I’m looking for a roommate for NN.  You’d have your own bedroom in a 2BR situation, very, very close to the convention center, right on 6th St.  It’s about two block according to Google Maps.

If you want to be in the center of it all, get a cheaper room than the nearby hotels, all while maintaining some privacy, get in touch.  Posting here at Calitics cause I’m from San Diego.

Your cost would be about $312, which covers a Wednesday check-in with Monday morning check-out (5 nights).  The nightly cost for the whole thing is cheaper than a room at the Hilton et al.  There is also a $200 refundable deposit that I will have to pay.  I’d ask for a check for $100 that I’d mail back to you when I got mine back.

The only downsides I am aware of: you must pay cash upon arrival (or money order / cashiers check) and it’s so close to the party district as to be noisy.  The noise is not a problem for me — I sleep fine with earplugs and recommend them if this is the only reason you’d pass this up.

There is, I understand, also a pullout sofa in a loft over the living area.  A third roommate could take that and reduce costs further, but I don’t really see the need.

More about your potential roommate after the flip…

Just in case you are particular about your roommates (we wouldn’t be sharing a bedroom, so such things are not a big deal to me):  I’m male, mid-thirties.  I do not smoke tobacco — if you do, just keep in outside the condo.  I do drink and am something of a beer snob (I homebrew), so I’ll be doing some beer tourism while in Austin.

I’m a longtime lurker, only occasional poster/commenter on dKos, OpenLeft, MyDD and such.  I am a political geek and can chat about it for hours, but then that’s why I’m going to NN.  

Here’s a story I’d like to see from top Democrats someday:

The California Republican Party poured $345,000 into Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian’s state Senate campaign last week, a sign that party leaders hope to make a run at the seat of termed-out Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden.

The party followed up that donation by giving $595,000 to former Assemblyman Tony Strickland, the GOP nominee in another fall Senate campaign.

The races are the only two of the 20 Senate seats up for election in November where competition is expected.

By the Bee’s calculations, by the way, Aghazarian has a 9:1 fundraising advantage over our candidate, Lois Wolk.

Meanwhile, on our side, the lump-sum payments go… elsewhere.

If the apologists don’t see how bad this looks, I can draw them a map later.

[UPDATE by Brian]: Well, we can’t compete with these sums, but how about we throw a little love towards our two candidates in these districts. Both Hannah-Beth Jackson and Lois Wolk are strong progressives and would make excellent Senators. So, let’s Pick up the slack at ActBlue.

Disgraced California Democratic Party Chair Art Torres apparently intends to attend a small dollar fundraiser with Speaker Karen Bass this evening and make our Speaker look ridiculous by asking for Democrats to give $50 on actblue while the CDP is wasting $450,000 not electing Democrats. Those attending Reggie Jones-Sawyer’s home will be in the awkward situation of having wasted a contribution to the CDP while the latest scandal is being ripped on the editorial page of the LA Times:

Meanwhile, the Sacramento Bee reported that the California Democratic Party used $250,000 of its contributors’ money to pay the legal expenses that Perata (D-Oakland) has racked up defending against a criminal probe by the FBI.

It’s all perfectly legal, but it sure stinks. […]

As for Perata, Democrats not just in his district but anywhere in the state must wonder what their party is doing. They have every right to expect that contributors’ money will be pumped into districts where Democrats are locked in tough election fights with Republicans, or into struggles with the GOP over the budget. Instead, it’s paying the legal bills for Perata, who simultaneously is leading the fight against a redistricting measure on the November ballot.

When politicians demonstrate contempt for Californians, Californians respond in kind. Term-limits reform, badly needed to fix the state’s broken political system, lost at the ballot box in large part because voters mistrusted Perata, Nuñez and Schwarzenegger, and with some reason. The notion that elected officials are paid by the public to do the public’s work has become distressingly quaint.

This is clearly indefensible, which is probably why Bob Mulholland chickened out on debating the issue with Rick Jacobs on KPFA this morning. According to the host, Perata’s flacks also refused to go on the show. With today’s editorial rightly blasting the CDP, the press is trying to get people on record and the word on the street is that the CDP and Perata’s team are refusing to try and defend the indefensible. Props to any press organization that can get the CDP or Don Perata to debate this in public.

There isn’t a debate because there is no excuse for this waste of money. Don Perata needs to immediately refund all $450,000 and Art Torres must resign in shame before tonight’s fundraiser to avoid making a fool of Speaker Karen Bass. And then both should apologize to Hannah-Beth Jackson and every Democrat on the ballot this fall for having such contempt for the concept of trying to win elections.

[UPDATE by Dave]: The problem here is transparency, and it’s not limited to funding.  Watch palace courtier Bob Mulholland respond to the fact that his boss essentially lied about Sen. Feinstein and the FISA bill:

So I contacted the party today to see if Torres would comment on today’s votes. I got a callback from party political advisor Bob Mulholland, who noted Obama voted for immunity today too as a compromise. “Our attitude as a political party is, let’s win the election and we can start cleaning up the constitutional mess Bush gave us,” Mulholland said.

In other words, shut up and trust us, we know what we’re doing.  I think it would be easier to win the election if they weren’t laundering half a million dollars to the Senate leader’s legal defense fund and embarrassing the entire party.  Speaking of which, why IS he still the Senate leader?  Why haven’t there been immediate caucus leadership elections in the wake of this?  Nuñez at least had the sense to step aside.

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California.

I have been looking at the issue of computerized voting machine security for several years, and want to write about it today.

Many people have pointed out that there are a number of problems with the new touch-screen voting machines.  They fear that these machines can be used to rig an election. Others feel more confident about the machines because they are “hi-tech” and computerized and make voting easier.

Computer experts warn that the machines cannot be trusted.  Meanwhile, I have a relative who believes that computers can’t make mistakes, so these machines will guarantee accurate vote counting.

I can give you my position on these machines in just a few words:  “Prove it.”  Here is what I mean:  The standard for trusting the results of an election should be based on what an average citizen can believe about the election results.  If the election system that you set up is able to prove to an average citizen that the election results are accurate, then you have the right system in place.   Elections are about average citizens making decisions and trusting the results, not about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be. The whole “trust me” thing hasn’t worked out so well in the past so people came up with “prove it” systems so everyone could see for themselves how the elections turned out.

Yes, I have an election system in mind that meets the “prove it” requirement.  It’s simple.  I say that it simply doesn’t matter what kind of machine (or no machine at all) is used in the voting booth or to count the votes later, as long as the voter can put a printed ballot in a ballot box.  (The voter, of course, is expected to look over the printed ballot to be sure it has the right candidates and ballot measures marked.  Just like with the old pen or punch card systems.)

Everyone understands printed ballots with marks on them, and putting the ballot into a ballot box.  Time-honored methods for holding secure “prove it” elections with ballots have been worked out.  At the start of the election day you check the ballot box to be sure it is empty.  Each voter gets one ballot, marks it, and puts it in the box.  At the end of the day the ballots are counted and the total is reported.  Etc.  I work in elections and I know the system well.  It can be trusted.

If we use touch-screen computers as input devices to help the voter mark the ballot, all the better.  This helps prevent mistakes like those in Florida in 2000.   When the voter is ready the machine prints out a ballot with clear markings of the voter’s choices.  After the machine prints that ballot it doesn’t matter if the machine has been hacked or is just making mistakes because you look at the ballot before putting it into the ballot box.  And it doesn’t matter how the count is reported because once you have a printed record of each voter’s intentions, you can count them by hand if necessary.  The voters or a trusted representative can watch the counting.  

There is one safeguard that I think is very important.  You must randomly test the reported vote counts against the paper ballots they are said to represent.  And I am very strict about this part.  If the count is off by even a single vote it means something is wrong with the counting system and the entire election needs to be counted by hand!

The controversy about touch-screen voting machines started because they do not use printed ballots that can prove the election’s results to the average person!  The machines come from private companies.  Some of these prohibit anyone – even election officials – from knowing how they count the votes.  There is no way at all to check whether the machines are reporting correct results.  It is a matter of trusting these companies and not of proving to the average voter that the results can be trusted.  We are just supposed to trust that the companies are telling us who won the elections!   Remember what I said about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be?

If these machines make mistakes or just break down, there is no way to figure out who really won the election.  And if someone is able to rig the machines to change the vote counts, there is no way to know that, either.  History tells us that this is a concern.  People have gone to great lengths to rig even local elections.  So with the huge stakes in today’s election — trillions of dollars and wars — we certainly should understand that highly-skilled and well-funded attempts to dictate election results are likely to occur.

There are a number of ideas for making voting machines more reliable and harder to hack into and change results.   One idea is that the public should be able to examine — and experts allowed to repair and improve — the source code for the programs used in the machines.  This is called “open source” and the Open Voting Consortium has done a lot of great work in this area. (Send them some a few $$ to help their effort.)  Open-source systems will help make the machines more reliable and easier to use and will reduce the chances that someone can try to rig an election.  This is a great approach, but in the end it fails the “prove it” test.  The average person doesn’t understand the complicated programming involved.  And there is no way to prove that the open-source code is the code that is actually running in every single voting machine on election day.  

Other ideas involve elaborate security to test and guard the machines.  This again fails the “prove it” test.  Unless average people can see for themselves that the results are accurate, no security is sufficient.

I say that the system I describe above — involving a paper ballot that the voter can check and put in a ballot box — makes the reliability and security of any voting machines themselves less important because you can “prove it” by counting those paper ballots. You can test a sample of ballots against the reported counts, making it useless to try to hack the voting or counting machines themselves.  

California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen understands these issues and is working hard to make sure that our state’s elections are safe, fair and provable.  Let’s hope that the rest of the states can catch up to California.

Click through to Speak Out California.

Anything else?