outrage fatigue

ok justin. so that plan of attack didn't quite work out. although, i strongly believe kerry did win the election. while i have experienced four of the five stages of grief, i maintain that my refusal to accept the election results is based on evidence of electronic voting machine malfunction. in addition, the way i understand it, the provisional ballot situation in ohio is far from adequately resolved. Not only were partisan election challengers allowed into the polling places to "challenge" low income african american voters, but the validity of the provisional ballots is determined by a four judge panel of two republicans & two democrats. if the panel is split 2-2 as to the ballot's validity, the vote is not counted.

the la times alludes to this:
"under state law, each county will examine its provisional ballots, which are in sealed envelopes. before opening the envelopes, a team of elections officials — split evenly between declared democrats and republicans — will decide whether the voter who cast the ballot was registered by the early october deadline and voted in the correct precinct."

i know the media is casting all of these concerns in the light of "radical liberal conspiracy theories of the angry sore-loser democrats." i think it is more than that. the first step is to perform the most basic of audits- comparing the number of people voting on a machine with the number of votes that machine tallied. as in franklin county, that can show the most elemental of errors. yes, it is only 3,000 votes in an election that had a 150,000 + difference. but without more basic audits, who is to say this problem is not more widespread?

i think there is no way to have confidence in our elections without voter-verified paper receipts. why is that so resisted by our elected representatives? it isn't just a cost thing. think of all the costs spent on analyzing and re-analyzing these elections. if you had spot-check audits to confirm the trend of accuracy, and the ability to re-count when necessary, you would have a much better situation. why is this so hard??

despite all of this outrage, john paul and i have had some fun in recent weeks. we went to rich and sibel's wedding up in saratoga springs the week before the election.



it was beautiful and great fun!



after the wedding, john paul and i went back to brooklyn with jason and deb. we did many fun city things, including a bit of movieoke. deb and john paul acted out a quintessential scene from the brigitte bardot/jean-luc godard classic contempt.



overall, we had a brilliant time.

and last weekend, i was fairly successful at distracting myself from my election-devastation by attending the international quilt festival.



i took two classes; one that suggested techniques for making fabric-altered books, presented by a wonderful teacher and artist, lesley riley. it was quite an inspiring festival, and did help stave-off my total despair.