Greg: Marilee, you might be right on the cold, heat, and rain... but damn it, if I see a tornado, I'm gonna run.
Marilee's right. Not quite a protest, but when we had our tornados in the DC area a couple of months ago, I drove past what looked like a ground-breaking ceremony for a church in Fairfax County on my way home from work.
Now that's faith.
Campaign people are work hard, play hard people. In general, if you're out on a campaign, you just don't sleep. It's like permanent college, complete with the dramas and intrigues, romantic and otherwise, even across party lines. Going out and playing with others is what gets campaign operatives jobs in the future. For the people the Washington Post serves (Hill staffers and campaign people, current or former), not looking after yourself, when campaigns last about three months on average, would strike them as nuts. Because when November rolls around and Dean loses, they're out in the cold in a bad economy.
Playing hard is just as important as working hard if you want to do campaign work permanently, full-time, but if the Dean people don't care, that's their business.
Patrick had to know people would jump on the milk thing, right?
"Our organic milk has a pour spout on the top which I'm a little conflicted about - on the one hand, it's not necessary and it's not a green use of resources - on the other, it's wonderfully convenient, and it keeps the milk fresh.
Well, you asked."
I would have appreciated such a milk spout this afternoon when I went to my local hole in the wall lunch place for chocolate milk, got it back to my office, opened it, took a swig and realized that my mouth was full of milk chunks. And it wasn't past date. Yuck.
Take the California example again. When one is assigned an absentee ballot, you bet your rear end they record who that ballot was issued to, when and what ballot number was on it. When you submit the absentee, you retain a ballot stub, which also has the serial number. If you were so inclined, you could then call the clerk-recorder and be sure that your ballot had been received and your vote recorded.
They do the same with voter registration forms, which is why when you register yourself as someone able to collect voter registrations, they write down what serial numbers they give you so if a bunch of fradulent requests come in with those numbers, they know who to arrest. Not so consequently, when you register with someone other than the clerk-recorder (tables in front of supermarkets and post offices come to mind), those forms are photocopied by the person taking the registration. The same is done with absentee ballot requests.
Yet more reasons why your vote is not as secret as you think.
Slightly off the topic of prison camps, but related to the disenfranchisement of voters, NPR reported this morning that Bush, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, et. al. receive 80% of their donations from people giving $200 or more. Dean and Clark received 54% of their donations from people giving $200 or LESS. That's really saying something considering that Dean has raised ~$12 million this way (~$25 million total), primarily on the internet.
Tell that to the internet whiners.
See politicalmoneyline.com for full contribution totals for all candidates.
Let me take my comment (on the thread below) and Adam's a bit further with this bit of information:
After the election, it is possible to obtain how people of various parties voted in each precinct. Therefore, if there is one Democrat in a very small absentee precinct, you can then match up the voter to how they voted by looking at your lists of registered voters. In fact, I've done it, mainly for amusement value. Granted, it doesn't work in areas with very large populations, but I suppose if you were very determined, you could at least make some educated guesses by watching polling places, particularly when you have divided your volunteers according to precincts so they get to know individual voters.
All this is perfectly legal. There are also illegal, unethical methods of obtaining information, which might involve an inside job of some sort, but there are protections against such things. However, one can (and does, one when is campaign staff) legally obtain quite enough personal information (name, age, phone number, address, stated political party, precinct number, I've even seen lists with social security numbers) and voting information about various voters that it would make probably a good portion of the population nervous if they were aware of it. Think about campaigning somewhere like Brentwood--ever wonder where those star maps people get their information?
At least in California, you can decline to state your political party and phone numbers are optional, but then you are potentially hampering the campaign efforts of a candidate you'd like to see elected by limiting staff's ability to gather information; information they use to target staff and volunteer time to vulnerable precincts and money to areas that require more intensive media buys.
Campaigns collect that data all the time. Precinct watchers (employees or volunteers on a campaign) go to polling places and see how many Republicans, Democrats or others have voted at a given polling place. That information is used during Get Out the Vote efforts so areas that have low turn-outs can be targetted by phone bankers and precinct walkers over the course of the day. Poll workers have to give an official campaign representative that information. It's the law.
After the elections, results are tabulated by precinct, giving a campaign an accurate picture of who voted for whom and where, information which is then used to target certain neighborhoods in future campaigns.
What I'm saying is that whether they use computerized voting linked to Access or someone manually counts votes for various people, information on precincts and parties, etc. gained via voting machines of whatever type is used for relational purposes now, with or without computers.
As to whether or not data is manipulatable, I have done a lot of poll-watching and frequently when a paper ballot is submitted, voters will hand their ballot to the specially trained polling place worker, who then sticks it in a box, often after the voter turns his or her back and walks away. In the middle of the day, there is no one else around and those ballots could go absolutely anywhere if no one is watching. High tech games or low tech games, no solution is without the opportunity for corruption. Don't even get me started on absentee ballots, which can't even be addressed by computer voting systems, the data from which is analyzed for weeks before the polls even close.
This information refers to California election laws and procedures. I am not as well versed on what happens in other states.
Oh boy. I use Access for my association's mailing list. Don't laugh. It was better than the 5x8 cards we had when I started. Besides, we're poor and it comes with Windows Pro. However, those two reasons are the principal ones for my using Access. If we could afford better or if I hadn't needed to move our data immediately into some electronic format, I would have done it differently.
When it comes to not whether someone gets their newsletter, but whether someone's vote gets counted, I think we can afford better.
Oh boy. I use Access for my association's mailing list. Don't laugh. It was better than the 5x8 cards we had when I started. Besides, we're poor and it comes with Windows Pro. However, those two reasons are the principal ones for my using Access. If we could afford better or if I hadn't needed to move our data immediately into some electronic format, I would have done it differently.
When it comes to not whether someone gets their newsletter, but whether someone's vote gets counted, I think we can afford better.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 3 |
| 2003 | 8 |
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