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Local participation in what generally turned out to be open gripe
session by those who knew that it would be held and aired twice. Not only did citizens speak, but they engaged in open discussions with council. It was great! A few hours before there was a death in my rescue family of friends. I stayed a few hours before taking off, without speaking at-large, but to staff and council. A lot of people are interested in a hand count to audit Hillary's, including our city clerk. So did Mary Eberle, at least to clerk Skitt. [[ Mary - there was a good reason to leave you with Valeria in the hall. She gets to meet someone working in the trenches on elections reform. She's interested. That is exactly what I was hoping for. The worst thing for me to do was interfere and the best to go away.]] Clerk Skitt joked about the number of times we could hand count the ballots compared to the machine count, but believes that human error is possible. However, she said something I find disturbing. That is the machine may have different reasoning for counting a ballot in some other way than humans and call is human error! Valeria is intelligent, and I will point out the hidden flaw. Computers fail to produce expected results all the time. Yes, human error is involved in systems design, integration, procedural requirements. Human error at the statehouse and in DC. Whereas I am mandated to ignore humanly visible un-voted ballots and the systems' willingness to vote for Maynard G. Krebs <end rant> "nature always sides with the hidden flaw" - murphy Next Tuesday is Hillary's visit. I will propose a hand count instead of Ballot Now, failing that, a hand tally with council as judge of authenticity. This is the quasi-judicial board that controls the ballot in our city. Difference between tallies or not, I believe that we want the council to recognize the validity of a hand count. Meeting at 7pm - 350 Kimbark. Come early to sign up to speak for three minutes. We can say a lot of important stuff in 3 mins. All that must be addressed is accuracy and a history of it. The New Jersey law is a great example of state public law response to federal elections demagogery. Bearing the lack of complexity involved here: one race, four candidates - I see a buddy system that I would call a "body double" system <with your partner all through the shift - eyes on hands>, that makes eight SORTERS. An additional citizen to work with staff to figure out what to do with pile five. Finally, someone like a canvas board member wanders around and scrutinizes operations according to know procedures (invented 10 mins before). Ten volunteers. The clerk has three staff members who will participate, and the city attorney who won't. 14 hands on ballots. How many times should we count the ballots? How big should we make the batches for the volunteers? Valeria says 15K on a sunny day. My guess is that it will be a slim race between two well known candidates, but that's spin. However, in tasking assignments it must be accepted that a team assigned to a loser candidate might be have little to do while another is nailed. 14 may not be enough to count this many with effective accuracy. I don't know how to do this. In fact, I don't know much, except that the only computers that should be involved in elections is hand calculators. --
Paul Tiger 303.774.6383 Home 720.323.0570 Cell 303.651.7919 Business A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction. |