@Karoli: It’s fucking hard. Cowboy up.

@anonymous: There is no evidence linking that quote to Stalin… it’s considered a myth at this point to attribute it to him.

@scott gun: you can only get that information under certain circumstances… check this out for more: http://whovoted.net/

@messels: everyone wants to fix the system during even-numbered years divisible by four… the other years people don’t want to hear about it and certainly don’t want to pay to fix it. We attempted to modernize but Congress screwed that one up with HAVA (a law in 2002) that paid localities to upgrade but then made them do it very fast, before anything worthwhile was developed. In fact, the LA system now was meant to be a temporary system until something better was available on the market. No such device, system or innovation has emerged.

There are so many unreconcilable tensions in all of this… for example, people want usable ballot designs so things like the LA problem don’t happen. However, they also want elections systems to abide by every arbitrary rule that one of the 6 parties in California decides for their party rules. And we want counts quickly.

You should care that the people counting the votes don’t get a day off because no one does their best work under those conditions. That’s their job and not a job anyone particularly wants to grow up into. We need to make elections positions placed of pride in our society that are well-paid and for which we expect a lot of (and recognize the importance of their function). This is not low-skilled work… it’s tough and a single error in such a dependent system can mean a disaster.

Elections happen. They don’t happen perfectly. We try to learn and study them to make them better. People need to recognize the importance of the insane ballet that pulling off an election is… and they need to be willing to pay for a well-run election.

So…if you’re so educated…and so passionate and so concerned about your vote being counted…

why don’t you know who you’re affilated with? On some days, you’re a democrat, or maybe a green party or maybe an independent…oh…you just can’t remember.

If your vote to participate in the DEMOCRATIC party primary was that important to you, you might have put some effort into determining whether you belonged to the party or not. When you got your ballot, you might have called and asked “hey, am I registered Democrat?”

It’s not the job of the people at the polling station to know your party affiliation. They are just there to make sure you are registered.

Don’t you think it’s up to YOU to make sure you know what your party affiliation is? You didn’t understand the ballot but didn’t do anything about it until election day?

And this is somehow ‘the system’s’ fault?

(fwiw, I’m a registered Democrat who voted for Obama)

@ albert, just fyi, we californians were voting on state measures as well, so it was a part of the democratic process, at least to some extent. *perhaps* not so far as the upcoming presidential election is concerned…

that all being said, i’m pretty sure the entire system is designed to be confusing so that there is a reason to throw out votes. this is a development/evolution of the ‘southern strategy’ and was amazingly affective in florida during the 2000 elections, as you may recall. here’s the wiki link for your convenience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

democracy now! had a bit of coverage on super tuesday and the conversation did eventually turn to disenfranchisement. here’s the link to that discussion. http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/2/6
since you may be short on time, about 2/3 of the way through is when they touched up on the southern strategy and disenfranchisement.

it’s a little shameful that we haven’t modernized our electoral system.
the comments from “joe” that the information is on the internet really reflect the lack of motivation on our political system’s guardians, the bureaucrats such as joe as well as the actual policy makers in washington (and sacramento), to fix a system that is *obviously* flawed.

for example, how does information on a website help someone who doesn’t have internet access? how does someone even know about it? the day to day demands on each of us to process information is already huge. where’s the time suppose to come from? we’re already tied to a wage slavery system, our education system perpetuates mediocrity as ‘good enough’, and we have to deal with politicians manipulating our desires by tapping into big-themed words such as “hope” “change” (obama) or “terrorism” “WMD” (bush in 2004 and mccain et al now).

the system is flawed and it’s really embarrassing to think that we’re suppose to be some magnificent, developed nation even despite our democratic system hardly being a representation of the people. it’s a representation of a few elites and that’s how they like it. i’m not getting paranoid, conspiracy theory here. it’s just a result of the system’s design.

that all being said, joe, why should we care that the people counting the ballots won’t have a day off? that’s their job. they shouldn’t get days off when we need them most. it’s like saying, “well, you would have gotten that emergency heart transplant but we gave the surgeons the day off. sorry.” total nonsense. don’t pander to our sense of fairness. PLUS, nobody is pointing out that many of the people in this nation on the lower end of the earning spectrum work 7 days a week 350 days per year (xmas and new years off, maybe). don’t believe me? go down to the local big-box complex where there is bound to be a chilli’s, olive garden, other-standardized-corporate chain and ask the dish washers how many days a week they work…or how many different places they work. most will answer 7 days and two jobs (lunch shift at one location, dinner shift at another, etc).

peace.

In the UK the system is still more like the US system was 50+ years ago. The UK still has a party convention where all these issues like “who is the PM candidate” and “what are party platforms” get decided. The US is midway through a reform process of breaking open the closed party convention using the primaries. The rules on membership, etc. derive from that. Some states have no problem with allowing Republicans to vote on selecting Democratic policies and candidates. Other states think that this should be restricted. It depends on the state level decision makers. There is no consensus yet on what is the best balance between party insider power and public participation.

The UK and US still have general elections where everyone just votes. That’s not for another 9 months.

I recommend that you contact the registrar’s office and ask to speak with the staff that handle voter data requests. These people are typically database administrators. Tell the DBA about your concerns and questions and ask them if their data will be able to confirm whether you voted or not and whether your ballot was counted.

Chances are that you will have to wait until the 28 day certification period is complete. The data may not give you the whole story. The voter history column may count your ballot as received; say that you “voted” but not indicate whether your ballot was “counted”. The registrar DBA should be able to explain their methodology for how their history data is reported.

Finally, if you obtain a complete LA voter file with voter history columns, you can run a count query on the 2008 primary column and compare that number to the results that the county is reporting. If their is a difference between the number of people that the voter file says have voted and the number of ballots counted in the official “results,” then the registrar has some splainin to do.

As I look at the vote spread in California, it seems skewed far more than expected and seemed that way as I was watching the real-time counts come in. Since those independent voters were likely to vote for Obama, I’m wondering how many have been disenfranchised.

And in other news, we have New Mexico’s officials holding three ballot boxes overnight instead of submitting them for counting the night of the election with no notice or accountability to anyone.

How fucking hard is it to supply a ballot and count it when the voter is done? After well over 200 years, you’d think we’d have this much right.