Costas…
(All of whom work for NBC. Hmmm…)Report
Joe Buck is worse than them all.Report
DC is the town where we had a Presidential Impeachment because of fucking seating arrangements.
Totally not kidding on that.
(of course DC isn’t the west wing.)Report
IIRC the only reason for the impeachment colorably relatable to seating arrangements was the President being seated too closely to where an intern was kneeling.Report
Yeah, well, you weren’t in DC at the time, now, were you?
People who weren’t in DC missed a LOT. (actually, some people in DC missed a lot — like what the term “soccer mom” actually meant)Report
“the term “soccer mom” actually meant”
Do tell. Inquiring minds demand to know!Report
Moms having sex with the boys on their sons’ soccer teams, and then getting pregnant because of it.
Naturally, way back in 92 when the politicos misunderstood, they started a fad about “suburban kids playing soccer” which led to more soccer moms.
… people think “older people liking younger people” is just about men and girls. It ain’t.Report
IIRC the seating arrangement slight resulted in a government shutdown, not an impeachment.
The impeachment over a mistress was led by a Speaker who found the time to conduct the proceeding while balancing his own mistress.
Who was replaced by a Speaker who didn’t have a mistress, only young boys.Report
You’re thinking Airforce One, right?Report
And the Speaker with the mistress divorced his wife to marry her, then divorced her to marry his next mistress.
He is now one of three advisers to a candidate who has kept three mistresses in turn, along with the other adviser who has had several mistresses, and another adviser who harassed young women under his employ for sexual favors.
This lecherous brain trust of wrinkled old goats has now announced their clever strategy of using the original interns affair as an attack against the one person who was the innocent party in all of this.
No seriously.
I’m not making this up.Report
This is true, but on a different part of the timeline. It was the first mistress that became the second wife that he divorced during the impeachment, and the second mistress that became his wife is still his wife.
His first two marriages each lasted about twenty years, so his current wife has roughly four more years until the expiration date.Report
She’s probably hoping that he reaches his expiration date first.Report
The beauty of it is that he has two Catholic annulments for his two previous marriages.
Apparently he was very, very, distracted every time he said “yes” beforeReport
That and perjury, yes.Report
An accusation of perjury, that is.Report
To which he eventually entered into a plea deal.
But plea deals don’t mean you’re guilty amirite?Report
Because the Democrats in West Virginia are people like Joe Manchin.Report
I think it was Nob Akimoto that said somewhere that African American women are the base of the Democratic party, and he is right.Report
To err is human; to really foul things up you need a computer.
I have no idea how the idea of computerized voting came to infect the minds of so many officials. I think the best voting system by far is pieces of paper and pencils, counted by hand, by volunteers, in a process one can come in to watch, and actually understand. The more advanced computers get, the worse they get for election handling – sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable magic, and magic being the last thing you want near your election.Report
I’m all for paper ballot with scanners, that the voter can feed immediately at the polling place (and thus if it cannot be read, it can be fixed directly by the voter).
The point is, there is a paper ballot. Recounts are possible. If things go to court, a physical artifact exists to validate the electronic process.
At the same time, you get fast, fairly accurate results. This is good.
Best of both worlds.
I recall after the 2000 mess, Florida wanted electronic voting with no paper record. That was madness.Report
That’s exactly the system we have in California.Report
I don’t think it is the best of both worlds – it’s the best of computer voting, and some of the benefit of purely physical voting, but not its best by a long shot. It’s also not shockingly dreadful the way other computerized voting systems are (and is what my city uses for municipal elections).
Yes, there’s a paper record, so you can (and must) do randomized manual recounts of some percentage of polling places, which if any fail will trigger the full manual recount of the whole works – and hopefully a serious financial penalty from the voting software vendor. But it’s still putting part of the electoral process into a black box, subject to programming errors, hacking, botched software release control, etc. And, just as importantly, perceived as being subject to those things.
That is, I think it’s not only important that the voting lead accurately to the given results, but that any citizen can observe all parts of that process and satisfy themselves that it has been the case in this particular election. Even if there are no result-altering bugs in the vote counting software, even if no hackers alter the results in swing ridings, we can’t witness anything that would disprove it to our full satisfaction.Report
Doesn’t the full manual recount with that system disprove that? Or do you mean ahead of time? Because even with a full manual initial count, a malicious person could alter things as well.Report
The full manual count would prove accuracy only if one takes place – which presumably only happens if there’s evidence of inaccuracy in the initial samples. If you manually count a random 2% of polls and find nothing to trigger the full recount, all you really know is that 2% of the polls were accurately counted.
I mean, Statistical significance, etc. etc., as long as the polls to be recounted are chosen publicly, by a method even non-experts can understand as random (rolling dice on incredibly boring live TV in front of the world’s most bored studio audience maybe).
But that’s not the same as knowing that every single ballot was counted, in public, by multiple volunteers, using no technology more advanced than eyeglasses and electric light, which you don’t even have to understand to know that they’re not hiding a tricky techy way of fixing the count.Report
The computer science on this is, iirc, fairly straightforward. You don’t need a full paper trail if you:
1. Accept a voter’s votes at the kiosk
2. Print a receipt of that vote as collected on the machine for the voter to verify
3. Print a receipt of another random voter’s vote as collected on the machine (ID number and positions voted for).
4. Make available to the public a database of votes with ballot ID (but no name or demographic info) and votes as recorded towards the official results.
So if your vote is changed, you have paper to prove it. If you throw yours away, there’s no guarantee that someone else won’t have the paper to prove it. And the odds of a meaningful vote-shift going undetected approach zero.Report
I’d have to think about that some more. Some initial thoughts
– Providing a receipt does away with the whole ‘secret ballot’ thing. A pretty important consideration.
– How do you know the receipt printed in 3 was randomly selected? How do you know it was cast by a human?
– If you’re an early riser, and are the second person to vote on that particular machine, the vote you’re shown is not random, but compromises voter #1’s privacy.
– How do you know that all the votes shown in 4 were cast by humans and not made up by inscrutable software processes?Report
Compared to which:
– all the polling places cardboard boxes are set up in the morning, and checked for emptiness
– voter’s identity is checked, they are issued a serial numbered ballot, number recorded along with their name
– they fill out the ballot
– the serial number piece goes in one box, the vote piece in another
– everything is counted at the end of voting, by hand.
– the number of vote parts matches the number of serial number parts
– no serial number parts are unaccounted for
There is no specialist knowledge needed to understand the evidence that everything is above board. You know all the votes were cast by humans because they are physical pieces of paper put in previously empty boxes, by humans, before witnesses.Report
You really shouldn’t link individually identifable voter information to a cast ballot.
The way we do it here-
Begining of day
-verification of empty ballot box, verification of counter index on ballot scanner, verification that tamper seal on ballot scanner thumb drive compartment
– seperate tablet computers with voter registration lists (hooked up to each other via physical cable, never to internet)
– vote start form fed through ballot scanner to initialize it.
Voting process
– voter goes to registration table, states name (shows ID under current law and court rulings), has name checked off list, handed paper card to give to ballot table worker
– worker at ballot table takes card hands paper ballot to voter, voter goes to privacy screen to mark ballot
– voter then goes to ballot scanner, puts ballot in ballot scanner, ballot is tabulated in ballot scanner computer, paper goes into locked bin (directly underneath scanner)
– voter gets I voted sticker and future voter sticker for their kids.
End of day-
-Close out form is fed thru ballot scanner. Ballot scanner produces paper tape of all contest results and total votes cast. The’s are called into the county offices for them to update the website.
– forms are filled out (by hand) to reconcile ballots cast per ballot scanner with number of voters that showed up per registration computers (they should be equal, also factoring in the ADA machine which is a seperate process)
– all the paper ballots and forms are packed and sealed with everyone signatures over the seal. The ballot box scanner thumb drive is also taken out and put in a sealed envelope. Everything is then taken to the county offices, where it’s all stored like the Ark of the convenent unless someone wants a recount.Report
What I’m describing is a two-part ballot paper with a perforated strip, serial number on one part, voter’s choice on the other.
Serial number is recorded alongside the voter’s name when they’re given the ballot. Presumably there’s a process for recording if someone wrecks their ballot and needs another one issued, but I’ve never seen how it’s handled.
The serial numbers go in one box, the voter’s choice goes in another. The number of papers in the two boxes has to match, and the serial numbers have to be accounted for by voter name – but you can’t re-associate a voter’s choice to the serial number, so the voter’s privacy is preservedReport
We have to account for every paper ballot anyway, blank or filled in. I don’t know what serialization will provide – except to be a vulnerability to privacy.Report
I was mistaken on how the serial numbers are handled!
The number is removed and destroyed, not kept separately. The purpose is to make sure that the voter returns from the voting booth with the same ballot they were handed a moment ago.
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=rec/tech/tec&document=p7&lang=eReport
Frankly, I’d be okay with computer voting if and only if — it printed out a paper tally for each vote that was voter readable, that each voter had to verify it (final step) and deposit it, and there was a random audit of, say, 1% of voting precincts each election. (1% of each State’s, not 1% nationally).
If the little piece of paper doesn’t match the computer records, a much more thorough audit is conducted.Report
This is pretty close to where I stand. I’m sorry the trees have to die, but they do. Using technology to speed things up can be good, though. Use digital for preliminary numbers but then count the paper (in all preferably, or a sampling at least).Report
Hemp-based paper!Report
and soy based inkReport
Same here. Electronic voting, paper record.
And why in the blue blazes would anyone base such a machine on Windows?Report
I suspect that there’s an expensive certification process that MS was willing to pay for, but not Apple or any Linux vendor. Why are there only about four software vendors that you can buy a conforming food stamp (now SNAP) administration system from?Report
The important thing is that there be a system where we have reason to believe that it *COULD* have been manipulated by one, maybe two, people.
If it requires 30-40 people to manipulate? That’s good. One of them will eventually blab. If someone believes that a system that requires 30-40 people to manipulate got manipulated, we know that they’re a crank.
If it only requires one, maybe two?
That’s enough to undercut the entire system.Report
https://jezebel.com/the-team-of-men-behind-rachel-brewson-the-fake-woman-w-1787270300
An interesting read, in light of the recent Elena Ferrante story. It’s OK for journalists to dig into a woman’s history and uncover the fact that her identity is secret…except for when it’s a horrible imposition and we should have left well enough alone, I guess?Report
A while ago I mentioned that in the current BridgeGate! tiral both the defense AND the prosecution agreed that Christie knew about the lane closures while they were happening, and how that boded poorly for his future as an un-indicted servant of the public good. Now things have turned even worse for him: Key Bridgegate Witness [Wildstein] Claims Christie Discussed A Cover-Up Plan With Cuomo
Things don’t look good. As oneof his heroes might say, “he’s going down, down, down, down.”Report
Trump really wanted Christie as his VP. Can you imagine if he was going to be debating tonight?Report
It would certainly test Americans’ seemingly boundless ability to eat s*** and grin.Report