I’ve been preoccupied with work, a side project (a search widget I’m playing with along with Biggest Guy, who’s displaying alarming technical acumen), and dealing with the server issues here.

So here’s a blogging bleg – what other good-sized sites do people know that are running MT? I’ll poker around and look but don’t have time for sustained research this week.

Part II of “Iraq Is F**ked” is in process…just taking longer because of all the distractions.

Sorry – just back from a wonderful weekend in Las Vegas with TG and blogger, SOA-goddess, ExposureManager.com-goddess Kerry Dupont who scored some Cirque de Soleil tickets and was kind enough to share them with us.

First, we had another comment spam attack which nailed our server this weekend. We’re working on it, and this fix may improve things. Meanwhile we have the comment filtering set on “max” which has been trapping a lot of legitimate comments in moderation – apologies for that, and I set them all free. We’re working on the problem.

Vegas was lots of fun; we saw “O” and “Zoomanity”. O is – as always – stupendous and worth a trip on its own. Zoomanity – not so much. I will confess to having occasional licentious thoughts about some of the more …flexible… Cirque women. And a show based around that could be fun. Zoomanity isn’t that show. 25% Cirque magic, 75% traditional Vegas topless review. Bah.

However, food and company made up for it. TG is the best travel companion ever. And we ate at – Emeril’s, Chinois (at the Forum?), and a little place called Mon Ami Gabi.

I’d go back to all three.

In 2002, I wrote this:

I STARTED TO WRITE ABOUT VETERAN’S DAY…

…and to thank the veterans alive and dead for protecting me and mine.

And worried that what I wrote kept coming out sounding either too qualified or would be interpreted as being too nationalistic.

And I realized something about my own thinking, a basic principle I’ll set out as a guiding point for the Democrats and the Left in general as they try and figure out the next act in this drama we are in.

First, you have to love America.

This isn’t a perfect country. I think it’s the best county; I’ve debated this with commenters before, and I’ll point out that while people worldwide tend to vote with their feet, there may be other (economic) attractions that pull them. But there are virtues here which far outweigh any sins. And I’ll start with the virtue of hope.

The hope of the immigrants, abandoning their farms and security for a new place here.

The hope of the settlers, walking across Death Valley, burying their dead as they went.

The hope of the ‘folks’ who moved to California after the war.

The hope of the two Latino kids doing their Computer Science homework at Starbucks’.

I love this country, my country, my people. And those who attack her…from guerilla cells, boardrooms, or their comfy chairs in expensive restaurants…better watch out.

I don’t get a clear sense that my fellow liberals feel the same way. And if so, why should ‘the folks’ follow them? Why are we worthy of the support of a nation that we don’t support?

So let me suggest an axiom for the New Model Democrats:

America is a great goddamn country, and we’re both going to defend it from those who attack it and fight to make it better.

And for everyone who is going to comment and remind me that ‘all liberals already do that’…no they don’t. Not when the Chancellor has to intervene at U.C. Berkeley to get ‘permission’ for American flags to be flown and red-white-and-blue ribbons to be worn. Not when the strongest voices in liberalism give lip service to responding to an attack on our citizens on our soil.

Loving this country isn’t the same thing as jingoism; it isn’t the same thing as imperialism; it isn’t the same thing as blind support of the worst traits of our government or our people.

It starts with recognizing the best traits, and there are a hell of a lot of them.

They were worth defending in my father’s time, and they are worth defending today.

So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.

For the last 4 years, I’ve wrestled with lots of people over these issues. The issue of what it means to be a patriot – and a progressive one – is something I haven’t yet succeeded in getting onto the table of broader discussion. I think I need to work harder at that.

I think the climate for that discussion is ripe. I think that in the coming year – between now and next Veteran’s Day – we will start to have those discussions in a more meaningful way.

Part of that is because we will have to confront what love of country looks like in it’s most raw form, as the veterans of the current – and I’m afraid future – war in the Middle East muster out and rejoin society. In it’s most basic form, patriotism is about the debt we owe.

When we talk about owing it to a country, or to a polity, it is an abstract debt. But we are going to start encountering people in our daily lives who will embody that debt – who have lived it, shed blood for it, bled for it themselves, and wept over those who died for it.

They are the walking, breathing manifestations of our obligation to America.

In my youth, when people showed contempt for veterans – what they were doing was attempting to repudiate the debt that they knew they owed to the country that had raised and succored them and that they didn’t want any more.

It wasn’t about the veteran who was challenged, screamed at, spat upon. It was meant as a kind of political bankruptcy – a washing away of the debt owed for a safe childhood, for being well-fed, for the pile of presents under the tree. Owed for freedom to choose what kind of life to lead, from the fear of the tyrant’s club, from barbed wire.

No one wants to owe for that. Many people see it as a birthright.

But everybody does owe for it. And birthrights bring obligations.

Grace Slick sang “I’d rather have my country die for me…”

Somehow I don’t think that’s the kind of time we’re in right now. Somehow I think we’re on the other side of the valley that we descended into when the Airplane sang that song, and climbing back out.

I think that veterans – in political office or in the cubicle next to yours – are going to be the catalyst for that climb. I think that the breadth of the embrace of veterans – while not as big as it should be – is also stretching our patriotism by making us look our obligations in the eyes and shake their hands. That’s easier and more widely accepted today than it was four years ago.

I don’t think this bigger war is nearly over. I desperately hope I’m wrong. I think there will be many more veterans in the coming years. Most likely, one or more of my sons will be among them.

I have a feeling all of us are going to have our debts to the country called, and we’ll have to sit down and write some (metaphorical) checks in the next decades.

But I’m confident that we will, and that we will have what it takes to see them cashed.

So today, if you know a veteran, look at them and realize that they are a marker – a marker of what we all owe. Thank them, honor them, buy them lunch or a beer. And do a gut check and see if you understand how much each of us truly owes America. I’ll bet you do.

So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.

Yes, it is. Not yet as horribly as it may be, but badly enough that the influx of returnees has become a flood of refugees. People are voting with their feet, and they aren’t happy feet. I’m distrustful of the quality of reports and reporting coming out of Iraq – on all sides these days – so I’m always looking for some basic indicators. Real estate prices are up? Doesn’t happen in disaster areas, and it was recently happening in Baghdad – but not any more. Deaths and violence? Horrible, but not to the level of a full-scale internal war like Lebanon. But the local folks know what’s going on and what’s coming better than I do, and they are headed to anywhere that they can get out into. So yes, I’ll stand up say that Iraq is simply f**ked (asterisks to make sure this gets through nanny filters at work).Is it a complete humanitarian and military disaster as claimed by many? No, not yet. But it could be, and it could be soon, which means we’d better deal with this issue, and not keep hoping it just goes away. But it is clear that our overall strategic direction (as I – a reasonably well-informed citizen – know it) is wrong, and needs to change.

Let me talk first and foremost about what to do. Then a little bit about what I see is happening. And then in retrospect about how I think we got here.

I’ll talk more in Part II about why, but simply put and as hard as things may be, I continue to believe that we have no choice but to succeed. A bogus “declare victory and leave” solution, as appealing as it may be to many of us in terms of domestic politics, will only result in a bloodbath within Iraq, will embolden the exact movement we went into Iraq and Afghanistan to push back, will strengthen the hand of the anti-American forces within Iran, and will almost certainly lead to a wider and bloodier set of wars within the Middle East – either with the United States as a participant, or with Israel if they are left on their own.

In early 2003, I wrote:

We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we’re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we’re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.

There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward isn’t.

Nothing has changed that view in the last three+ years. If it makes you better to call this “we broke it, we bought it”, so be it – although one of my points is that Iraq was f**ked before we invaded, and had been so for a long time. We’re now a party to the f**king, though and so have to own up to our responsibility.

So now the question is what to do.

In my mind, there are three legs to the problem. Iraqi, Domestic, and Foreign.

In Iraq, the military leg is the easiest. From Phil Carter at Slate:

This violent weekend proves that America needs to radically change its course in Iraq, while some form of victory still lies within our grasp. First, the U.S. military must reverse its trend of consolidation and redeploy its forces into Iraq’s cities. Efficiency and force protection cannot define our military footprint in Iraq; if those are our goals, we may as well bring our troops home today. Instead, we must assume risk by pushing U.S. forces out into small patrol bases in the middle of Iraq’s cities where they are able to work closely with Iraqi leaders and own the streets. Counterinsurgency requires engagement. The most effective U.S. efforts thus far in Iraq have been those that followed this maxim, like the 3^rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar, which established numerous bases within the city and attacked the insurgency from within with a mix of political, economic, and military action.

Second, the United States needs to reinforce the most successful part of its strategy so far – embedding advisers ($) with Iraqi units. Our embedded advisers achieve more bang for the buck than any other troops in Iraq; one good 12-man adviser team, living and working with an Iraqi unit, can bolster an entire Iraqi battalion. Without these advisers, Iraqi army and police units remain ineffective – or worse, they go rogue. However, these advisers are drawn primarily from the reserves and the staff ranks, not from America’s military elite, so they represent the B Team of today’s military talent. The military needs to invest its best people in the job. If necessary, it should shatter existing units to cull the best officers and sergeants – those selected for command positions – for this critical duty. And the United States cannot afford to lavish advisers on the Iraqi army alone, as it has largely done since 2003. It must extend the embedding program to the police and the Iraqi government, down to the province and city level, to bring critical services like security, electricity, and governance to the Iraqi people.

At the same time, we must recognize the limitations of our strategy to raise the Iraqi forces – it is a blueprint for withdrawal, not for victory. At best, it will enable us to substitute Iraqi soldiers and cops for American men and women. But simply replacing American soldiers with Iraqi soldiers and cops will not end the insurgency; it will merely transform it into a civil war where the state-equipped army and police battle with Sunni and Shiite militias, with Iraqi civilians frequently caught in the crossfire.

To combat the insurgency, America must adopt a more holistic approach than simply building up the country’s security forces. We have the seeds of this in Iraq today – the State Department’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams. I worked closely with the PRT in Diyala to advise the Iraqi courts, jails, and police, and I saw their tremendous potential. However, having been hamstrung by bureaucratic infighting between the State and Defense departments, these teams now lack the authority, personnel, and resources to run the reconstruction effort effectively. America should reach back to one of its positive lessons from Vietnam, the “Civil Operations and Rural Development Support” program. There, the United States created a unified organization to manage all military and civilian pacification programs, recognizing that only a unified effort could bring the right mix of political, economic, and military solutions to bear on problems.

Although we copied some parts of the CORDS model in Afghanistan and Iraq when we created the PRTs, we did not go nearly far enough. It has become cliché to say that the insurgency requires a political solution; in practical terms, that means subordinating military force to political considerations and authority. Today’s PRT chiefs need to have command authority over everything in their provinces, much as ambassadors have traditionally exercised command over all military activity in their countries. We must also empower the PRTs to actually do something besides diplomacy – that means money. Like battlefield commanders, PRT chiefs need deep pockets of petty cash (what the military calls the Commander’s Emergency Response Program fund) to start small reconstruction projects and local initiatives that will have an immediate and tangible impact.

The Iraq Study Group led by James Baker will reportedly propose many significant adjustments to our diplomatic strategy and our relationship with the nascent Iraqi government. Failing that, the panel will recommend a strategic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. I believe that there is still time to secure Iraq and stave off what some believe is an inevitable civil war. Bolstering Iraq’s security forces and our own reconstruction efforts may not be enough, but these practical fixes represent our best hope for pulling Iraq back from the precipice. We must act quickly, though, before more cities explode like Balad and Duluiyah.

This meshes perfectly well with the Boyd work on counterinsurgency that I read and wrote about some time ago (from Boyd’s “Patterns of Warfare” (pdf) presentation, available at the DNI site):

[Slide 108] Action:

Undermine guerilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*

Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*

Infiltrate guerilla movement as well as employ population for intelligence about guerilla plans, operations, and organization.

Seal-off guerilla regions from outside world by diplomatic, psychological, and various other activities that strip-away potential allies as well as by disrupting or straddling communications that connect these regions with the outside world.

Deploy administrative talent, police, and counter-guerilla teams into affected localities and regions to inhibit guerilla communication, coordination, and movement; minimize guerilla contact with local inhabitants; isolate their ruling cadres; and destroy their infrastructure.

Exploit presence of above teams to build-up local government as well as recruit militia for local and regional security in order to protect people from the persuasion and coercion efforts of guerilla cadres and their fighting units.

Use special teams in a complementary effort to penetrate guerilla controlled regions. Employ (guerillas’ own) tactics of reconnaissance, infiltration, surprise hit-and-run, and sudden ambush to: keep roving bands off-balance, make base areas untenable, and disrupt communication with the outside world.

Expand these complementary security/penetration efforts into affected region after affected region in order to undermine, collapse, and replace guerilla influence with government influence and control.

Visible link these efforts with local political/economic/social reform in order to connect central government with hopes and needs of people, thereby gain their support and confirm government legitimacy.

Idea:

Break guerillas’ moral-mental-physical hold over the population, destroy their cohesion, and bring about their collapse via political initiative that demonstrates moral legitimacy and vitality of government and by relentless military operations that emphasize stealth/fast-temp/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of overall effort.

*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides.

(emphasis and footnote his)

This ties closely into the CORDS model (pdf), and the kind of warfighting that Phil Carter proposes above.

It also hits on the need for us to live and project some level of moral superiority – one of the key justifications for my opposition to torture as a practice. Boyd said it again:

[Slide 118]Observations Related To Moral Conflict

No fixed recipes for organization, communications, tactics, leadership, etc.

Wide freedom for subordinates to exercise imagination and initiative – yet harmonize within intent of superior commanders.

Heavy reliance upon moral (human values) instead of material superiority as basis for cohesion and ultimate success.

Commanders must create a bond and breadth of experience based upon trust – not mistrust – for cohesion.

I’ll come back to this when I talk about domestic issues.

So the short version is that we need to get the troops out of the huge bases and into the villages where they can interact with the Iraqis; we need to combine military, political, and humanitarian efforts in ways that have been done – successfully – but somehow have not become widespread policy. In part, I’m guessing that a big piece of this is the military and political leadership’s desire to have an “uncontroversial” war – a decision driven largely by the desire to make no political waves at home.

Politically – within Iraq – we have also made some serious mistakes. Potentially much bigger than our military ones. The biggest error was our over-focus on elections as a metric of success – and I was a more-than willing participant in the hype.

The reality was that while the elections were good metrics for the sentiment of the Iraqi people – their desires – that they were in fact a Potmekin event, designed mostly to support the belief that we were almost done in Iraq and could start preparing for success.

I’m bitter about this, because my own feelings were so high about the elections, and because I was so swept up in the enthusiasm – as were so many others.

And more, because we created a kind of cargo-cult around the appearance of democratic institutions, rather than their substance, and sold it to the Iraqis when we – and they – should have known better.

Should we have focused on elections? Or should we have focused on nation-building – on building infrastructure, institutions, the sense of a nation under laws?

Elections are sexy and easy. Infrastructure, institutions and laws are boring and hard. Was it misguided idealism that led us to this choice, or the desire for stage settings for domestic politics? I wish I knew.

I do know that domestic political considerations have driven far too much of the war policy. One reason I’m not unhappy about the results this week are that they now dramatically shift the political ground underpinning the war, and remove the apparent desire by the Administration to keep the war off the front pages so that the Republicans won’t have to risk much in the elections.

OK, that problem’s out of the way.

And now that the Democrats have the keys to one branch of Government, we’ll quickly see what I expect to be a sharp argument over what to do with them. My guess, and hope – and the place I’ll stand in line to help push forward – is that there will be a faction advocating departure and reparations and one advocating finding a way to win. I’m obviously on the latter side.

That’s the lead in to the Domestic part of the piece, which I’ll get to tomorrow if I can.

Note that while I’m convinced that winning in Iraq is central to winning the larger conflict, when I say “win” I’m talking about the war, not the battle. Wars are seldom won by losing battles, but it’s equally true that losing a battle does not equal losing a war. The possibility still exists to do both.

Sorry, am crunching on a deadline and have not got the time for a long post on the elections.

But a) Debra Bowen won, great news;

b) it looks like I may have been right about controversial elections, at least in Virginia – and wrong in that most of them were far enough outside the margin of cheating that there won’t be huge hassles about election results (at least I’m not seeing that now); and

c) The GOP got taken to the woodshed and spanked hard. That’s nominally good news for me, as a Democrat – but a lot depends on what the Democratic leadership does about the war (not just the one in Iraq…). Long posts on all those when I resurface.

And I have a piece up at the Examiner explaining why I think today is a better national holiday than July 4 or Thanksgiving.

“Today is Election Day, which to me has always seemed to be the most appropriate national holiday for our country – better than July 4 or Thanksgiving. Today, the powerful are reminded that they serve the powerless, and another link in our intricate set of checks and balances is renewed.”

And don’t forget to check out their election predictions.

Below is a real email thread I received today from a friend. I’ve redacted the names and email addresses. It’s completely distracted me from worrying about the election. B____ is married to B___B and they are the parents of J____ and friends with A____ and K____…

From: B____

Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 8:13 PM
To:
Subject: sunday at our place

A____

You said I wasn’t the old me

Stooped a little

Bags under my eyes , little dribble coming out of my mouth .

I saw worry in your eyes.

Below is a typical night at my house

A____ I am sorry I scared you

But understand coming into my house ,

My kid is screaming

My bird Mr Blue is screaming because he is not going to get laid that night

There are feathers all over the fucking house

The dog is hiding in the corner with his paws over is ears , small green feather at the corner of his mouth.

J____ traumatized his dog ate his bird , sleeps on the floor in the room

A____, you still want to say how bad I look or what a miracle it is I am still breathing.

B____

**************** Begin Forwarded Message ****************

From: B___B [Mrs. B____]
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 9:38 AM
To:
Cc:
Subject: RE: sunday at our place

Hi K;

Okay I drove over the construction sign and enjoyed a fantastic afternoon . Meal was great, company was fabulous . But if you think of a puppy let me tell you our latest story .

While we had the greatest time at your great fully constructed house .Shawnee was lonely and bored and he decided to break out of his cage and have some fun with the birds. Lizzie disappeared , we found tons of feather but no dead bird . J____ was hysterical , Mr. Blue was even more hysterical and my husband accused of mass murder …

So I cleaned for an hour picking up all the feathers, looking with a nightlight for the dead bird but did not find him.

J____ in the mean time sleeps on the floor with us , because Mr. Blue was chirping all night looking for the his bride to be, B____ is grunting and still accusing me of massmurder-. This morning more feathers but no bird, B____ goes on the hunt but still no dead bird. I go with our Hunter Shawnee to see if in the poo Lizzie appears but no Lizzie there either , we hoping that Carmen finds the bird -. But this is only 1 evening and 1 morning with the new _______ family.

So are you sure you want a puppy?

Anyway this afternoon you find us back at the pet store buying a new friend for our heart sick Mr. Blue -..

Your mass murderer,

B___B

PS Shawnee looks a bit guilty , but this morning he started to jump on our white leather sofas chasing J____, who screamed to get the beast of him

PS B____ decided that from now on he will have breakfast at Starbucks. He might actually camp there .

Mr. Steve Bennett, CEO,
Mr. Scott Cook, Founder,
Mr. Bill Cambell, Chairman
Intuit, Inc.
2632 Marine Way
Mountain View, CA 94043

Gentleman:

I have been a user of Intuit products for almost ten years. I currently run my small business on Quickbooks 2007 and 2007 Payroll, and several businesses and enterprises which I have helped start also use Quickbooks – on my recommendation.

I’m about to start researching alternatives, for my business and others.

As a California resident, I was irritated by your successful efforts to kill the “Ready Return” program, in which the state Franchise Tax Board provided tools to allow simple filers to calculate and pay their own taxes – because it competed with your TurboTax products.

Here’s law professor Larry Lessig on your efforts:

In 2005, the state of California conducted an experiment. Hoping to make paying taxes easier, it launched a pilot program for people who were likely to file “simple returns.” The state already had the payroll information some taxpayers needed to file their returns, so it filled out 50,000 of those forms for them. Way in advance of the filing deadline, the state mailed the taxpayers their completed ReadyReturns. Like a Visa statement, the ReadyReturn itemized the taxes due, making the process easier for the taxpayer and more accurate for the government. People could either file the ReadyReturn or use the information to fill out forms on their own. Of taxpayers who hadn’t yet filed, 30 percent used the return; more than 95 percent of that group said they would do so again. Praise for the program was generally over-the-top.

Soon after ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation. Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax?

But what is surprising is that their “arguments” are having an effect. In February, the California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its “concerns” about the program – for example, that an effort to make taxes more efficient “violates the proper role of government.” Soon thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop the ReadyReturn program.

Inefficiency has become a virtue in government – and not just in California. Last year, the US Senate passed a funding bill with an amendment prohibiting the IRS from developing its own “income tax electronic filing or preparation products or services.”

Your efforts were successful:

Intuit lobbied hard to kill the free state program. It introduced “do no math” legislation to stop the free state software from performing calculations, thus rendering the program useless for taxpayers. It lobbied successfully this year to strip the Board of Equalization of funding to keep the free tax filing program alive.

While that was irritating, I’m deeply offended by your recent actions. In Tuesday’s election, State Controller candidate John Chiang has supported reinstituting the program. Your response? To donate a million dollars to an independent expenditure campaign for his opponent, Tony Strickland.

I can’t think of a more breathtaking effort to buy a favorable regulatory environment, or one that so consciously admits that your arguments wouldn’t succeed on their merits. Here’s Lessig again:

Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first. And what if private schools pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public transportation prohibitively inconvenient? Pick your favorite of these outrages, and take note of how it makes you feel. You’ll experience it again when you read the next story – and this one, unfortunately, is true.

Count me a deeply offended customer, and one offended enough that I may not remain a customer. I’ll alert the readers of my blog when I finish researching alternatives and make the change.

Thanks for making such a good product; I’m sorry that you don’t trust the abilities of your team to build products good enough to win an audience without shaping the market in your favor.

Marc Danziger

You can tell them what you think of their efforts by clicking here.

I’m not making any more predictions this election – things are just too turbulent and unsettled (OK, I’ll make one. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be re-elected. And the Iowa Electronic Markets, which I follow pretty closely, are showing some definite trends…).

But I’ll make one absolute prediction about what we’ll be doing a week from today – as we wake up to the election results. We’ll be fighting about them.

This is going to be one of the ugliest elections in post WWII America; we will approach Third-World levels of distrust in the process. And that needs to be fixed.I’ve lived most of my adult life in California, which has a history of relatively clean elections (except for San Francisco, back in the 50’s), and so I’ve missed much of the cynicism that many of my peers who grew up in places like Chicago and Cleveland may have.

But the level of concern and scrutiny around voting are higher than ever. As I’ve said, that’s a not necessarily really bad thing, if it leads us to better processes and more transparency. Refs in football and baseball and line judges in tennis blew calls before instant replay; in the modern era of television and computerized scrutiny, I’ll say that the quality of refereeing in major sports has gone up because we can replay the serve or the tag at home and see whether the ref erred. Transparency and auditability count.

But there was an ugly period – when television was exposing the shortcomings of human refs and before the management of the game had taken these tools into account – when trust in the refs started to collapse.

We’re there now when it comes to voting. Part of it is the increasing sophistication of the electoral “mechanics” all high-level candidates employ. Part of it is the fact that those mechanics now do their work in plain daylight, in courtrooms, and in the media.

But we see the vulnerabilities of the system, and those vulnerabilities make us less and less certain of the outcomes, and more and more concerned that some dark conspiracy – of ACORN activists or Diebold fat cats – is deciding the outcome. And so, at the end of the day, he’s not your President.

The problem, of course, is that we have to live as though he is – whoever he is – for our polity to work. When I quoted Schaar a long time ago (and then in comments recently), the key graf for me is this one:

Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic.
(from “On Patriotism”, by John Schaar)

That political idea at the center of our covenant is that the government is responsible to the people through the vote. When that belief is tarnished too badly, the covenant sickens and may die.

Right now, that political idea is under a lot of challenge:

Fortune:

First get into a business you don’t understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don’t hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.

With missteps like those, it would be hard to succeed in the gumball business. But when your product is the hardware and software of democracy itself, that kind of performance gets you called not just incompetent but evil – an enemy of democracy. And that is what has happened to Diebold Inc. (Charts) of Canton, Ohio, since it got into the elections business in 2001.

Time magazine:

County election officials who spoke to TIME reported that most of the fears they field about the new machines come from Democrats, who have not won a national election in three cycles. It may be that a solid Democratic win in 2006 will allay some of their worries. It follows, of course, that if the Republicans lose, they will take up the charge. In fact, that’s already happening in some places this year.

USA Today:

The fall elections shape up as the most technologically perilous since 2000, election officials say, because 30% of the nation’s voting jurisdictions will be using new equipment. They include large parts of Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, scenes of key Senate races. “If you’re ever going to have a problem, it’s going to be that first election,” says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services.

We focus on the machines, because they are visible, and obviously problematic.

But voting is a system; you register, are enrolled, vote, have your vote counted, have your vote recounted, etc.

There is the potential for massive problems at virtually every step in the process.

We’re mishandling the new-tech voting machines and making them incredibly vulnerable – not only the overnights that we did in the CD-50 special election, but in today’s news from Tennessee…

Political insiders have expressed alarm after 12 voter smartcards have gone missing from one Shelby County, TN early vote location!

The cards are used to activate electronic voting machines.

The location at the center of the controversy is Bishop Byrne High School on E. Shelby Drive in Memphis.

The polling place started out with 25 cards. By Wednesday, 11 were missing, says an eyewitness.

But we also have problems with the old-fashioned paper systems as well. From the Joint Task Force on Election Fraud (the Milwaukee Police Department, Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the United States Attorney’s Office):

D. Vote Total Discrepancy
An additional finding of the task force to date is that the number of votes cast far exceeds the total number of recorded voters. The day after the November 2, 2004 election, the City of Milwaukee reported the total number of votes as 277,344. In late November an additional 191 previously uncounted absentee ballots were added, for a total of 277,535 votes cast. Still later, an additional 30 ballots were added, bringing the total number of counted votes to 277,565. City records, however, have been unable to match this total to a similar number of names of voters who cast ballots – either at the polls (under a prior registration or same day registration) or cast absentee ballots. At
present, the records show a total of 272,956 voter names – for a discrepancy of 4,609.

FYI – Kerry won in Wisconsin – 1,489,504 votes to 1,478,120 for a margin of 11,384.

That’s because we don’t want a strong ID policy at the registration level, because over 1/3 of us vote absentee with few checks and controls, because the systems (the combination of human and machine processes) that count votes are not robust – and because we want results 30 minutes after the polls close.

Up to now, we’ve been able – like the sports fans back in the 1950’s – to rely on the basic integrity of election officials to keep the level of error and fraud to an ‘acceptable’ level. But the television cameras are on, and we can all see that the baserunner was really safe.

So what’s needed is an overhaul of the system itself.

What’s needed is a careful examination of the process – from registration to recount – and a commitment to fix it by making it reliable, transparent, and reviewable. There will be limits to what we do – we can, as Bruce Schnier says, make something so secure that it can’t be used or can’t be afforded. We need to make voting easy enough not to drive anyone entitled to vote away. We need to make it reliable enough that people trust the results. We need to make the processes by which this is done totally transparent so that people trust the results.

How do we do this?

To do that fixing, there is one election that matters. That is the race for California Secretary of State, and the candidate is Debra Bowen.

I’m asking you to do three things:

1. Watch her debate with her opponent, Bruce McPherson.

2. Watch McPherson’s ad.

3. Once you’ve watched it, I think your position will be pretty clear. Go over to the Bowen website and toss her a few bucks. If you live in California and haven’t voted absentee yet, vote for her. Ask your friends in California to vote for her. If you have voted absentee, note that in many counties the signature-matching software that will validate your absentee ballot is made by Diebold, and has never been through any rigorous testing.

I’d be writing the magisterial post about voting security except that my neighborhood is hip-deep in trick-or-treaters.

I’m on my fifth large bag of candy and fruit snacks with three more in the kitchen before we have to turn out the lights.

Have I mentioned that I love my neighborhood?

Meanwhile, I have nothing to add to the latest John Kerry brouhaha except to point out that Andrew Sullivan said it perfectly:

Is Kerry not content to lose just one election? Does his enormous ego have to insist on losing two?