Escaped Thoughts

I went to vote today, and it was deeply depressing. Since I have this crazy desire to have a system where, you know, votes actually count, I refuse to use the current electronic voting machines. Yet, when I refused the electronic card and asked for a paper ballot, I was told there was no paper-ballot voting. At least when I insisted that yes, there in fact was paper ballot voting, and the desk-workers found someone with a clue, he was happy to give me one, but it was so very sad. First, the poll workers were so badly trained that many people who were only somewhat aware of the issue would probably have just buckled and been pushed into using the electronic voting machines—when poll workers are actively disenfranchising people through poor training, that's just wrong. Second, the clueful person said, “We were just commenting about how there has only been one paper ballot today.” And third, that one ballot was Laura. So the poor training probably didn't even come into play, which is even worse. (I suppose it's possible that one or two people were dissuaded after requesting paper, but I doubt it).

Why are people such sheep? Is it because they trust machines blindly? Or trust authority blindly? I don't even know which is worse. Maybe it's just apathy—I was talking with some co-workers today, who I know know better than to trust the current machines, but they still voted by machine. It's sad. Rigging elections at a national level is now something that requires the know-how of a high-school student, and most people don't care. Now, I'm not politically active—I've never written my congressperson—but if my only option were to vote using the currently-available machines, I wouldn't vote. I'd make a scene at the polling place, I'd write to my representatives at every level, and I'd probably protest at the polls at every election and try to get others to do the same. Would anyone care then? I doubt it.

In summary: the most important vote I feel like I made today was requesting a paper ballot—and it feels like it was a write-in.

Category: Society

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I finally sat down and put the time into debugging and researching that I needed to do to get the blog up and running again. I'm still not sure what all was changed on the server end that fouled everything up; I'm guessing some sort of directory structure change in addition to the change in the user that services requests (www-data? What's up with that?)—the second wasn't the problem that actually brought the whole blog down, but even if it had been the only thing it still would have screwed up the commenting system.

Anyway, despite not knowing what happened a combination of good luck and my growing familiarity with Perl meant I didn't have to go crawling to an admin whose job doesn't even begin to cover keeping my blog running (but would probably have helped anyway) to get help. Just one of the many benefits of higher education.

After all, I do have a masters degree... in Science!

Category: Geek

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