Brux's official contest scoring page has arrived. I see that when I said, "I figure I have something like a 1-in-50 shot to win 100-to-1 payout on my money", I was grossly overestimating the number of participants in the pool. I also forgot to take into account that by making two entries I effectively cut both ratios in half. A more accurate estimate is that I have about a 1-in-8 shot to win 15-to-1 payout.

I also see that it probably would have been a better strategy to have entered a pro-Bush scenario. I do still believe that the pro-Kerry possibility is slightly underestimated by the public at large, but it seems to be slightly overrepresented among the friends and colleagues who enter Brux's pool. As a result, my leaning-Kerry scenario is competing with several entries which are very similar, whereas with a leaning-Bush scenario I would have had a larger probabilistic territory to myself.

A new twist Brux added to the contest this year which I didn't mention before is that those who sent their entries early get extra bonus points -- an additional 10 points for guessing before the end of September, 20 points for August, and 30 for July. Procrastinator that I am, I didn't get any bonus points. That will probably work against me. I don't think I really gained that much additional perspective by postponing my guess. On the whole, I think September 30 would have been the most advantageous time to make one's predictions.

Next time it won't matter. Brux says he's decided he doesn't like that rule after all and in 2008 it will be gone. It occurs to me that another way of accomplishing something similar is to have a series of deadlines which affects the entry cost. Maybe entries in August cost only 75 cents while entries in October cost $1.25. That way individuals still have a strategic motive to play early, but once the entries are in they all compete on equal terms. The reason this probably won't happen is that, I suspect, Brux prefers the paper money and doesn't want to deal with receiving quarters in the mail. And if the scale is bumped up so that the entry fee is $1, $2, or $3, I think that's too big a spread to be practical.

Rereading in my own post the bit about contests in past years, I suddenly had this notion that I was the one who was a doofus and guessed South Dakota wrong in 1992, which would mean that Brad Wilson was the one who got everything but Georgia and I was the one who missed three smaller states. In that case, maybe Brux is right and I did win that year. Or maybe my three smaller states added up to one more than Georgia and I still was narrowly defeated.

My memory is a muddle. Perhaps Brad remembers. Does anyone out there know where to track him down? If nothing else, I'd be curious what his political views are like these days. In the Benzene 3 era he was strongly conservative, but somehow I don't see him as the sort of conservative who would be pleased with where Bush has taken his party.

I decided many months ago that I would vote for Democrats for U.S. House and Senate, not because I prefer the candidates, but because I think it's more important to defeat the Republican congressional leadership this year. I don't really like to be so partisan, but that's the nature of the U.S. Legislature these days.

In the House, my district is among the 90+% which are not in the least bit competitive, so my vote there will make no difference. In the Senate, it might. Incumbent Patty Murray is one of my least favorite Democratic senators. She's friendly toward two of the tendencies in my Party that I like the least -- extremist posturing (which is largely cosmetic and thus probably doesn't matter much) and nannyish government paternalism. Worse, as the senator representing Boeing, she is one of the Senate's most dutiful tools of the military-industrial complex. She is the sort of Democrat I might well have voted against in another year, but this year I think the leadership matters more, and that depends on party control.

For the rest of the offices, I was dithering between voting for all Democrats, in line with my new pattern of partisanship, or leaving them all blank, on the grounds that I know virtually nothing about any of them. When I lived in California I always received a booklet in the mail in which there were descriptions of the numerous ballot initiatives, complete with arguments submitted by various supporters pro and con. (For a very amusing sample of what might find its way onto the official voter's pamphlet, take a look at these arguments in favor of Oregon's measure 36. "Sissies!" Funniest thing I've seen on the Web in weeks. Yes, even funnier than those trick Diebold ballots.) If I got such a pamphlet here in Washington, I managed to lose it. Possibly it came when I was in the course of moving and it never got forwarded. I thought I had seen a stack of them at the public library in Shoreline, but I just stopped by there today and there were none, so I'm still in the dark.

So I've decided to go ahead and vote for Democrats for the governor and, with two exceptions, all of the other offices all the way down the ticket. I think I was leaning in that direction anyway, but what settled my decision is that this afternoon I got a phone call from an actual human being who was familiar with both candidates for governor and was willing to spend a few minutes talking about them. I've gotten dozens of calls over the past few weeks, including a few from Republicans (left over from when Karen was using this phone number), but nearly all have been recorded messages, and the few that weren't were volunteers who didn't know anything beyond their script.

The woman who called today was working directly for the gubernatorial candidate (Christine Gregoire) and actually knew her. When I confessed my indecision and offered her a chance to persuade me, her first response was to ask, "What issues are important to you?" I refused to answer that on the grounds that it would only lead her to tailor her message toward what she expected I want to hear, and I invited her to instead tell me why she prefers Gregoire. She didn't tell me anything particularly revelatory, but it was still nice to hear an authentic and genuine endorsement rather than a canned one. It was sufficient to win my vote for her candidate plus a gaggle of lower-tier Democrats, so who knows? Maybe that one volunteer made a difference.

I realize that it's entirely possible that if I knew better I really would prefer the Republican candidate for governor, and in fact it's quite likely that somewhere among those Democratic candidates I'll be voting for at least one that I really don't prefer. But for any given race, the odds of that are less than 50%, so it's a better guess than just leaving it blank. It's the same sort of playing-the-odds game you make when taking an educated guess on a question you're not quite sure of on the SAT test.

Of the two exceptions, one is Deborah Senn, who I just noticed is the Democratic candidate for attorney general. I recognize her name from my days at Underwriters' Report, the now-defunct weekly trade magazine for the insurance industry which provided me with a day job for many years. Ms Senn was Washington state insurance commissioner back then. I don't remember much about her, but I do remember having a very negative feeling about her. Lacking any other information, that's sufficient to make me choose not to vote for her.

The other exception is the Republican candidate for commissioner of public lands. I've heard campaign ads that show bipartisan support for this guy in a way that sounds appealing to me, so I'll go for that. Again, it's just a guess. It might well be that I'm being bamboozled by bullshit, but what the heck. If nothing else at least I'm supporting the pretense of bipartisanship, affirming that getting along with people on the other side is still valued enough that it's part of the image a candidate will want to project.

That's one of the things I like about Alaska senate candidate Tony Knowles. He's always going on about how when he ran for mayor of Anchorage it was a non-partisan position and now he's the guy who is ready, willing, and able to work with either party regardless of who wins the presidency and which party controls the Senate. Obviously that's a campaign tactic, since he's a Democrat running in an overwhelmingly Republican state where he would surely lose were it to become a partisan decision. Still, I like hearing him say it. Knowles, incidentally, was the candidate in the first political campaign I ever worked on. I think that was his first run for mayor -- 1976 or maybe 1977. I was in junior high, and one particular class assignment gave us a couple of choices, one of which was to join a campaign. I didn't really do much other than show up at the headquarters a few times and occasionally get put to work doing junk tasks like stuffing envelopes. Afterward I wrote a little paper describing the experience for the class.

News reports suggest that a majority expect the election will not be decided Tuesday night and will need to be settled in court. It's implicit in Benzene's prediction for the electoral college that I disagree with this. There will still be some close states, and there will be room for legal bickering about them, but with the lead I'm projecting for Kerry it wouldn't be something that affects the essential outcome of who becomes president-elect. So I guess that's something where I disagree with the popular opinion. I do indeed believe that the winner will be known before I get home at about 10 p.m.

Another point on which I disagree with the popular opinion is that settling all these cases in court would be a bad thing. I hope that somewhere something really does go to court, perhaps some local race. There's a lot of vagueness in the law, and it would do our democracy good to have it hashed out. In 2000 the controversy was all about ballots and how to interpret them. This year, the controversy is going to be about registration and how to decide whether a voter is really registered or not.

No doubt we'll be hearing plenty about this throughout the news media tomorrow, and perhaps for days to come, but if they cover it like they cover most things they'll make a mess of it, bringing on competing "experts" to tell us that the other guy is trying to cheat. That's the thing. It's really not just a matter of bad guys and good guys, following the law versus cheating. It's about differing philosophies about what constitutes a fair election -- specifically, different attitudes about the nature of rules.

We all know that everyone has a right to vote. But the election has to be organized, so in order to vote, you first have to register, and there are certain rules and procedures for how registration is done. Now let's make up an example. Suppose some state has a rule that says in order to be registered your name has to be correctly listed on the form. Inevitably, there are going to be names that are mistyped or misspelled. Think about the junk mail you receive. I used to get mail for "MARK DLEW", obviously the confused result of my habit of always giving my middle initial with my name. Plenty of other people experience similar minor errors. The mail still comes to you, so hardly everyone bothers to correct it.

When I was working the polls during the primary election there was a brief confusion because one voter was incorrectly identified as Mr "Iv". He was the fourth in his family to bear his name, and somewhere in the process the "IV" at the end of his name got miscategorized. Once we located his name on the list, it was abundantly clear that he really was who he said he was, so we let him vote. It never even occurred to anyone to make him use a provisional ballot just because of this little confusion about his name.

But let's go back to the rules in this imaginary state. Anyone who's name is spelled wrong is not properly registered. If you're not registered, you can't vote. All these victims of carelessness, bad penmanship or typographical errors are voting illegally. If we are to abide strictly by the rules, their votes should be tossed out.

That is a simplistic example. I don't know if any state has exactly that rule, but the point remains. There are specific rules about voter registration and there will inevitably be voters who are qualified to vote and who registered in good faith but nevertheless didn't quite get it right according to the rules. The question then becomes whether it is more important to abide by the letter of the law or the spirit, and that's not a simple question.

Complicating the question is the fact that it is pretty easy to pursue the argument in a partisan way. If you take the position that registrations ought to be scrutinized carefully and any improperly filed one should be thrown out, then it makes sense to focus your search for bad registrations on areas where you know most voters are going to vote against you. If you take the position that everyone has a right to vote and registrations should be accepted wherever the identity and eligibility of the individual voter is clear, then it makes sense to focus your attention on areas where you know most voters are going to vote in your favor.

Theoretically, either strategy could work for either party. Carelessness and bad penmanship are not qualities strongly correlated to political ideology. But in reality the Republican Party has come down on the side of favoring the letter of the law and the Democratic Party has come down on the side of favoring the spirit of the law. This is a matter of philosophical comfort. There are individual exceptions, but for the most part Democrats are happiest when taking the side of maximum enfranchisement, while Republicans are happiest when taking the side of defending the integrity of the process. So while a Democratic activist theoretically might go into a Republican region, find a bunch of muffed registrations and say, "Yes, you have a right to vote, and yes it's clear who you are and what you intended; nevertheless, you filled out the form wrong, so your vote doesn't count, and tough shit for you," he in fact won't, because a Democrat just doesn't want to play that role. Likewise, a Republican activist might find a bunch of challenged ballots and say, "Yeah, I realize that technically these are illegal, but come on, you know damn well that these are real citizens with a right to vote, so there's no basis for throwing them out based on a technicality", but the Republican doesn't want to play that role.

It gets stickier than that. In addition to the rules about how to judge the individual registrations, there are procedural rules about how to handle registration lists. In many cases there will be a rule that says something like, "In cases where [certain condition is met], registrations may be sent back for [some sort of review process] and if the voter doesn't [some sort of tedious confirmation action], the registration will be disallowed." Such rules are often constructed in such a way so that the state official has the discretion to either apply the process or not apply it as he sees fit. A clever official might well think that one particular batch of ballots are likely to go his party's way, and so he'll let all those go unexamined, while another batch is likely to go against his party, so he'll order those ballots to be put through the review process. This is essentially what is going on in Florida with those felon lists you hear about. Most of the people aren't felons and aren't ineligible, and the officials know it, but the rules are such that they are given the legal discretion to make certain voters jump through another hoop, and many of them will fail to take the extra jump.

In their defense, in any of these cases, the sticklers for the rules will say, "Hey, the rules are the rules. If you don't like it, try to have the rules rewritten next time, but this is what the law says now, so we're going to enforce it and not let anyone cheat." On the other side, advocates will say that those very same rules specify in their precatory language that their purpose is to extend the franchise not to restrict it, and for good measure they'll mention similar passages in the U.S. Constitution.

So who is right? The truth is that both sides have a very good argument in their favor. That's why it's such a tough puzzle. Unfortunately, we're probably not going to be hearing those good arguments on the news. Instead we'll hear one side shout that their mean and nasty opponents are fixing the system and bullying individuals to deprive them of their right to vote, while the other side shouts that their crooked and sleazy opponents are trying to cheat by stuffing the ballot box with fake votes.

Both of these are caricatures. There will be a few cases that meet those general descriptions, but those are easy to settle and no one will seriously dispute them. The ones that will be hard to resolve are all the voters who register in good faith but due to their error or someone else's failed to meet strictly the conditions set forth in the statute. Those are the cases they'll be fighting over, and the over-the-top rhetoric is just an extension of the partisan mudslinging of the campaign.

6:28:52 PM  [permalink]  comment []