My dad and I talked this weekend about the upcoming election and our dread of the debacle that will no doubt take place. The race will be close, and the country’s I’d say more divided than it was even four years ago. On top of that, there are all sorts of problems across the country with voting machines and regulations pertaining to voting. My dad suggested that the Democrats are untrustworthy when it comes to elections, citing voter fraud in Chicago that got Kennedy elected, among other cases. And he expressed displeasure at the fact that Democrats are mobilizing thousands of lawyers to try to contest the election regardless of how big Kerry’s margin of loss (if he loses) is. In short, he views this as a Democratic attempt to steal the election. Whether that’s the intention or not I can’t say. Maybe it is, and if so, shame on them. I’d like to propose that there are other valid reasons for oversight, however, mostly having to do with a history of disenfranchisement of Democratic voters. A claim like that requires examples. All of these come from the November issue of Harper’s (admittedly a liberal magazine) with sources cited appropriately therein.

In Florida, the center of the last presidential election’s most problematic disenfranchisement issues, very little has changed for the better. Florida didn’t learn its lesson, or, because the outcome was pleasing to Governor Jeb Bush, a lesson was in fact taken to heart in spite of the damage it does to the democratic process. Election equipment is at the heart of voting issues in Florida. In richer, whiter communities, voting machines are equipped to allow voters to confirm their selections prior to submitting the vote. In poorer, blacker communities, such confirmation opportunities are much less abundant. In 2001, a committee appointed by Governor Bush recommended that paper ballots, together with scanners in the voting booths (which had been successful in Leon County) be instituted for the entire state. And although fancy computer voting mechanisms cost eight times more than and are more problematic than the system implemented in Leon County, the Governor’s Select Task Force on Elections Procedures opted for the computer systems instead. Says Harper’s: “Based on the measured differential in vote loss between paper and computer systems, the fifteen counties in Florida using touch-screen systems can expect to lose at least 29,000 votes to spoilage on Election Day — some 27,000 more than if the counties were to use paper ballots with scanners. Given the demographics of spoilage, this translates into a net lead of thousands for Bush before a single ballot is cast.” Don’t forget that Bush “won” Florida by some 500 votes four years ago. Further, in 2000, Florida disenfranchised thousands of supposed felons (325 of whose listed felonies occurred in the future). Many who attempted to correct their mistaken identities were forced to request pardons from Jeb Bush for crimes they hadn’t committed, among other things, in order to right the record. It’s awful when voters try to game the system, but it’s so astonishingly much worse when officials are gaming the system.

There’s been much controversy over direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting. In a nutshell, many voting machines being used in the upcoming election provide no receipt of a person’s vote. There’s no printout, in other words, and thus no way to account for all the votes. If a voting machine is programmed to tally votes incorrectly, there’s no way to go back and see a valid record of the votes. And while recounts can be performed based on the data tabulated by the machine, the results will always be the same because it’s a recount of the data as entered into or manipulated by the machine rather than a recount of actual votes. Because the voting machines use closed standards, there’s no way to guarantee, or even to increase the likelihood of, honesty. Moreover, at least two vendors (Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems) of election software used on many of the machines have strong partisan ties with guess which party. “8 to 9 million votes will be tabulated in computers provided by Diebold, whose CEO, Walden O’Dell, caused a scandal by declaring he would help deliver his home state, Ohio, to George W. Bush.” Fully one third of the votes that are likely to be cast this year will be unrecountable because they’ll be cast on these systems. Harper’s further breaks the problems down in states key to this year’s election. Most directly relevant to me is the following passage:

I asked the elections administrator in Knoxville, a fellow named Greg Mackay, what he would do if there were a close election this year. “Shit, I’d go home and get drunk!” he said. “No, we could run the cartridges through again.”

“‘Course,” he added, “you’d get the same result…. It’d be the same damn thing.”

So far, the problems I’ve discussed can be (though musn’t necessarily be) chalked up to system problems rather than directed attempts by crooked Republicans to steal the election. More heinous to me are deliberate attempts to disenfranchise voters. This happens most frequently to the underprivileged, who often don’t know their rights, are in a poor position to learn about their rights, and are over-credulous of things that have the appearance of being official. Consider that Sharpton’s bid for the presidency this year was secretly financed and managed by one Roger Stone, a player in the Watergate scandal and a long-time G.O.P. backer. Harper’s alleges that Stone “helped script the preacher’s attacks on Howard Dean’s lack of black appointees and on the Democratic establishment’s neglect of minorities.” Now Sharpton’s at least as much at fault here as Stone, and I wouldn’t try to pin this on the Bush machine as an attempt at disenfranchisement, but it represents an attempt by the GOP to trick black voters into turning away from the Democratic party, and it sure stinks.

Consider some other examples from the past. From a phone call LBJ placed to Hubert Humphrey on election night in 1964:

Oh, Hubert, I wish you’d see what these sons of bitches have done. They’ve got out an instruction from the “Negro Protection League” [presumably a fake organization name] that says that any Negro that goes and votes — that the Protective League just wants to inform him, as their friend, that if he’d ever had a traffic ticket, if he’d ever been under suspicion, if he’d ever been speeding, if he’d ever had a parking ticket, if he’d ever hadn’t paid his taxes on time, if he’d ever been discharged from employment, that he’ll have to report right away to the sheriff, and that these things will have to be settled before he can clear his record to vote. And they put those out in all Southern cities — just the meanest, dirtiest, low-down stuff that I ever heard.

In 1962, William Rehnquist, working for Arizona’s Republican party, “supervised an operation in which local G.O.P. officials dressed up in police-like uniforms and stalled black voters, insisting they read the U.S. Constitution out loud before casting their ballot.” And “just before Election Day 2002, flyers went up in black neighborhoods in Baltimore advising residents not to vote until they had taken care of their parking tickets, overdue rent, ‘AND MOST IMPORTANT ANY WARRANTS.’ The flyers also included a friendly reminder to ‘come out to vote on Nov. 6th’ (The election was Nov. 5).” The examples go on and on. Now in many cases, disenfranchisement goes on at a local level and not as explicitly directed from a higher post, but it occurs nevertheless. The sad circumstance of sub-par voting equipment in poorer regions of Florida paired with a history of fraud perpetrated by local and state political engines directed at the same demographic points to big civil rights issues.

Given that the demographic affected by such circumstances tends to be Democratic, it hardly seems unreasonable that the Democrats would have crews of overseers handy for the election. Somebody’s got to look out for those who don’t know how to look out for themselves, who don’t know that it’s illegal to insist that they read the Constitution aloud prior to voting. If overseers are protecting rights, then their presence is valid and all but essential. Of course my dad may not have known any of this history and at any rate was probably predisposed (fair though he tends to be) to emphasize more heavily the reports of multiple Democratic voter registrations, the lawyering, etc. I can’t really blame him, given the facts he had reviewed, for crying foul, and before I read up on the matter any, I was ready to stand beside him and cry foul at what seemed an attempt on the Democrats’ part to engineer their desired election results. And that may be their aim, but given a sordid history of election engineering on the part of Republicans over past decades, I’m willing to grant for the sake of argument at least that the Democrats’ move may be a legitimate defensive move. Of course, it may not be. We can’t know.

There is a larger philosophical issue here, though. Something else my dad said was that Al Gore performed an act very destructive to our country by refusing to accept his defeat in 2000. I can’t help but think back here to my college reading of King Lear. One reading of that play is that the ill that befell Lear resulted from his ceding power. Kings are kings for life, and to cede power is to tamper with the order of things (recall that kings are divinely appointed). In Lear’s case, things went wildy wrong when he began to let his power be siphoned off. The idea is that if you’ve been given leadership, it’s your duty to embrace it.

The office of President of course is nothing like being king (for very good reasons). But there is a sense of duty in both cases. Specifically, if you believe you’ve been chosen as the leader, or that the process by which you’ve been chosen (or not) has been compromised, you have a duty to ensure that the process is reviewed. If you believe you may have won the presidency and you don’t contest it, you’re not just forfeiting a soccer match: You’re ceding the most powerful position in the world to someone whom you don’t believe the people intended to have that power. Which is a wildly and globally irresponsible thing to do. Moreover, it’s something that you do at a potential great personal and professional sacrifice. Al Gore’s never got another real shot at being president. I can understand the temptation to criticize Gore for pursuing lawsuits, etc., four years ago, but I’m not convinced it’s on target. He was doing what he thought was best for the country by attempting to enforce the rules of the democratic process, however ugly and self-interested that enforcement wound up looking.

So too, I would hope and tentatively argue, are the Democrats looking only to ensure that elections are fair and that they represent the will of the people. If it turns out that Bush wins by a margin that can’t reasonably be thought to have been influenced by crooked elections and the Democrats pursue litigation, I’ll stand beside the Republicans and cry foul. But if the election results can reasonably be questioned, I think it’s the responsibility of the Democrats (or of someone — Jimmy Carter is renowned globally for stepping in to promote fair elections outside the U.S., so election oversight isn’t something Americans are allergic to) to blow the whistle so that the intent of the people can be scutinized as best as possible (this is of course made more difficult by electronic voting machines) and honored.

For several days, I’ve been seeing in my news aggregator these weird headlines from Eric Meyer about something called S⁵. I didn’t check it out until last night, figuring it was probably some Mac thing that didn’t apply to me. But I checked it out yesterday, and it rocks.

S⁵, which stands for “Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System” is a cross-platform method for displaying presentation slides without needing special software. Using XHTML and some nifty DOM-parsing javascript, Eric and friends have come up with a method that handles all the mechanics and layout of a basic slide presentation for you. All you have to do is provide the content in XHTML — wrapping individual slides in div tags — and his engine takes care of the rest.

If you’re looking for fancy transitions and sound effects, S⁵ won’t be up your alley, but for a nice clean, fully skinnable, simple slide presentation, this is an excellent tool that generates slides that are ready for projection but are also great for downloading because they render in the browser. And it’s great because you don’t have to keep track of your next and back links, etc. Further, it’s got a print-friendly style sheet that allows you to display additional notes not displayed in the screen version. So if you’re already comfortable writing XHTML (and I’m not talking about making your layout work, but just about wrapping your content in div tags and using list tags to format your bullet points), you can just take your notes in an S⁵ document and immediately have your presentation and your presentation notes ready for projection and download.

I’m working on a presentation now and will be giving Eric’s tool a try in lieu of going the usual OpenOffice.org route.

The Spread Firefox crew, of which I happen to be a near-unwitting member, has launched what we hope will be an exciting and worthwhile campaign. A couple of our other campaigns have fallen a little flat, but so far, only a few hours into this one and with no official publicity yet, we’ve gotten off to a good start, having already met about 3% of our goal.

So what’s so great about this campaign? If you donate $30, you get your name in a full-page ad we’re taking out in the NY Times. You can also donate more (or convince your employer to make a donation) and get your friends’ or coworkers’ names in the ad as well. And if you’re an sfx user, you get beaucoup rollcall points (100 per name and 1500 if you sign up 10 names) for donating and for referring others, provided you use the affiliate link provided at the site.

Reportedly, this is “the most ambitious launch campaign in open source history.” In any event, it’s unprecedented as far as we know, and it’ll help us gauge how well grassroots marketing really can work.

Make a donation if you value the freedom and security open source software affords and if you love America and Jesus.

Googling for Vollmann and David Foster Wallace over lunch, I found this pair of reviews. I’m 1/3 of the way done with Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels and am considering rereading Infinite Jest when I finish up. I might give Oblivion another read first. I agree, for what it’s worth, with Green’s assertion that “Good Old Neon” is the best story in the book. I think there are thematic ties between this story and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive pertaining to the instant bridging life and death. Maybe I’ll get into that sometime.

This article describes Dick Cheney’s indignation at John Kerry’s bringing up his (Cheney’s) daughter’s lesbianism during one of the presidential debates. Cheney described himself as “a pretty angry father,” and Cheney’s wife called the maneuver a “cheap and tawdry political trick.” I agree with Cheney’s wife here. It was cheap when John Edwards brought it up during the VP debate, and it was cheap when Kerry brought it up again, though he did so a little more gracefully than Edwards did. So score a point for the Cheneys.

But take away points from the Cheneys for being complete assholes about their daughter’s sexuality and the rights she’s accorded. Take away about a million points for Cheney’s support of a proposed constitutional amendment that would take away from his daughter the civil liberty of marriage, which affords many rights such as spousal hospital visitation and the right to adopt children together as straight couples are able to. Sure, Kerry and Edwards have engaged in some cheap politicking, and that’s not to be respected. But Cheney’s shooting his own daughter in the foot, so to speak — attempting to deny her some basic rights he’s taken advantage of himself — and has the gall to be angry at Kerry for performing a pretty predictable speech act. Such hypocrisy for damned sure makes this father pretty angry.

I’m not actually going to tell anybody who to vote for. But I have been thinking a lot lately about wasted votes and wanted to share my thoughts on what renders a vote wasted or not. This whole matter became very real to me at the last presidential election, when I didn’t especially like either major-party candidate and considered voting third-party just to make a statement. People who did just this helped put George W. Bush in office by a very small margin. The matter’s very real to me again, as once again, I don’t especially like either candidate.

Because my political leanings are distinctly Libertarian (with a pragmatic twist), I have a strong urge to vote Libertarian. The problem, of course, is that there’s absolutely no way the Libertarian candidate is going to win. (I was talking to a conservative-leaning co-worker yesterday who thought Nader was the Libertarian candidate, for crying out loud and so was going to vote for Bush on the basis of his fiscal “conservatism.”) There’s a common perception that voting for somebody who can’t win constitutes wasting your vote. I would argue that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

For me to vote on a third-party candidate, however strongly my views are aligned with those of the party, would be for me to waste my vote because I have a strong preference for one of the major-party candidates over the other. I don’t especially like Kerry, but I dislike Bush. Specifically, I dislike Bush’s stance on civil liberties, which are more important to me than fiscal policy or even whether or not we’re at war. I’m not convinced that Kerry’s even on the wholly right track with regard to civil liberties, but he’s less likely to appoint justices who would abridge civil liberties for decades to come, and he’s generally in closer alignment with me than Bush is. Because I differentiate between the two candidates, I have a stake in trying to make sure the lesser of the two doesn’t win the election. So I have to cast my vote for Kerry to keep Bush out or consider my vote wasted.

Some of my more staunchly Libertarian friends have a different angle, though. They view Bush and Kerry as equally dismal alternatives, Bush for his social policy and Kerry for his fiscal policy. In this case, I think voting for a third-party candidate is a valid choice. Doing so stands to sway the future of politics (however slightly) toward the third-party views in question by forcing major-party candidates to consider a growing minority of voters not in line with the mainstream views. In other words, the more people who vote Libertarian, the more mainstream politicians will have to appeal to the Libertarian view. Thus a vote for the Libertarian party, when the Republican and Democratic candidates are sincerely viewed to be equally bad alternatives, is not a wasted vote.

My name’s up in lights at Digital Web, where an article I wrote entitled PHPitfalls: Five Beginner Mistakes to Avoid appears today. 7:00 in the morning and one negative comment already. Guess I’d better get ready to go stick my head in the oven.

I recently wrote about the perils my dev team encountered while working to build an editable grid in XUL. We came up with what seems to be a workable solution. Only after we did a lot of work to come up with this solution did I happen upon a bug report that pointed over to an editable tree example that does more or less what we were shooting for to begin with.

The main problems with our implementation are that it’s less scalable the more data you get (I’m not sure how scalable the tree example will be — haven’t tested it yet) and that it doesn’t have sortable, hideable, draggable columns by default, as a tree would. This is definitely a widget I’ll be looking into.

In other semi-related news, I found in the same bug report a link to a nifty date picker written in XUL. That too could come in handy.

I use my laptop both at home and at work. I choose not to send personal mail at work using my employer’s SMTP server. Call me suspicious or secretive. Until recently, I was able to use my SMTP server for this domain to send mail from both home and work without having to change any settings. But my broadband provider at home recently started blocking SMTP traffic to servers not on their network. Which means I have to have two SMTP servers. Which means that every time I go home and try to send a message, I get an error message saying that I can’t connect to the SMTP server. Likewise, when I get to work and try to send my first message of the day, I get a similar message. Which irritates me a great deal because each time this happens, I mutter under my breath about my stupid (not really stupid — what they’ve done actually makes sense) broadband provider and do the five or six clicks and 80 or 90 characters I have to type to change my SMTP server. Finally, after a few weeks of being on the verge of going postal thanks to this really quite minor inconvenience, I looked for a solution. If you’re having the same problem, go here for an explanation of how to set up multiple SMTP servers and here for a nifty Thunderbird plugin that lets you add a button to toggle back and forth between mail servers. This’ll save me mucho frustration and grants those inclined to use the post offices or to walk around underneath bell towers in my area that much more safety. For now.

I recently picked up Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, the first volume in a three-volume piece of historical fiction entitled The Baroque Cycle. I had read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon a few years ago and found it interesting and fairly engaging, if not earth-shattering stylistically. It was well enough written, with a good story and tight enough prose, but it fell short of a standard set for me at the time by David Foster Wallace. It was a good enough book, but it lacked something I couldn’t put my finger on, a sort of polish. Where DFW and others made me want to go out and write books of my own, Stephenson didn’t.

I’m finding the same to be very much true of Quicksilver, so much so, in fact, that I’ve put the book down 170 pages in. Again, it’s well enough written, but it feels to me as if the prose tries too hard to be clever or engaging without being either to a very great degree. I found myself dragging myself through the book in hopes that there would be a payoff later (and I’m sure there would have been, if not a grand one), when, given a severe limitation on my reading time right now, I can’t very well justify reading a book unless it’s doing the tugging.

At the same time that I bought Quicksilver, I bought a book entitled You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann. I found this book by watching the “others who bought this title also bought this one” feature at Amazon.com. I wanted to branch out and try somebody I hadn’t heard of who it seemed stood a chance at least of being somebody I’d find interesting. And interesting this book is. It’s another (very) loosely historical novel that treats of the history of electricity (taking many liberties), a supposed war between insects and human beings, the taming of the West, and other things I haven’t gotten to yet. Marked by midstream changes of point of view and generally unconventional prose, it promises to be an engaging, if not a straightforward or traditional, read.

As I was reflecting on this last night, and trying to take particular note of some of the things I was liking about this book that I didn’t like about Stephenson’s, it occurred to me that the strangeness of the prose itself was a big factor. I enjoy reading things that are hard to decipher. That’s why I find DFW and William Gaddis to be so worthwhile.

A substantial part of the enjoyment we derive from reading is anticipating what’s going to happen next in the plot, trying to figure out what the author’s got up his sleeve and how he’s going to get us from point A to point B (if we’ve already figured out, as careful readers often do, what point B is ultimately going to be). Authors like DFW, Gaddis, and, apparently, Vollmann provide additional enjoyment because they keep you guessing not only with regard to plot but also with regard to the very method of storytelling. In J R, Gaddis forbids you to read in a conventional way: You have to learn to read the book as you go along, picking up cues about how to understand the action as the book progresses. DFW, with his footnotes and fragmented endings and $40 words, keeps you guessing about what he’s doing so that the fun includes not only trying to interpret the story but also trying to interpret how he’s telling the story. So too with Vollmann, as in this book the narrator seems to have a rotating point of view, as the story itself takes on a weird form, I find myself trying to figure out where he’s going, why he’s telling the story in the way he is. And it’s fun.

This is not to say, by any means, that fiction that’s not so hard to read isn’t worthwhile. I do find myself leaning toward the less traditional stuff of late, however. When I consider the 800 or 900 pages that Stephenson spread Quicksilver (only the first third of a longer work, recall) across and I weigh the satisfaction I anticipate deriving from it against the satisfaction I would derive from a harder book of comparable length, there’s simply no comparison. It occurs to me to draw a comparison here between running a marathon and competing in a triathlon: Both are worthwhile and difficult endeavors, but one might be considered more broadly satisfying to some because its completion calls for a greater variety of skill and engagement.