Jetsam (not Flotsam)

No Politics and little Bexley --

1) Blue Jackets officially pick up Michael Peca. I had Peca for a while on my fantasy roster a few years back, and I liked him because he picked up stats across the board, especially Face-Offs won... When I went to confirm this on NHL.com today, I found out that he also was in the top 10 in Face-Offs Lost that same year. An important reminder not to focus too closely on the parts of data that confirm your prior conceptions. (By the way, Manny Malhotra is statistically among the better FO guys in the league. I had somehow never picked up on that).

2) When I was up in Grand Marais, there was a little local brew-pub. Big points for the attempt, but the beer was a little disappointing. I discussed this with an inebriated dentist from Grand Rapids, MI, and we agreed that the place needed an India Pale Ale, not just because we both agreed as to the general superiority of IPAs, but because you couldn't taste much, let alone the hops, in any of the other beers at all...

Last night, I asked my wife to pick up a six-pack on the way home, as I was planning on making chili (my recipe calls for 12oz. of of beer). Instead of "cooking" beer, she stopped at McLaren's (Bexley's fine beer & wine store) and picked up Red Hook's Longhammer IPA. Not as bitter or bitingly hoppy as many of my favorite IPAs, but really really really good. Worked well in the chili, too, but I wince a bit thinking about it...

3) The Columbus Dispatch seems to be engaging in information warfare. Not in content, but in quantity. Their RSS feeds have gone wild today, spitting multiple copies of the same story out, regurgitating hockey stories from before the regular season ended, and sending out auto racing results under the heading of "editorial." When you are flooded with 600 stories to scan through, you're likely to miss something. I wonder what they slipped by me this afternoon.

Pandering for the Sake of Pandering

Last week, Rep. Pat Tiberi had an op-ed published in the Newark Advocate. Russ Childers did a response at Progress Ohio, but I had initially decided on taking a pass. The right-wing mouth-foamers (The Center for Vigilant Freedom???) have been up in arms about a case in which a group of Muslim men who feel they were singled out on the basis of their ethnicity are suing the fellow airline passengers whose suspicions got them kicked off a plane. The solution? Make sure that nobody can ever sue anybody who calls them a criminal or reports them to authorities, no matter how ridiculous or prejudicial the claim. Well, apparently, you can sue them if they are not acting in good faith.

According to whom...?

This is a tiresome issue. Frivolous lawsuits (and I do suspect that parts of the trigger case here might fall into that category) tend to get dismissed. Immunity provisions like this one (as is typical of 'tort reform') tend to do a whole lot more to protect the guilty than the innocent. A number of people discussing this issue point to the Fort Dix plot and/or an airline employee on 9/11 who hesitated in the face of suspicious behavior on the basis that they might be being racist. What these commentators are missing is that in neither case did the person with the information worry about being sued, they worried about acting in a moral way and doing the right thing. Far too many people advocationg for the John Doe law are confusing morality and legality, a common affliction of a subset of conservatives. If you see behavior, you report that behavior to authorities, and your report is accurate, the law has always been on your side. If you generally mistrust African-Americans and suspect that they all deal drugs, especially the ones in the apartment down the hall, well, now the law is on your side, too.

Anyway, I'm only posting to contrast the Tiberi Talking Point with the statement of one of those "vehement" Democrats...

PatTi:

But the attitude of the Democratic majority worries me. Prompted by the "Flying Imams" incident, when six Islamic leaders were removed from a flight after fellow passengers reported suspicious behavior, Republicans included a "John Doe" measure in the 9/11 Commission Recommendations bill that would protect those people who report suspicious activity from being sued. That measure passed the House as part of the overall bill by an overwhelming vote of 304-122.

But when members of the House and Senate sat down to iron out the differences, Democrats vehemently resisted including that measure in the final bill.Thankfully, common sense prevailed, and the "John Doe" measure is included in the final piece of legislation

From "The Hill" (a non-partisan newspaper covering the federal legislature):

The provision was not included in either the original House or Senate version of the 9/11 bill, but it was included in a separate transit security bill that the House passed in March. That has irked some Democratic senators, who say the upper
chamber has not had a chance to review the measure’s ramifications.



The so-called “John Doe” provision “has not had any committee review or hearings in the Senate and had not been in the original 9/11 bill, so its inadvertent effects had not been examined,” said an aide to Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). “Looking before legislating is important because court-stripping bills tend to be overly broad.”

Pat seems to feel the need to distort the facts, even when the truth would win him points in his district. I'm the first to admit that there are probably more objective viewpoints out there, but Pat seems to be unable to stop himself from turning into a caricature of a Right-Wing Republican Congressman.

Correction on Council Candidates

Last night's post identified a single candidate as "the one who isn't currently on the council." As convenient as this shorthand may be, it is simply wrong. Jed Morison, although a former council member, is not a current member, meaning there are two such candidates.

Blue Bexley regrets making dumb^%$# errors like that one, and appreciates reader vigilance.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

Here I am stuck in the middle with Pat Tiberi.

News is coming rapidly today (check out BSB or Ohio Daily Blog for up-to-the-minute updates), but apparently Deborah Pryce is retiring in OH-15, setting up an anticipated Petro-Kilroy race, and Dave Hobson is reportedly retiring (Update -- The 8/16 Dispatch is reporting a statement from Hobson "As of today, I'm running again...") in OH-07, setting up a match between his hand-picked successor Steve Austria and former Democratic challenger William Conner.

Two of three Franklin County seats will be open. The third seat is OH-12, in which Pat Tiberi is raising large sums of money to defeat... well, nobody yet. I can understand the reluctance to run against Mr. Tiberi, he defeated a well-funded challenger in a "toxic" year for Republicans last time out, but it is important that we contest the seat with a viable alternative. If not, all of Pat's time and disposable warchest can/will be spent attempting to get Petro and Austria elected. That's an advantage we really shouldn't be giving them.

Democratic Steel in the Hour of Chaos

I got a letter from the government the other day.
I opened and read it, it said they were...

The Franklin County Board of Elections.

They wanted me for presiding judge or whatever,
Picture me giving...

The info to y'all. See, because Strickland won almost every single precinct in Franklin County, almost every single precinct in Franklin County now needs a registered Democrat as presiding judge. Because of the spectacular nature of Blackwell's defeat, even within traditionally Republican areas, there is a shortage of trained Democratic precinct officials. If you are a registered Dem in Franklin County, and you've ever complained about the way instructions were done, or ID was checked, or provisional ballots were assigned... well you've got a chance to do something about it now. The pay is $160, which sounds like a decent amount for one day's work, but that's a 14-hour day (minimum - see below), with a mandatory 4 hour training session, so you're looking at about $9/hr. You won't get rich, but if you can't otherwise afford to take Election Day off and volunteer, it'll at least subsidize your pro-democracy activities.

Getting this letter was the second thing that impressed me about the BOE this week. The first was Matt Damschroder's heads up concerning November 2008. In 2004, the election in Columbus was a disaster, and lots of fingers were pointed in lots of faces. The Dispatch did what might be the worst piece of data analysis I've ever seen in a mass-media publication (and I pay attention) in an attempt to show that the suburbs were just as busy as the city (if not busier), and that the voting machines were distributed fairly.

They were not. What the Dispatch showed was that machines were at capacity all day, everywhere. The problem was that some machines had a two-minute wait, and some had a four hour wait. A four hour wait disenfranchises voters, and many Columbus voters were disenfranchised.

The reason for the disparity between the distribution formula for the machines, the Dispatch's analysis of machine usage, and the experience of suburban vs. city voters was primarily the ballot itself. Columbus had several very lengthy propositions on the ballot. The rest of Franklin County had a much shorter ballot. Many voters in Columbus found it impossible to cast their votes within the five minutes alloted, and frankly it would have been impossible to read all of the text, process it, and vote within five minutes. Merely scanning the text and confirming that you were voting the correct way on an issue about which you had already educated yourself prior to entering the booth probably added 1-2 minutes to the voting time for each voter.

Mayor Coleman and the City of Columbus want to do this again. It's a really bad idea. I know that the 2012 plan is hugely important for the city and the administration, and that it will be easier to assure passage in a high turnout election, but it is not ridiculous to speculate that this dsecision could cost Democrats the presidency.

Let's run some numbers:
Machine A is one of three machines in a City precinct that is projected to have a turnout of 630. Machine B is in the suburbs, one of two in a precinct that has a projected turnout of 420. Each of these machines is expected to serve 210 voters. Because the polls are open for 14 hours, we expect the machines to handle 15 voters/hour, or one every four minutes. Because of the additional ballot measures on the City ballot, we project that the typical voter will take 5 minutes to cast a ballot, as opposed to 3.5 minutes in the suburbs.

Now pretend that Machine B actually has one voter walk up every four minutes, like clockwork. Typically, they will be able to walk right up and vote, because the person in front of them finished 30 seconds prior to their arrival.

Machine A is a different situation. When the second voter of the day walks up, they will have to wait 30 seconds for the first person to finish. When eight minutes have gone by, the third voter will show up, but the second voter will still be in the booth for another full minute. Each voter adds 30 seconds to the wait of the next voter. After 3 hours, 40 people will have voted, and 5 people will be in line (looks like 10 because there are two machines), with the last person in line expecting to wait almost twenty minutes to vote. After twelve hours, 160 people will have voted at that machine, there will be twenty people in line for that machine (60 total in the precinct), and the folks at the end of the line can expect to wait more than an hour and a half to vote. When the polls close at 7:30, there will be about 24 people in line for each machine, and they'll finish voting around 9:18.

If all 72 stick around.

What's worse, let's say that 30-40% of the electorate waits unti after 5pm to vote, but they space themselves out evenly from 5pm to 7:30 pm. With 75 voters and 150 minutes, we have one voter showing up every two minutes.

At 6pm in the suburbs, we have had 30 people show up (per machine), 17 of them have voted, 13 are in line, and the last person in line can expect to wait less than 45 minutes to vote. At 6pm in the city, 30 people have showed up to vote, 13 have voted, 17 are waiting, and the person at the end of the line has about an hour and 13 minutes to wait.

At 7:30 pm in the suburbs, 43 evening voters have entered the booth, 22 are in line, and the last person will have to wait an hour and 14 minutes to enter the booth.

At 7:30pm in the city, 34 evening voters will have entered the booth, 41 are in line, and the last person in line can expect to wait just over three hours to get into the booth (10:31pm).

An hour and 14 minutes is reasonable for a person ducking in at the wire. Three hours is never reasonable. This disparity does not require racism or classism or even banal incompetence. It just requires 4.5 minutes vs. 3.5 minutes to get through the voting booth.

So, to take this to the important point, lets say that 21 of the 210 people on Machine B decide that they simply can't wait that long in line. Assuming 300,000 voters in Columbus (the 289,000 recorded voters, plus a conservative bump for growth and those who were victims of this situation that year), we're talking 30,000 votes lost. Given the 61-39 Kerry advantage, there would be more than 7,000 net Democratic votes lost.

Is it possible that Ohio will be decided by fewer than 7000 votes?

There are a number of ways to fix this. The Board of Elections has done a pretty good job of fixing things that they can fix since 2004 (although we won't know how fair the distribution of machines really is until November of 2008), and they have sounded the alarm on this issue in plenty of time. I'd encourage the mayor and the city to take this seriously.