\n
![\"Election_Pass_08.JPG\"](\"http:\/\/www.windsofchange.net\/Election_Pass_08.JPG\")
\n<\/center><\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
…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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>, saying that they wouldn’t be able to manage high-turnout elections without the systems.<\/p>\n So how was it?<\/p>\n An island of calm. Kind of boring. We wound up watching Comedy Central (funny!), because when we walked around, there was nothing<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Smoothly, accurately, transparently. <\/p>\n I’ll have more on elections tomorrow, including a (friendly) challenge to election conspiracy theorists on the right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal watched the election in Sacramento where the predicted post-voting machine crash did not take place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1955"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}