A friend reported on the early voting here in the western suburbs of Boston. “There aren’t any Republicans on the ballot except for Trump,” she said. “And most of the races are uncontested though there are some independent candidates running for a handful of them.” She said that the ballots go into a box to be kept by town officials until Election Day. Presumably at that point they are fed into the same scanner that is used for same-day votes? Certainly it would be possible for a town official to correct any mistakes on the ballot, e.g., voting for Ballot Question 2, which would reduce town officials’ budgets and authority by authorizing more state-supervised charter schools.
Separately, I recently agreed to be part of a climate change panel discussion in Cambridge where they wanted one panelist from each political party. I agreed to be a “small-L libertarian” so that I didn’t have to defend current Libertarian candidates. They couldn’t find anyone willing to show up identifying as a Republican. Some more items from the panel:
- a woman said that she had complained to a Cambridge city councilor about exterior lighting on some office buildings being (a) bothersome to her sleep, and (b) a waste of energy. She said that the councilor had threatened her with eviction from “affordable housing” (controlled by a city-run housing ministry)
- the moderator said that a few previous panels had been all-female, which was okay, but this one happened to be all-male, at least in his opinion. He said that the lack of gender balance was unacceptable and would any woman in the audience be willing to come up to the table and sit with the panel. No qualifications were sought other than being a woman. This idea of last-minute token female presence was seconded by the organizer of the event. (Of course I promptly scolded him for the cisgender-normative assumption that panelists named “David”, “Larry”, etc. actually did identify as “men”.)
- at the end of the discussion, the moderator said that this showed that people with different political points of view could be civil. I reminded him that this might have been because they’d excluded Republicans from the room.
> She said that the ballots go into a box to be kept by town officials until Election Day
a fox guarding the hen house? 🙂
I wonder why every person can’t be issued a receipt with the cryptographic hash of their vote. That would allow anybody to go online and confirm that their vote was counted and not altered, while sill maintaining privacy. The states should be required to publish every vote record in a publicly accessible database. It’s very sad that our voting process is so archaic and prone to tampering.
2 charts of climate change data…
2016 was warmest year: tipping-point disaster or just another El Nino?
Growing up 30 miles north of Boston in the ’70s – ’80s every person in my extended family was Republican, say, about 20 out of 20 relatives. A few of the older ones have passed but the rest all relocated to FL over the years and remain Republican.
“Certainly it would be possible for a town official to correct any mistakes on the ballot –”
According to this Republican election lawyer, the boxes are kept under lock and seal.
Here in Canada, the ballot boxes are sealed in the presence of party scrutineers (representatives from each party, typically volunteers, who are there to prevent cheating). And then scrutineers are present again at the unsealing of the ballot boxes and the counting of the ballots. This ensures that the ballot boxes can’t be stuffed with ballots before they’re closed, and that ballots can’t be added or removed.
By the way, the scrutineers cannot physically touch the ballots; that’s grounds for immediate removal. (I was volunteering at last year’s federal election, and saw this happen: a volunteer from another party touched some ballots, trying to straighten them out during the count, and was ejected.)
Unless American elections are run in a much more shoddy way than Canadian elections, I wouldn’t be too concerned about cheating.
On climate change:
It’s just conservation of energy. The planet receives a continuous stream of incoming energy from the sun; the reason the planet doesn’t keep getting hotter and hotter because it also radiates thermal energy into space (like the heat you can feel coming off a stove). A warmer object radiates more heat, so there’s an “equilibrium temperature” where the incoming energy is balanced by the outgoing energy.
By digging up and burning massive quantities of fossil fuels (like a super-volcano), we’ve raised CO2 levels. CO2 traps heat, so this reduces the outgoing thermal energy. Heat will continue accumulating slowly until the planet is hot enough for outgoing thermal energy to balance incoming solar energy again.
It’s like gradually turning up the heat on an electric stove. We need to stabilize the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, instead of raising it higher and higher. Unfortunately at that point the heat will still be on, and heating will continue. Actually cooling down the planet will require geo-engineering (e.g. blocking incoming sunlight).
Since we only have one planet, we can’t run scientific experiments on multiple planets. The next best thing is to use computer simulations (like learning to fly by using a flight simulator instead of actually crashing a plane). But of course they’re not going to be a perfect match for reality.
The computer simulations aren’t what tell us that climate change is dangerous. It’s the conservation-of-energy reasoning.
If someone tells you climate change isn’t real, ask them what’s happening to the extra heat trapped by the elevated CO2 level.
Russil Wvong, there’s no need to simulate the human body or run any experiments. It’s obvious from basic physics that if you warm up a room by a few degrees the people in it will overheat and die. Simple conservation of energy. That’s why I live in an industrial-sized sous-vide bath and spend my days (or could be nights for all I know) browsing blogs in my SCUBA suit with integrated VR headset.
You joke, but the range of temperatures that the human body can handle without overheating is surprisingly narrow. Sherwood and Huber. National Geographic. The 2003 European heat wave caused 70,000 premature deaths.
I know! And one time I came very close to hypothermia when someone accidentally left a window open on a crisp autumn morning. Thus the tank.