Not the arguably-good kind of chaos — unruly throngs of new voters, eager to participate in the thrills of the electoral process, overwhelm a sleepy polling station. Democracy whiskey sexy! No, this was the certainly-bad kind of chaos: incompetent bureaucracy renders voting experience difficult to impossible.
So I show up at my decidedly non-thronged voting place — five machines, three or four workers, a handful of voters, no more than one or two hundred square feet in total. But my name is not on the list of registered voters. The volunteer worker seems not at all surprised; did I register recently, he asks? Well, it was some time in December — I’ve been receiving sample ballots and all that in the mail, so I know that my registration successfully went through. Ah, he explains, your name is probably on the “supplemental voter list.” Which, apparently, they don’t currently have. But it’s coming! They’ve sent another volunteer over to fetch it (from someone’s house, apparently — I didn’t pry), shouldn’t be more than another ten minutes.
So I wandered over to Starbucks to have a coffee and peer at the internets through my iPhone, and came back about fifteen minutes later. Now it was approaching lunchtime, and something of a throng was indeed gathering — fifteen or twenty would-be voters were squeezed into the tiny space. But there wasn’t that much voting going on. More than half of the people who showed up were, for some reason or another, not on the list of registered voters. They were now encouraging people to cast “provisional ballots” — you could vote, but it wouldn’t be immediately counted. Someone would later check to see if you were really registered, and if you were, then it would be added to the total. Did I trust the finely-tuned machine I saw before me to successfully check on my registration status? No, I did not. Besides, I wanted my vote to be included on the totals to be shown later tonight on CNN. But almost everyone affected did end up casting provisional ballots, amidst much grumbling and requests for the phone number of the Board of Elections.
I inquired about the status of the mysterious supplemental list. Well, it was explained, it was not successfully fetched. But now it is being faxed right here! So I settled back to observe the voting. (About five Democrats for every one Republican, but that shouldn’t be a surprise in Downtown LA). After about ten minutes I inquired again — still being faxed! That seemed like an awfully slow fax machine. So, to clarify, I asked whether it was actually emerging from the fax machine at present. Ah, no, but there were definite plans in the works to fax it! Soon.
At that point I gave up and left, although I plan to go back tonight and give it another shot — the polling stations are open until 8 p.m. (Sorry, East Coasters — California will be reporting late tonight.)
And then, of course, I walked back to my car in time to see an officer drop a parking ticket on my windshield. I had put (just to be safe!) about 36 minutes on the meter, but the whole affair took about forty minutes total. Our Board of Elections may make the Three Stooges look like the Kirov Ballet, but Parking Enforcement is a marvel of ruthless efficiency!
What an embarrassment.
Update: So I went back, inquired about the supplemental voter list, and happily it had arrived. (Not, evidently, by fax, but I was too polite to press the issue.) Sadly, my name wasn’t on it. I toyed briefly with the notion of flying into a Hulk-like rage, upending the table piled high with paperwork and generally inflicting even more chaos on the already-disordered polling station. But I decided that wouldn’t be productive.
So I filled out a provisional ballot, and whiled away the extra time in line commiserating with the others who were in the same predicament. It seemed to be a common occurrence, and the volunteers verified this casual impression. I suspect that my poor little ballot will never see the light of day, and the state of California will find itself bereft of my opinion that it’s okay to let the Indian casinos install more slot machines. (A weighty decision, the kind that the Golden State simply won’t entrust to its legislature, preferring instead to decide via the exciting mechanism of Direct Democracy.)
The much worse problem seems to be the hidden button that independent voters must push (on an already unwieldy butterfly ballot) to indicate that yes, not only are they expressing a preference for a candidate in the Democratic primary, but they would also prefer if their vote actually counted! Being a proud Democrat myself, I didn’t have to jump through the tiny little extra hoop.
I understand that the United States is slowly and painfully making it way toward becoming a functioning modern technological society, and wish it all the best during the difficult transition.
[T]he ’47 Cheval I drank that night now ranks as the greatest wine of my life, a title I doubt it will relinquish. The moment I lifted the glass to my nose and took in that sweet, spicy, arresting perfume, my notion of excellence in wine, and my understanding of what wine was capable of, was instantly transformed—I could almost hear the scales recalibrating in my head. The ’47 was the warmest, richest, most decadent wine I’d ever encountered. Even more striking than its opulence was its freshness. The flavors were redolent of stewed fruits and dead flowers, yet the wine tasted alive; it bristled with energy and purpose. The ’47s signature flaws—the residual sugar and volatile acidity—were readily apparent, but it was just as Lurton had said: In this wine, the flaws inexplicably became virtues….
is Planck’s constant, c is the speed of light, and n is just a whole number that can be anything from 0 to infinity. So the effect of the compact fifth dimension is to give us an infinite set of four-dimensional particles, indexed by n, each with a different mass. Not a very big mass, unless the extra dimension is pretty small; separating the levels by about 1 electron volt requires a dimension that is about 1 micrometer across. We would certainly have noticed all those new particles unless the extra dimensions were considerably smaller than a Fermi (10-15 meters).
