Brooklyn Museum by the Brooklyn Masses

The Brooklyn Museum is doing its part to spread democracy by creating "Click!" a photography exhibit on display until August 10th. The exhibit began as an open call for photographs that capture the "Changing Faces of Brooklyn." Visitors to the exhibition's web site then voted on photographs and the crowd consensus selected the images that would become "Click!"

There's an interesting dissent from Slate about both the photos that were chosen as well as the broad and ineffectual nature of the theme of the exhibition itself. I don't think it makes you a fascist to agree that some of the photos selected were amateur in composition as well as trite and sentimental. But as far as an experiment in crowd mentality intersecting with art, well alright.

Luckily there is an image in the exhibit of one of my sentimentally favorite Brooklyn buildings, the Pippen building at 3rd Avenue and 3rd St. on the Gowanus Canal. Though it's not the image below, courtesy of another blog, you get the idea.

Video: New Hampshire Recount Chain of Custody Problems

This is a little scary. This has implications unrelated to the results of the New Hampshire primary recount. I do not believe there was any attempt at vote fraud in New Hampshire. I do believe that the security of the ballots for the NH recount was lacking. You'll see in the video how the ballots were stored in two separate places on two consecutive nights. On the second night, the subject of this video, the ballots were not placed in a secured vault as they apparently were the night before. Instead they were stored in a building that was far less secure than a vault. You will also see the officials place some sort of security sticker on the door that would presumably be broken if opened and would indicate someone had gone into the room and would have had access to the ballots. Then you will see the camera crew find a box of these stickers in the same building and then demonstrate how easy it would be pull one of these stickers right off the door and replace it with another one.

Clinton Union Fails in Effort to Ban Casino Caucuses

This is a very unsexy story. It's difficult to come up with a catchy bloggy title for the post. But, it is an important story, to me. As I posted about earlier, a basically pro-Clinton teachers union in Nevada had sought to block caucuses located on the Las Vegas Strip, in large resort casinos saying arguing that these caucuses would wield too much power. The Culinary Union argued that these caucus locations would allow many union members to actually get a chance to vote in the upcoming Nevada caucuses. The Nevada caucuses takes place in a short window of time and those employees who were working during the scheduled caucus hours would likely be unable to vote.

The effort by the Clinton backed union seemed to be a way to prevent many Culinary Union members from participating in the caucuses. Oh, and the Culinary Union endorsed Barack Obama. Today a court ruled against the teachers union thus preventing the disenfranchisement of many voters.

Nice try.

New Hampshire Recount Starts Today

Rep. Dennis Kucinich has given the state of New Hampshire a check for $25,000 in order to pay for the start of a recount of the New Hampshire Democratic Primary ballots. The estimated cost to complete a recount is about $67,000 or 24 cents per ballot. By handing over only part of the needed money to complete the recount Kucinich will be able to retract his call for a recount if not irregularities show in the first large batch of ballots. One of the two counties in which the recount will start is Manchester, a heavily populated county that reportedly used the Diebold optical scanning machines and came out in favor of Hillary Clinton.

No Republican recount is scheduled at this time because the candidate requesting it, a virtual unknown, had not provided the state with the fee required to begin the count.

"Pro-Clinton Union" Works to Hinder Nevada Voters

A Nevada teachers union, backed by Hillary Clinton's campaign, has filed suit to prevent Nevada caucus locations along the Las Vegas strip, a move that could prevent many Culinary Worker's Union members from being able to vote in the state's caucus. The Culinary Union recently endorsed Barack Obama. Because the caucus' take place during a small window of time, just a couple of hours, many workers who are working during the caucusing could be prevented from having their voices heard if the teachers union successfully blocks the caucus locations in some of the large resort casinos.

The teachers union, the Nevada State Education Association, has not made an endorsement. However, many of the union's higher ups are publicly pro-Clinton. According to a New York Times article, the teachers union argues that the,

"...decision, decided late last year, to create at-large precincts inside nine Las Vegas resorts on caucus day violates the state’s election laws and creates a system in which voters at the at-large precincts can elect more delegates than voters at other precincts."

Strange Numbers From New Hampshire

This is interesting and odd. I saw a comment on the Huffingtonpost story about Kucinich requesting a recount in New Hampshire that described the difference in the percentage of votes cast for Obama and Clinton that were counted by hand and those counted by optical scanner.

If you take the total number of votes cast for Clinton and Obama only (not the total number of votes) and then take the percentages for each candidate you see an almost perfect reversal in the percentage of votes received for each candidate. Got that?

Here:

Clinton received 91,600 votes counted by machine to Obama's 81,633 for a total sum of 173,233. The percentage for each candidate is Clinton 52.8767% and Obama 47.1232%. If you take the hand counted votes Clinton received 20,529 votes to Obama's 22,944 for a total of 43,473. The percentages here are Clinton 47.2224% and Obama 52.7775%. That is less than one tenth of a percentage away from an exact reversal from machine counted to hand counted votes when looking at just Clinton and Obama's votes. (Numbers came from this site.)

I am no statistician but that is a weird coincidence. The odds of that happening seem pretty long.

Recount in New Hampshire?

I didn't think there would be anymore to this story. I was wrong, I can admit it.

Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has called for a recount of the vote in New Hampshire. Kucinich is not calling for the recount for his own benefit, he acknowledges it will not significantly change the number of votes cast for him. Instead, he calls for the recount because,

"Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery – not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election" -from the Kucinich campaign website.

What significance Kucinich's call for a recount will have isn't clear. He tends to be treated as a joke by many in the media so, we will see. According to New Hampshire law Kucinich would have to pay for the recount, so far he has given $2,000 to the Secretary of State. I am assuming $2,000 won't quite cut it. Maybe Kucinich can drum up some more money or maybe he will bite the bullet and pay for it out of whatever money his campaign has left.

UPDATE: Apparently $2,000 is the fee to order a manual recount, so, I guess there will be one now.

The Brief Life of the New Hampshire Election Fraud Conspiracy

Yesterday, there was a slight trickle from blogs and obscure news outlets claiming and reporting on claims that there was election fraud rising out of the use of the Diebold optical scan counting machines in New Hampshire. Today, that trickle has pretty much stopped as far as I can tell. There have been a couple of stories from regional news outlets reporting on yesterday's trickle. I am not going to link to them because they are boring and not important. Maybe more will come out, but I doubt it.

Voting Machines vs. Poll Workers

First plastic post. Just a quick one to expand on the voter fraud/machine-counted vs. hand-counted ballot issue.

The NYTimes Sunday Magazine did a story on electronic and touch screen voting machines last weekend. The cover almost says it all:


But not quite. The article brings up that in many situations, poll workers are not trained properly about how to operate or set up voting machines. Or they are just oblivious and incompetent, losing flash drives from electronic voting machines, leaving church doors open the night before voting with vulnerable machines inside, etc etc.

[I]n the real world of those who conduct and observe voting machines, the realistic threat isn’t conspiracy. It’s unreliability, incompetence and sheer error.

Whether or not people are dissuaded from voting because they can't be sure their votes are counted is one thing. If there were to be a proven conspiracy in the voting process, that's another beast entirely. But what if you just don't trust computers OR human beings to accurately report your vote?

What kind of training do poll workers receive anyway?

New Hampshire Voter Fraud?

I hesitate to even post about this but...

Hillary Clinton won the NH primary last night by a relatively small amount. There is a little swell of activity online about voting fraud in New Hampshire. Most of the stories I have seen about it are from web sites and blogs that have a pretty clear slant, some Ron Paul supporters some pretty far left. The claims, so far, while interesting don't prove any far reaching fraud.

Apparently the ballots counted by the Diebold optical scan machines show different results than those that were hand counted. Clinton has a lead in the Diebold ballots while Obama has a lead on the hand counted. The problem with this as proof of fraud is that, well, on its own it doesn't prove anything. I am not sure about this, but it seems plausible that the Diebold machines were more readily available in the larger cities which is where Clinton seems to have secured her victory. This would account for a wider margin of victory on the Diebold counted ballots.

However, it is the combined results of Diebold ballots vs. paper ballots and the pre-election polls showing a wide lead for Obama that is fraud theorists are pointing to. It is interesting and more will probably come out about it later today.

Here are a few of sources (1), (2), (3)

UPDATE: Here is a pretty astute refuation of the voting fraud claims.

Register Your Ass To Vote

Friday is the final day to register to vote in New York to be able to vote in what some idiots are calling Tsunami Tuesday aka February 5th when a alot of states are holding their primaries. It may actually mean something since there is no sure fire candidate yet. Here's what you need to do. Follow this link (if you live in NYC) and find the link to the registration form in English (if you speak English). Click the link and download the forms, fill them out and send them in. If they are post marked by January 11th you are good to go. Here are the qualifications as stated on the Board of Elections site:

To register to vote in the City of New York, you must:

Be a citizen of the United States (Includes those persons born in Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

Be a New York City resident for at least 30 days.

Be 18 years of age before the next election.

Not be serving a jail sentence or be on parole for a felony conviction.

Not be adjudged mentally incompetent by a court.

Not claim the right to vote elsewhere (outside the City of New York).

Also, you don't have to have a New York ID to register and the postage is free!

Voter Registration Deadline

Hey, if you live in NY and you want to vote in the primaries on February 5th you need to register by January 11th.

Got that?

If you want to vote in the primaries on February 5th you need to register by the 11th of January. No excuses, unless you are an anarchist. If you live somewhere else figure it out for yourself.

If you want to know who to vote for, read the comments for my endorsement and leave a comment of your own.