elections

Did you vote? I did (maybe).

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 | Life, Politics, Rants | 3 Comments

I moved to a new house not that long ago. A couple of weeks back, my wife and I went to the DMV and updated our driver's licenses. While we were there, we both requested that the DMV update our voter registrations. Approximately one week ago, my wife got a card in the mail confirming her voter registration had been updated. I got... nothing. Well, that's not entirely true. I got busy fighting with HR and the insurance company trying to get my health insurance cards¹.

Then today rolls around. On a break at work, I start checking the Internet to find out where I'm supposed to go and vote tonight. While I'm doing that I run across a link allowing Iowa voters to check their voter registration. I try it out and find that my voter registration did NOT get updated. Grrrr. Tonight after dinner (roughly 6:15PM), Ariesna and I head over to the polling place to vote. I tell the person inside the door that I need the provisional ballot. She tells me to tell somebody else after I've signed in. I sign in, get in line and then tell the pollworker who has the book of names. She looks confused and refers me over to my 3rd pollworker of the evening.

Again, I get to wait around for my chance to talk to her. I explain my situation, including the bit about already talking the county auditor's office. Her eyes look a bit glazed over and she seemed pretty confused. She mumbles something and then brings me some paperwork to fill out. Then she goes to try help 3-4 other people, disappears for a while and eventually comes back to take my paperwork. I hand it over and she disappears again. I hear somebody mention that the phone in the polling place doesn't work, so apparently she's running around the building to another room to call the county auditor's office. Of course, if she could have kept track of what I'd said she wouldn't have had to do that.... Eventually she comes back, gives me one of the provisional ballots and lets me vote. Wheee!

Next year, I'm so totally going to sign up for the absentee ballot. It's just so much easier than dealing with understaffed (one of the other pollworkers mentioned they'd all been there since 6AM) & undertrained people at the polls.

¹ So far, I'm still waiting. *sigh*

Tags: elections, Politics, voting

WordPress is Web application of the year!

Monday, January 3rd, 2005 | WordPress | No Comments

I was just over at ArsTechnica, checking up on the lastest news and noticed in their
Looking back at 2004 article that WP had been declared the Web app of the year. Way to go WordPress devs!

Web application of the year

We asked forumgoers to choose the best web application or development framework of the year.

Web-based applications provide interaction for all users regardless of platform or location. If you can connect to the web, you can use it. Forums, blogs, administration tools, collaboration frameworks; there were many excellent options to choose from in 2004.

Winner: WordPress

Let's face it. Blogs are in fashion, and why not? Vanity knows no bounds, and there are some people who actually do something productive with theirs. From the influence of blogs on the coverage of the US presidential elections to every random teenager who has problems with their partner/parent/teacher/cat, blogs are out there allowing your most intimate feelings to be shared with random people at wifi hotspots. WordPress is the most prominent rising star of weblog software, completely free and with a large and active community. Styles, plugins and hacks are readily available, with problems such as comment spamming being addressed far more rapidly than competing applications.

Tags: action, applications, article, cli, comment, con, elections, hacks, home, IM, linux, Plugins, problem, quote, random, Software, spam, tea, tools, war, WordPress, work

Did Bush REALLY Win?

Monday, November 8th, 2004 | Politics | 1 Comment

Well, I gotta put this here too. I am trying to keep my political stuff mostly in the political groups, but you guys should probably know that there's a strong possibility that the elections were hacked, and that as a result we have Bush. I don't see this as a conservative or liberal issue. I see this as an integrity issue that ALL Americans should be concerned about. Our first clue should have been that the exit polls indicated almost the opposite of what happened.

For more of the above posting go give this a read.

If a post of a LiveJournal user isn't good enough for you, try these sites on for size:

For exta fun, we have a report coming out of Cincinnati of how the election officials locked out the media "citing concerns about potential terrorism."

County officials say they took the action Tuesday night for homeland security, although state elections officials said they didn't know of any other Ohio county that closed off its elections board. Media organizations protested, saying it violated the law and the public's rights. The Warren results, delayed for hours because of long lines that extended voting past the scheduled close of polls, were part of the last tallies that helped clinch President Bush's re-election.

Call me a crackpot if you will, but I'm siding with the media on this one. There was no transparency in that count and the public's right to know was violated by the Warren county election officials. Now let's take a look at a couple of other snippets from the article:

A representative of The Associated Press, which had stringers at every Ohio board of elections site, said no such election-night access problems were reported outside of Warren County.
...
County Prosecutor Rachel Hutzel said commissioners "were within their rights" to restrict building access.
Having reporters and photographers around could have interfered with the count, she said.

Does it strike anybody else as odd that no other county in Ohio made any sort of notice about similar concerns? Or that not one other county had a problem with letting the media observe the count? According to Ms. Hutzel's biography, posted on Warren County's official website, she has been both the President and Treasurer of the Republican Women’s Club. Ms. Hutzel, if you don't mind; please explain exactly how the media could have interfered?

Still not convinced that this election stinks? Go to Black Box Voting and see what they have to say about the security and tamperability of America's electronic voting machines.

Tags: action, article, cli, con, Dreams, elections, heh, home, IM, journal, law, pain, photo, PHP, problem, quote, voting, war