Having not received a ballot for this years elections I went into my spam folder to see if it had been caught there. Instead I found a renewal notification for my foundation membership. The policy for members to renew their membership every two years is not a bad one but I was just informed that I can not be renewed until after the elections and as such can not cast any vote in this cycle. That is a bad policy. For someone who is in good standing with the Foundation, having worked on its behalf and even have been a board member myself, I feel I have a right to vote in this election.
The policy to not allow renewal at the ballot box has in effect disenfranchised me. Most bodies of democracy I know allow registering at the ballot box for those who have a record of having been previously registered and can prove they are who they say they are. We aren’t talking about someone voting who has not participated in a vote before and would require excessive vetting before gaining that right.
What really gets me steamed about the situation is that due to being caught in a spam filter the only other way I could know that I was removed from the Foundation’s member list was to realize that I never received a voting ballot in which case I am not even give a chance to re-register before voting cuts it off.
UPDATE: I have been notified by the membership committee that many people failed to re-register and are unable to vote this cycle. If this isn’t a sign of a broken system then people are ignoring the issue. I could see if this was an isolated incident but since there is a small number of people who are eligible to vote I wonder what the ratio is of people who were denied a vote due to this procedural issue. I bet it is statistically significant. How can a vote be legitimate when a significant portion of the community is denied their vote? It is grounds for a challenge during the ratification stage.
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Congrats goes to Barack Obama for making history and becoming the next president of the United States. By all accounts the House and the Senate will also see major Democratic wins. We now wait and see what the Democratic party will do with this mandate. If they are smart they will act wisely and swing further centre than most majority parties have in the past. As we have seen from the Republican mandates for the past eight years no matter how powerful a party, the stronger you are the harder you fall. The question has become will the Democratic party build a long term legacy or squander it, damaging their party as Bush had done in a mere eight short years? From what I have seen and read of Obama, I think I have made the correct choice when checking that box this morning. Now it is time for the US to come together, repair our image around the world and continue to be a beacon of Freedom to all.
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It was quick, easy and dare I say fun. I was a little disconcerted that the paper ballot used involves a scanner in which a poll worker stands behind and watches you put your ballot in. I was trained on and am used to the old mechanical voting booths where I grew up in New York. It is the one where you walk into a booth, pull a lever which closes a curtain, flip a few switches on a matrix and then pull the lever again to open the curtains and register your vote. No method is perfect which is why there is a continual search for better voting methods. There is always some sort of trust that is involved when going to the polls.
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It seems that Cindy McCain didn’t like the questions the hosts on the View asked her husband and her. You can see the View interview here.
Watching it I saw a lot of evasion from John McCain and fair tough questions being asked by the hosts of the View. Questions on how Palin was going to change Washington, on why John McCain approved ads which have been debunked as lies about Obama – a point even Carl Rove has talked about.
It just seems all of John McCain’s “straight talk” rhetoric has fallen aside to a “perception talk” agenda where his campaign hides the realities by twisting the perception to their view point. Just looking at Governor Palin who has pirouetted around her own beliefs on topics such as global warming and the war in Iraq (has God tasked us with this war?) makes me shiver thinking about what would happen if she had real power. It isn’t so much her beliefs that scare me (though it isn’t the America I want to live in) but the fact that she understands these beliefs to be unpopular so she has to sugar coat them to be more palatable to the majority of Americans. And then there is the bridge to nowhere debacle which was supposed to paint the perception of Palin as a reformer but we instead find out that she had actually only came out against it after it was killed in congress (and she still kept the money). Oh I don’t doubt she is a reformer but I simply can’t trust what she is going to reform if I can’t trust her own words.
McCain’s own performance on the View along with the actions and words of his campaign make me seriously doubt McCain is in control of this machine. There was a time I had respected the Senator but since he has replaced his straight talk with pandering and slight of hand tricks I just have no trust in him and the policies he may pursue if elected.
On the lighter side, you’ve got to love Tina Fey.
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This really gives a kick in the pants to those who take short cuts and lose sight of software freedom. Kudos to Mozilla who actually has the critical mass to effect real change by endorsing Vorbis and Theora on all of their OS platforms. Soon it will be up to the content producers to make open formats ubiquitous. Having a delivery channel which people use on a regular basis means we can finally work from start to finish without touching a closed format if we so choose. That to me is freedom – not forcing everyone to encode in open codecs, but to allow for those who prefer open formats the ability to deliver their content without any barriers between them and their end users. There are those who don’t want to see this happen but I have to believe that momentum is starting to swing our way.
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