K-Squared Ramblings

Line Items for 2008-11-05: More Election

• Going to bed. Very glad to see Obama elected. Disappointed that Prop 8 looks like it might pass. #
• Wait… 3 MILLION mail-in & provisional ballots remain to be counted in CA? Why on earth are they calling ANY race yet? #
• Surprised to find no jokes online using the pun “Anvil of Cron,” just typos. There’s always S*P’s Google Crom: http://tinyurl.com/5vq8ox #
• More on the 2.6-3 MILLION mail-in & provisional ballots still to be counted in California: http://tinyurl.com/57bwln #

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Line Items for 2008-11-04: Election Day

• It’s like raaaaaain/on Election Day. #
• This morning’s voting experience: http://kelson.livejournal.com/107295.html #
• #votereport #good Only 30 minute wait, no problems with machine around 7am in Orange County, CA. No idea what it’s like now, though. #
• Voted! Shorter line than expected. #
• Voting freebies: Might hit Ben & Jerry’s, but don’t see much point in a plain coffee at Starbucks. Maybe if they offered a mocha. #
• Whoa… my tweet from my phone from 4 hours ago just showed up! #
• Ah, this would explain the 4-hour delay on my “I Voted!” tweet: http://tinyurl.com/5wwt5s #
• Wow… 38% of registered voters in Los Angeles County had cast ballots by noon. http://tinyurl.com/5mntos #
• Deep pink clouds at sunset. Camera turns them orange. #

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Uh, that’s a negative

The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:

It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!

On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.

The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.

As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.

I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.

Vote!

If you live in California and you’re a registered voter: vote!

If you like the initiatives on the ballot, vote them in.

If you don’t like them, vote them out.

If you’re disgusted with the way the initiative process has been subverted by the very political machines and special interest groups it was supposed to circumvent, protest it by voting them down, not by abstaining.