The panels are up and connected. We’re waiting for the final city inspection and then we’ll throw the (very large) switches.

At $68/month it’s a screaming deal. I’ll post more as the system comes online.

…some more pictures.

I spent the weekend with Ehren Murburg’s dad, Mike, who I consider a new friend. We ate, drank, and talked, and Saturday night a college friend of his from Princeton was in town, so dropped by for a few hours and we talked about everything except the thing which brought us together.

We wound up talking about – shockingly – patriotism, and going back and forth (both Mike and his friend Steve are forthright liberals) on the need for a patriotic liberalism. I told them that in my view, liberalism had become identified with a cosmopolitan view that denied the unique place that America has in the world and that wanted badly to reduce America to a country among others.

Steve offered the notion that America is an idea, and that that idea is inherently welcoming, and I chimed in supporting him; we are not a nation of blood or land, we are a nation of an idea, and possibly the first great nation that can say that.

We need – as liberals, as Americans – to embrace those ideas which are our patrimony, to accept their greatness and the imperfections of the realizations. Just as we recognize the greatness and flaws of our children.

Mike Murburg’s son Ehren was buried under an American flag, and like all of those who died and were buried under that flag wearing the uniform of our country, he died for a set of ideas. Those ideas are not liberal, not conservative – they contain American liberalism and conservatism and so are greater than either.

I am an American liberal, and as such, I owe my first loyalty to my country.

And because of that – like many modern liberals – I have no problem being grateful to those who died, were wounded, who simply or heroically served in defense of our flag and the ideals it represents.

So on this Veteran’s Day, let me – belatedly – say once again to all those serving and their families:

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.

Thank you Ehren. And Mike, for loaning him to us.

And finally, thank you to Eric, my son. For protecting me and the rest of us, and for choosing to wear the uniform and defend the ideas that make this country what it is – great. May we and all our leaders be worthy of you and all your colleagues.

Sorry for being inattentive. I’m in Florida hanging with Ethan Murburg’s dad, and real life trumps the blog today.

Should be back Sunday night…

A.L.

I’m absolutely happy that the margin (for almost all the races) was wide enough that it was not only outside the margin of error, but outside the plausible margin of any kind of fraud.

All the same, I’m developing an idea about crowdsourcing some post-election audits to try and see if we can generate enough data to either confirm that there were irregularities – or make a convincing argument that there were not.
I’d love to toss out a challenge to the conservative bloggers who tried to raise the ACORN/registration fraud as a meaningful risk to the integrity of the election.

First of all, I think it’s likely that every state has a significant number of ‘zombie registrations’ – registrations from people who have died, have moved out of state, or registered illegally either deliberately or inadvertently.

Given a set of assumptions about the quality of the work that ACORN did, you can either assume that they did great audits of the cards turned in by their low-wage registration workers, and thus created very few zombies, or that they didn’t (either deliberately or through lack of resources, processes, or ability) and so created a lot of zombies.

So it’s reasonable to assert that there’s a ‘zombie issue’

Now the question is where there are exploits we can devise that use those zombies in a plausible way to commit voting fraud.

I’ll exclude from this list encouraging people who shouldn’t be registered but are from voting. That doesn’t rise to the level of systemic fraud on one hand, and to the extent that we accept Patterico’s argument that this represents a large number of illegal aliens who have registered and voted – it represents broader policy issues.

So how would you audit for voting fraud like this??

I’d like to throw down a challenge to the people who care about this to work with me in devising ways that we can do some proof tests to see if the problem exists, to try and sample it’s extent.

Lots of knowledgeable people have looked at this and made the flat statement that it isn’t an issue.

If you think it is – and I’m in the ‘it might be’ crowd – then let’s get some folks together and figure out how to demonstrate it.

So I’m at an airport again, headed to Florida to give another talk and have dinner with Ethan Murburg’s dad.

And after reading a bunch of papers, and talking to a bunch of friends, I want to set out some quick thoughts about our having elected Obama. Depending on how sober I am this weekend, I may have time to do some more in-depth writing. But quickly:

This isn’t about Obama’s policies, which the staffing rumors hint suggest may make me much happier than Ezra Klein.

It’s about the notion that, first of all, America has overwhelmingly elected a black man to be President. And how unremarkable that seems, and how absolutely remarkable that unremarkability is.

And about the fact that a young, ambitious man – with no family assets, no inherited connections nothing except the relationships he chose and created himself – managed to rise up over a period of 15 years and make himself President.

So we were lucky enough to go to Sacramento Tues night – TG, BG (who is home on leave for two weeks) and I – where we got to watch the election results at the Secretary of State’s office. The things you have to do when you don’t have TV at home…

…and I was looking forward to standing around watching as crises flew up and were swiftly dispatched; the intent buzz of seriousness filling the building as the creaky mechanics of electoral politics were brought to life.

Particularly this year. Because as a result of Secretary Bowen’s insight and courage, California was the first state to take a stand on the deeply flawed electronic voting technology which had become pervasive by 2006. And we pulled the plugs on them. She decertified the bad machines, came up with security measures for the not-so-bad ones, and the county election officials screamed bloody murder, saying that they wouldn’t be able to manage high-turnout elections without the systems.

So how was it?

An island of calm. Kind of boring. We wound up watching Comedy Central (funny!), because when we walked around, there was nothing exciting going on, except for lots of people working calmly. One of the help line workers took a call while we were there. A voter wondered how long the lines at her polling place would be. Seriously, that’s the kind of stuff that happened all night. I chatted up several lifers – people who had been in the office for years – and they were beaming at what a smooth election it had been.

Sadly, smooth running doesn’t make for great drama. But it does make for great elections. So hats off to all the workers – from the nice ladies in my neighborhood garage polling place to the county officials to the state staff to the Secretary herself, whose judgment in pushing back on the use of these machines was validated last night.

Now we need to get rid of them in the rest of the country. If you don’t live in California, reach out to your state legislators, your Secretary of State, your Governor and ask why you can’t have elections that run as smoothly as the one here just did.

Smoothly, accurately, transparently.

I’ll have more on elections tomorrow, including a (friendly) challenge to election conspiracy theorists on the right.

It’s Obama, and by a bigger margin than I’d anticipated. Much bigger.

And the speeches – both McCain’s and the President-Elect’s – were magnificent.

John McCain is a helluva man, and he showed us why he deserved to be the Republican candidate, and why he deserved a better campaign.

Barack Obama’s speech hit the right notes for me – inclusive, hopeful, determined.

I am hopeful that that’s the keynote for his Administration. And watching, to see what my President will do.

So I have a Really Important Presentation this morning in Orange County, then a lunch, then have to fly to Sacramento to watch the results.

I had it all figured out- pick up the docs at the 24-hour Kinko’s down the street, get to the polls right at 7, vote, head to the meeting.

Glitch – found an error in the book, so work with the graphic artist on the East Coast and drop off the revised pdf at 5:30.

Home, shower, dress, wake TG, drive over to the neighbor’s house where we vote.

At 7:01 there were 42 people in line. Uh-Oh.

I can swing by on the way to the airport this afternoon…I hope.

Update: Made it!! The nice voting lady in her garage said that she was head-down until noon.

Reposted from November 1, 2004

This was posted four years ago, but I want to make sure people today keep it in mind.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve felt the pressure to get off the fence and declare for one candidate or the other. Commenters here, and people in my personal life, have pushed me to ‘fess up that I’m a Bush supporter, or admit that I’m too much of a Democrat to cross the line.

Thinking about this feels kind of like having a chipped tooth. Every time your tongue curls over and touches it, you get a flash of pain, and yet you keep going back and doing it again.

And then, as I wrestled with it – with Kerry’s opportunistic failure to be honest about where we stand in foreign policy; with Bush’s stream of failures in post-invasion Iraq and domestic security – I realized that there’s a much bigger issue afoot.

I remember the bumper stickers disclaiming responsibility for the Nixon/Humphrey election – “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for McCarthy” which in today’s discourse have been replaced by bumper stickers saying “He’s Not My President” and trying to disclaim responsibility for a whole Administration.

Well, you can’t. And yes he is. And yes he will be, whoever he is.

And I think that the attitude that denies legitimacy to an opponent – which is not nearly the same thing as rolling over for that opponent on policy issues – is far more dangerous, and will do far more damage to my country than either candidate can possibly do if their opponents most feverish claims prove to be true.

Michael Totten has a good column over at TechCentralStation about why hawks like me shouldn’t hyperventilate over the prospect of a Kerry victory.

Former Lee Atwater staffer Pitney has a great column on partisanship up at SFGate.

OK, here goes: I doubt that all wisdom lies on my side of the political spectrum. I do not think that all the people who disagree with me are crazy, stupid or evil. Though I’m voting for President Bush, I hardly believe that the election of Sen. John Kerry would bring on the end-times.

Behind all this invective lies a sense of certainty that I don’t share. Political issues are largely about the future, and nobody can be sure what the future holds. Will Social Security go bust? Would a privatized system work better? We free-market conservatives answer yes to both questions. We make a strong case, but some smart people reach different conclusions. Until the future arrives, each side should ponder the possibility that the other side may have a point.

There are two powerful issues here.

The first is that, like it or not, we are all citizens of the same polity. As much as TG is committed to the issue of gay marriage, she shares the political space with Cathy Seipp, who opposes it with equal fervor. They can choose to define themselves by their differences or by what they share – which is actually a lot.

That sense of shared citizenship ought to be the root of our patriotism, which manifests itself in any number of small and unheroic ways – the taxes we willingly pay to keep open schools when we have no children, the traffic lights we don’t run because it would be wrong. Instead we narrow our focus on the small circle of people whose beliefs reinforce ours, and whose shared sense of powerlessness and entitlement – after all, in this system none of us entirely get our way – lead us down a path to rage and frustration.

And it leads us off a cliff as well.

The incredible strength of the West lies in the fact that Western culture, uniquely as far as I know, facilitates open clash of certainties.

Reality is far more complex than any of us know, than any of our ideologies can express, and than any of our policies can deliberately shape. Politics is the realm of the “wicked” problem.

In my daily life, much of what I do is deal with organizational failure.

The primary cause of organizational failure is the unwillingness of those in charge to listen, to look, at adapt to new facts or changing circumstance. We try many ideas, and some of them prove out – or prove out for a period of time. We have to be open to abandoning them if we are going to succeed.

Those who criticize the conduct of the war in Iraq have valuable things to say, as do those like me who support it. The tension and arguments between us are not a bad thing, they’re a good thing, because out of that kind of process we arrive at better policy and better answers.

But that implies an openness to argument, as opposed to a struggle to simply upend the other, which is where we are today.

That implies that you think that we’re all part of one team.

I think we are. I think I’m not only on the same team as Totten and Simon, but as Atrios, Blackfive, Kevin Drum, Captain Ed, and even “Screw Them” Kos.

Whoever is elected in November will be President of all of us. I don’t know who it will be – and I’m not making this appeal because I secretly think it will be one or the other and I want to ‘bind the wounds’ – but I’ll have no problem saying “President Kerry” as I have no problem today saying “President Bush”.

Either man will be my President – and yours as well.