What might go wrong tomorrow

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From Ed Felten…

Long lines to vote: Polling places will be strained by the number of voters. In some places the wait will be long – especially where voting requires the use of machines. Many voters will be willing and able to wait, but some will have to leave without casting votes. Polls will be kept open late, and results will be reported later than expected, because of long lines.

Registration problems: Quite a few voters will arrive at the polling place to find that they are not on the voter rolls, because of official error, or problems with voter registration databases, or simply because the voter went to the wrong polling place. New voters will be especially likely to have such problems. Voters who think they should be on the rolls in a polling place can file provisional ballots there. Afterward, officials must judge whether each provisional voter was in fact eligible, a time-consuming process which, given the relative flood of provisional ballots, will strain official resources.

Voting machine problems: Electronic voting machines will fail somewhere. This is virtually inevitable, given the sheer number of machines and polling places, the variety of voting machines, and the often poor reliability and security engineering of the machines. If we’re lucky, the problems can be addressed using a paper trail or other records. If not, we’ll have a mess on our hands.

How serious the mess might be depends on how close the election is. If the margin of victory is large, as some polls suggest it may be, then it will be easy to write off problems as “minor” and move on to the next stage in our collective political life. If the election is close, we could see a big fight. The worse case is an ultra-close election like in 2000, with long lines, provisional ballots, or voting machine failures putting the outcome in doubt.

Let’s hope the opinion polls are right. The omens are not good on the voting machine front.

Drop the CiC cliche

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Terrific Glenn Greenwald piece in Salon.com arguing that the modern craze for preferring to the US President as “Commander in Chief” is not only unconstitutional but dangerous.

If I could be granted one small political wish, it would be the permanent elimination of this widespread, execrable Orwellian fetish of reverently referring to the President as “our commander in chief.” And Biden’s formulation here is a particularly creepy rendition, since he’s taunting opponents of Obama that, come Tuesday, they will be forced to refer to him as “our commander in chief Barack Obama” (Sarah Palin, in the very first speech she delivered after being unveiled as the Vice Presidential candidate, said of John McCain: “that’s the kind of man I want as our commander in chief,” and she’s been delivering that same line in her stump speech ever since).

The CiC usage has been assiduously promoted by George W Bush as a way of boosting his view of untramelled presidential power (the so-called ‘unitary executive’ doctrine). After all, in the military, the CiC is someone who must be obeyed. And that’s fine in the armed forces. But the president is a civilian who happens to have been elected to the highest office in the land. His authority is constitutional, not military. If George Bush ordered me to do anything I would tell him to get stuffed — unless I worked for the executive branch of the US government (where he really is the ultimate Boss of Bosses). And so should every American citizen.

Rip van Winklies

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I’m astonished by the vox pops that journalists are doing in the US as they interview ‘undecided’ voters. Time and time again one hears people whining about Obama that they “don’t really know anything about him”. On what planet have these people been living for the past year? I know that most voters aren’t terribly interested in politics, but this is ludicrous. Does it mean that they can’t think of a respectable way of explaining why they’re not going to vote for a black candidate?

Crashed and burned

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Robert Winder has a lovely essay in the Guardian about Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff. How does it read now, in the light of Bush, Iraq and thWall Street maelstrom? He concludes that

The Right Stuff is now best read as an elegy – a remembrance of vanished times. It describes a place and a mood that have crashed and burned. The seeds of this melancholy may already have been in place when the book was published – Wolfe was describing the early 60s from the vantage point of the late 70s, after all. But he was still able to work in an optimistic, fizzing spirit that has now quite dissolved: no one writes pop songs about astronauts the way that Bowie/Elton John/Pink Floyd and company once did. A book that once juddered with thoughts of the future now comes suffused with the past. Nostalgia for the 60s usually involves thoughts of free love, raw music and ditzy drugs, not the panic attacks inspired by Sputnik and the missile testing in Arizona and Florida. Wolfe was thrilled to find such subjects, and had superb, pyrotechnic fun with them. Who would have thought, only a generation later, that his eager, loop-the-loop prose would seem so sad?

He’s right. Sigh.

Recession is no time to abandon innovation

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I was struck by this quote in an interesting NYTimes piece:

“In the middle of the 1970s, when we were having a big economic downturn, both Apple and Microsoft were founded. Creative people don’t care about the time or the season or the state of the economy; they just go out and do their thing.”

Google pays peanuts for pole position

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This morning’s Observer column…

Is there such a thing as a ‘win-win’ situation? Journalistic cynicism says no. What the phrase usually means is that some people get more than they deserve and others get less – but not so little that they scream blue murder. The big puzzle about the ‘ground-breaking settlement’ announced last week between Google and its legal opponents, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, is whether it really is – as all parties claim – a victory for everyone…

The Bookseller magazine picked up on this piece and posted a good summary.

Palin’s energy policy

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Lovely cartoon in current issue of the New Yorker. It shows a lot of glum airline passengers thronging a departure lounge. Outside on the tarmac can be seen lots of grounded planes. There’s a notice saying “Please be patient. We are drilling for fuel.”