Rootscamp is going to have an election debrief this weekend in San Francisco. Link here. Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of town this weekend (I’m at the airport now), so I’ll be unable to attend. However, I’m sure it will be a great event.
Daily Archives: November 9, 2006
Thoughts in the Aftermath
(Amen…enough of the milquetoast! – promoted by SFBrianCL)
First and foremost, my heartfelt congratulations go out to Congressman-Elect Jerry McNerney, Democrat from California’s 11th congressional district, Lieutenant Governor-Elect John Garamendi, Secretary of State-Elect Debra Bowen (!!!), Attorney General-Elect Jerry Brown, Treasurer-Elect Bill Lockyer, and Controller-Elect John Chiang. I wish all of you the best of luck and hope that you will work hard and serve our state well!
Here is my post-mortem:
Governor: Of course I am disappointed in the outcome here, but I can’t say I’m surprised. After all, no California governor has been denied a second term since Earl Warren did that to Culbert Olson in 1942.
Arnold v.2007 will not be the same as Arnold v.2006; he will be much closer to v.2005. Be prepared for more of those “good ideas” that went down in defeat exactly one year ago. We will have our hands full in these next four long years.
To all my friends scared about the prospects of California turning red I say, “Worry no more. Just look at the down-ticket”. Arnold won handily and yet only pulled Poizner across the finish line with him. And Poizner himself faced a lackluster challenger in Bustamante (who REALLY needed to go!). If we can get a strong candidate in 2010 we can beat him!
Secretary of State: After weeks of anxiety, I can finally cheer and breathe a sigh of relief that Bowen pulled it out despite facing very steep odds, and that California will be painted blue in 2008!
California 11: To the Jerry McNerney team: WE DID IT!!! Grassroots support trumps Washington insiders and special interests. Party insiders feared Jerry was too liberal to win this pink-tinted district, but we proved them wrong! My sincere gratitude goes out to the voters of CA-11!!!
The props: I am thrilled that Prop 73 (er, I mean 85) failed again, by a slightly bigger margin than last year, and the atrocious 90 went down as well. The bad news here was that the awesome 87 and 89 went down and the atrocious 83 passed, though it is currently in court.
So, what can be made of all this? We are still a blue state (whew!), especially since John Chiang was relatively quiet the whole election and yet won the Controller’s race by 10, and DiFi, Brown, and Lockyer won by bigger margins than Arnold did. The Republicans do not have much of a bench here except Arnold and possibly Poizner unless we beat him in 2010. Democrats on the other hand have a relatively strong bench with Villaraigosa, Newsom, Núñez, Chiang, Bowen, and others. Even though we have a whole slew of good candidates to try for governor or Senate in 2010 and beyond, we still need to undergo a major overhaul. The governor’s race was a major wake-up call. We need to dump the milquetoast party insiders. Let’s take the party back! A good way to start is to appeal to the grassroots. A couple of fine Californians (the new SoS and CA-11 rep) have showed us such a way.
Prop 83, Jessica’s Law, ruled unconsititutional
Well, that didn’t take long.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday imposed a temporary restraining order on a key portion of the state’s newly approved Proposition 83, the controversial Jessica’s Law, blocking enforcement of a provision that would prohibit convicted sex offenders from living near a school or park.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston called the residential restrictions in Proposition 83 “punitive by design and effect” and agreed with registered sex offender “John Doe,” who had filed a lawsuit hours earlier Wednesday, a day after voters overwhelmingly passed the proposition passed at the polls.(SacBee 11/8/06)
The Runners’ version of Jessica’s Law is terribly flawed. Just because you whip 70% of the electorate into voting for something out of fear, doesn’t make it a reasonable law. It would seriously endanger children in rural areas and picks on rehabilitated offenders. We have addressed these issues in a piece of legislation signed into law this term. We don’t and didn’t need this onerous piece of legal crap.
Exit Polls for CA-Gov, CA-Sen and Prop 85
Join Courage Campaign, Rep. Hilda Solis & MyDD’s Chris Bowers For Post-Mortem Conference Call
( – promoted by SFBrianCL)
Congratulations to everyone for all you did leading up to yesterday’s phenomenal result. What we accomplished really was extraordinary and we should all be really proud of the effort we put in. As we all know, however, this is only the beginning of a long hard fight, both nationally and here in California. That’s why The Courage Campaign would like to get the ball rolling with a discussion of the impact of the California election results both on the future of California politics and on the national scene heading into the future.
What does a Schwarzenegger win mean for the fate of California’s 55 electoral votes? Are they in play? And what do the voter trends we saw yesterday tell us about how to keep California progressive?
We’d love you all to join us and special guests Congresswoman Hilda Solis of CA-32, Chris Bowers of MyDD, pollster Joel Wright of Wright Consulting and Frank Russo of the California Progress Report for a lively discussion. It will be held tomorrow, Thursday, 11/9, from 4:30-5:30pm PST. To join, just RSVP to [email protected] to receive the dial-in details. Space is limited. Participants will be welcome to ask questions, as time allows. Please invite anyone you think would be interested to join as well. Thanks!
how I spent my election day – a report from the polls
(A great story, including Sequoia machine problems. – promoted by SFBrianCL)
Crossposted from my livejournal.
I spent the day working the polls in Santa Clara County (where the voting method is Sequoia touch-screen machines with VeriVote printers) with auros. This is the third election we’ve worked together (the first being the stupid special election last fall) and the second in the same precinct but so far it was definitely the most exciting, the busiest and the most fraught with problems! Below is a synopsys of how the day went, just to give one snapshot of the sorts of glitches we dealt with, similar to problems I’m sure happened all over the state and the country. I’m sure my timeline isn’t perfect – the times things happened at are estimates from memory since I don’t have a copy of the procedural or technical exception logs from the precinct (we had to turn them in of course).
5am – wake up, groggy but excited, shower and make last poke at political blogs and news websites.
6am – grab coffee at starbucks and head to polling place to set up. Set-up goes fairly smoothly, though the one machine that had failed to power up the night before still fails to power up. But we have 4 working machines so we’re all good, right?
7am – polls open! 6 people are in line already. And… our card reader is broken! None of the machines recognize the cards! Now you know that manual mode you heard so much about on the news? (Well, if you’re in CA that is). THIS is exactly why it’s there. We put two machines in manual mode and had one person watching them to make sure noone went around to the back. As it turns out you actually have to press the yellow button in the back one time per vote, so it would be pretty hard for people to really vote a LOT of extra times this way. Still, we didn’t want to have more than two machines going just in case. Meanwhile, half a dozen or so people opt for paper ballots so they don’t have to wait.
7:30-or-so – field inspector shows up with spare card activator. deems our old card reader defective (so, no, it wasn’t just user error on our part). Now we are up and running with 4 good machines. And already we have a line of 20 people outside the building and another 5 or 6 inside the building signed in and waiting for a machine. Wheeeee!!
10:30-or-so – a 6th machine gets delivered to replace our dead machine.
12:30-or-so – ok, we’ve finally cleared the line and there is an afternoon lull. Auros and I take time to eat the lunch we brought with us.
4-ish – Things start to pick up again. One of our printers allegedly runs out of paper (I’m dubious on this one – when I asked the precinct inspector how he knew it ran out of paper he said “make up a reason”. I think he’s a bit of an ass and sloppy in his methods, but I’m also probably too uppity about questioning him. Next year I wanna be inspector, damnit!). Another printer jams. We make several attempts to unjam it but none are successful. Now we are out of spares, but we still have 5 fully working machines.
6:30-ish – we’re full up in the middle of the dinner rush – I can’t even see the line because it’s dark out and we can’t find a switch for the outside lights, but it’s got to be at least 20. and now the chaos really begins – more printers start running out of paper. this time for real. pretty soon we’re down to only 2 working machines so we start asking people to vote on paper ballots. Inspector gets even more sloppy and starts pulling people out of line and giving them envelopes before they’ve officially signed in. I am working the sign in page. I am trying to keep track of who has paper ballots. People are bringing paper ballots to stuff in the ballot box next to me. Some are asking to sign in when they hand them to me. Some are not. Meanwhile I am still signing people in to vote on the two remaining touchscreen machines. We are running out of paper ballots in english. Some people say they are willing and able to do theirs in spanish. We’re also running out of ballot envelopes.
7:20-ish – We are down to ONE paper ballot envelope and are considering using the spare absentee ballot envelopes when the field inspector shows up with a stack of spare envelopes and an extra printer. Now we have 3 machines up and running. Chaos is still continuing. I’m still trying to manage signins for paper and touchscreen and get ballots into the bag. Everyone else is also working like crazy.
8pm – polls officially close. We have maybe 15 people still in line. The LAST guy in line gets to me at about 8:20. He’s in the wrong precinct. It’s too late for him to get to the right one so I have him vote provisionally. The line clears and I start tallying the signatures in the book. I am tired and low-blood-sugar from skipping dinner (the plan had been to order chinese but we never got a break). The numbers don’t match and I stress and recount them 3 times. Until I finally realize I missed the supplemental roster index. I add it all up. The numbers match. We have 483 signatures. Other people tally the machines and count the paper ballots. 36 paper ballots. 448 electronic votes. 484 votes. The numbers don’t match. Count checkmarks in the book. 35 people recorded as voting paper. 36 paper ballots. That means someone handed me a ballot in an envelope without signing in. Honestly, given how chaotic it was I’m impressed I did that well, but of course it bugs me when the numbers don’t match. Fill out exception log noting explanation. Pack up rest of equipment. Sign stuff, seal stuff, put stuff in car.
9:45 – leave polls. Call county dem headquarters but get no answer. People done partying? Head home. Turn on MSNBC. Shwarzenidiot is on giving his “go me I won!” speech. Check dailykos, electoral-vote.com, cnn… OMG dems win house! OMG McNerney is ahead! Oh fuck we’re losing Lt Gov and Sec of State.
11pm – flip from MSNBC to Comedy Central to watch Daily Show / Colbert Report combined coverage. I think some of it was funny but I was really paying more attention to reloading kos and cnn.
12am – head upstairs to get ready for bed. at some point Lt Gov and SoS races start turning around. McNerney’s gain is widening. Getting really tired.
1:30am – see that CNN had called CA-11 for McNerney. Realize MT is not going to be called before dawn. Go to sleep. Long fucking day.
Seriously, despite all of those technical glitches we had at the polls I think we did an excellent job. We processed 484 voters in 13.5 hours – that’s 36 voters per hour at an average of one voter every 1.7 minutes. And that includes the afternoon lull (when we sometimes had only one voter in the building), so it was really closer to a voter every minute and a half during the heavy periods. We also had 103 absentee ballots collected, for a total of 587 votes cast in a precinct of roughly 1100 registered voters. That’s an estimate based on the people listed as active voters. If I count inactives the number would be higher. I am not sure which number is used when determining turnout, but if it’s the same one I used then we definitely had an above average turnout in our precinct vs national, state, and even county.
And now that Debra Bowen will be our secretary of state I am really hopeful that some of the issues we encountered will be dealt with intelligently. I can’t wait for next election!
Well, no, actually, I can. I need a rest.