Sorry Elana, but I have nothing to offer in regards to the recent city election. Tho it pains me to admit it, this was a year of pissing on the graves of billions– the poor subjugated people who have never known the sweet freedom of democracy. There was a moment’s hesitation on that fateful Tuesday morning, time afforded and excuses looking small and petty in the sunshine. I considered the candidates who would be spending their day in breathless anticipation for the results, I considered the ballot initiatives which would mold and shape my community for years to come. I considered the fact that I had given the year’s voter guide a perfunctory leafing and had no idea what the fuck was going on and then I considered making lunch and heading off to work.

The self righteous few who had collected the signatures or the money to land their names to the ballot did not speak to me beyond a general or focused revulsion. If Gavin Newsom had been challenged then I may have made a special trip just to mark one check-box, but he was up against local alternaculture luminary Chicken John, homeless cab-driving personality crisis Grasshopper and the slick would-be stuffed shirt Quintin Mecke who ran his campaign office a door over from my own. Having listened to his media savvy on the cell phone countless times I couldn’t even muster any sympathy to take me up the street. Now, had Chicken John or Grasshopper or Mecke had a chance in hell of winning I would have legged it double-time to oppose them but, as I said, this was a sleeper election at best.

I’ve skipped voting for candidates countless times, probably a couple in every election I’ve had the hard-won right and privilege to participate in, but I’m much more adamant about reading up on and forming half-baked, emotional opinions on local initiatives. This year, somehow, my weeks of note-taking and investigation came down to reading the first three in the book laying on the couch, sick, waiting for Amanda to pick up pants before I laid down in bed to prepare for playing a Halloween party. Not the ideal environment for civic duty, I admit, and it yielded a passing knowledge of a MUNI bill and two city hall procedural issues. The latter two made me drowsy but Proposition A stirred the dying embers of my heart momentarily. It looked like another step towards privatization which, broken as the bus system may be, is not the direction I would have things going.

Yet it wasn’t compelling enough of an issue to drag me off to the polls for another round of the ignorant ass awards, not this year. However, in the days leading up to America-day I received an interesting e-mail, followed by an even more interesting one. It’s worth reading the entire quote, people:

Correction! Election day is Tuesday, November 6th. We put the wrong date in our last email. Oh geez, we are so embarrassed, and so sorry for sending you a second email. This is the last you’ll hear from us. We promise.

Hey young San Francisco voter,

We got your email from the San Francisco voter file. See below for the legal mumbo-jumbo. We don’t mean to bug you, but we don’t have the money to send you something in the mail, and we’d rather not waste the trees.

Check out our voter guide to see what we think about the ballot www.theballot.org/2007/sf.

We just want to remind you to vote tomorrow, November 6th. Polls are open from 7am to 8pm. It’s so important that young people make their voices heard in this election.

Don’t know where your polling place is? Go here:
http://gispub02.sfgov.org/website/pollingplace/INDEX.htm
Or you can vote all day in the basement of City Hall.

Did you know that since February, only 154 new voters have registered in San Francisco? Crazy! That freaks us out, so starting Wednesday we’re going to focus on registering young voters. But for Tuesday, the city is expecting a record low turnout for this election, and that’s always bad news, because the Republicans always vote. So we’re going to get out there and vote. You should too.

We’ve been making voter guides for every San Francisco election since 2004, and we’re here to stay. There are three elections next year, and we’ll be making voter guides for young people for every one of them. We also throw parties, art shows, and poetry slams year round. Check us out and sign up to join at www.theleague.com/sf.
You can download a PDF version of it to print and take to the polls.
http://uploadway.com/files/1104/SF07_voter_guide.pdf

So please check out our voter guide to learn about the election and then go vote!

- The SF League

The League of Young Voters PAC (also known as the League of Pissed Off Voters) sent you this email blast. We’re not some vast right wing or left wing conspiracy, so don’t freak out. Don’t blame any of the candidates we endorsed.

We got your email address legally from the San Francisco voter file. You can unsubscribe from our list below. To take your e-mail out of the voter registration database, re-register to vote and write “delete” in the space for your e-mail address. But we hope you don’t. Email is the only way broke groups like us can contact voters, except for robocalls. But those things suck! We wouldn’t do that to you.

Paid for by League of Young Voters Political Action Committee (LYV PAC) 45 Main Street, Suite 628 Brooklyn, NY 11201, William Wimsatt, Treasurer. Not paid for by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Voter Guides posted on this site may not reflect the position of LYV PAC or its affiliated organizations.

If this offends you it’s worth continuing on to their website which is run out of New York, Brooklyn to be specific. Brooklyn, you know? Where the cool white kids live?

A couple of days after my failure to participate, my insult to the oppressed masses of history, I was standing outside work smoking a cigarette and chatting with a fellow wage-slave. A ragged looking, but obviously not homeless, bearded dude came out from the store doing his best Abby Hoffman, carrying some clipboards. “Hey, do you guys wanna hear about some, like, totally boring liberal stuff?” he asked making vague gestures with his hands and rolling his eyes. We both stared at him until he shrugged and started walking off. “No, I want more condescension” I offered but he didn’t turn around.

The next week the hip volunteers for Mecke’s failed bid were clearing out his rented office. I walked through the sad-parade of ratty chairs and tattoos and suppressed my smug laughter. Taking the trash out later that night I opened our blue bin to chuck the recycling and found it had been filled to the brim with campaign propaganda. So had the next bin down the street. Thousands upon thousands of unused, never touched, never read, never cared for and never needed newsheet pamphlets were standing between me and a simple civic task. I had no recourse but to leave a couple of paper bags alongside the trash where they would be kicked over and strewn about before the evening’s end. I wish I had the guts to follow my impulse and upend both industrial-sized containers into the former Quintin Mecke campaign office doorway.

PS– The top graphic wasn’t specific to this year’s democracy hootenanny, it’s the record cover of Funeral Shock’s 7″ that came out last time Gavin was up for office. Local band you’re not gonna like.

No Comments

Voting Rights

Standing smoking in front of the anarchist bookstore looking worn and disgruntled– it’s hard to sell ideology and days of slow business can eat away your nerve… Approaching in my old punk rock t-shirt freashly adorned with my red “I VOTED” sticker I prepared myself for any amount of abuse which might be hurtled in my direction… The expected confrontation never occurs and, try as might, passing ellicits not even a trace of a sneer…

The girl at the coffee shop is thrilled by evidence of my participation in democracy… Earlier, she explained, someone told her they weren’t voting because they didn’t believe in it… What does that mean– like you can’t exist? Well, it wasn’t gonna drag her down and damned if she wasn’t gonna plaster that red sticker proudly on her shirt after her shift was over… It’s nice that she’s often the first person I speak to in my day but even so it’s hard to keep up with her sunshine…

Rock the vote parked one of those new VW’s out front of work, manned by a team of numbskulls in matching t-shirts… One looked like Sammy Hagar and played cock-rock licks through the car’s amp while a hapless film crew shot from cutting edge angles… The other must’ve recently escaped from the fraternity and stood much too close to me and explained that people had told them to fuck off as they were spreading the word ealier in the day… Can you believe that? Well, yeah, you make me wish I hadn’t voted– but instead of saying it I just wished them luck and gave up on smoking…

I’m a bad voter– I’m under informed and my comprehension of issues is on par with an Irish lab’s… Generally my grasp of conidates’ history is non-existent, I judge commercials by style and funding and I decide by emotional instinct over critical pragmatism… As guilty as this makes me feel I collect my torn paper cheat sheet and anxiously approach the polls, expecting mocking looks, quiet chuckling and some death by embarassment moment contrived by gravity and my lack of coordination… Aside from being accidentally disenfranchised one year I’ve never suffered any of the expected catastrophes and I can’t help but step lightly as I leave… It happens with the knowledge that my ballot may as well end up floating in the bay for all it’s worth– San Francisco is a predetermined district…

Still, the guilt of my feckless participation pales in comparison to that which I would– have accidentally– be consumed by were I to refuse… In the end I don’t think I vote because I care or because I matter or because I decide a fucking thing ot even because democracy’s such a great idea… In the end I think I vote for every southern black who risked being beaten, jailed or lynched for stepping up to a ballot box for the first time… For the women who marched through the streets suffering taunts, jeers and abuse for their suffrage… For the Central Americans who stood in line under military guard to cast their vote amidst a week of political bombings, assassinations and the closure of independent newspapers… For my highschool English teacher who flew back to Africa to participate in the first election after aparteid fell… I voted because Chinese tanks ran over college students and for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland– because not voting would be pissing on the graves of people who deserved a right routinely taken for granted by the most powerful population in the world, and the graves still being filled today… Not really a good reason to vote or a responsible act, just a goad I’ll respond to like a pack mule…

[3] Comments

Election day is coming, and unless I miss my guess you have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on except that Arnold is poised to mop the floor with Angelides and his horrible commercials… When I was growing up my complete political perspective was shaped by Berkeley Breathed and my father’s high-volume diatribes syphoned through a couple 40oz of Rainer shot rapid-fire at the television… Now that I’m an adult I feel more compelled to investigate things further and for the past week or so I’ve been leafing idling through the California Voter’s Information pamphlet in between reruns to educate myself about the issues of the year…

As anyone who has ever cracked open such a guide knows the pamphlets are broken down into concise summaries of the ballot proposition written by some bureaucrat whose job is not likely to be affected by the results of the impending election… These summaries explain the core ingrediants of the ballot measure, the expected fiscal impact of implementation and, if you’re lucky, a breakdown of how this came to be on the ballot… Afterwards we’re treated to paid endorsements supporting or abhoring the proposed item… If you’re like me you mostly pay attention to who signed their name to these arguments and vote accordingly, kind of like how you watch the television adverts… Has anyone else found this year’s crop to be especially delicious? I swear to god the geniuses behind some of these are gonna take Madison Avenue by storm– one recently unleashed beast has obviously been based on the breakout success of popular herpes medication commercials…

Anyways, there’s many complicated issues involving state retrofitting projects, essentially the A-E props, which aren’t sponsered directly by Ghandi or Chrysler and, therefore, more difficult to navigate… Reading through the pamphlet yields that Prop 1A would prevent the taxes gleaned through the sale of gasoline and the tolls collected at weigh stations from being spent on anything other than transportation… By transportation they mean adding more lanes to more freeways, but that’s besides today’s exercise… The proponants, a shadowy congomeration of minds known as The One Plan to Rebuild California Now, complain about this legal loophole with which politicians (if anti-Semetism was still en vogue this would be interchangable with Jews) syphon off our hard earned dollars for their special interest cronies, yachts, illegal immigrant nanny/mistresses and prime rib dinners… The opponant to this measure is Jackie Goldberg who chairs the state assembly of education who argues that flexibility with tax revenue is key to budgeting and cites schools as what will suffer if the billions of tax revenue is locked into expanding all of Los Angeles’ freeways…

Who do you trust? The shadowy organization includes everyone running for office this term and everyone who has ever run for office holding hands with various city groups from the Mexican border to the Bay Area… Jackie Goldberg is a dyke from LA who teached in Compton until she decided it was time to become a Democratic State Assembly member… Can’t decide? Neither can I, so let’s look at the law they’re changing…

Okay, first of all you can’t get the full text online unless you’re prepared to download the fucking PDF file so we can’t do that… From what I recall the way things stand there’s an amount of revenue which is gained from gas and weigh station taxes which goes into a Transportation Fund… The California Energy Commision website is of no help… Don’t waste your time on the PDF’s… So I google: “california state budget” transportation revenue 2005 and get a page of various pages none of which appear to be actual budget data from the state… Let’s try “proposition 1A” california!

Okay, so we find the legislative analyst’s breakdown of the proposition which is nice… There’s a blog entry and some paid hack sites and then we have this official text from the state which discusses the precursor ballot measure, Proposition 42 from 2002’s election cycle… So here we learn that this issue was recently voted on, that the loophole has been exercised twice to balance the state budget and that both sums borrowed from the transportation fund will be repaid within a period of time with interest…

So remember when California couldn’t pay its employees and state buildings were unscrewing lightbulbs and shit? Some of the money dig out the shit came from the transportation fund… Fair enough– I can’t find it online but in the actual pamphlet there is mention of a 2/3 majority vote by the state assembly and approval of the governor for such a syphoning… So I guess with Prop 1A the next time the state can’t pay its employees– well how many are there? I can’t tell by browsing the DPA site… Frankly I have a headache already from this excursion and you’re bored to death and don’t care so why bother? So twelve more ballot propositions to learn about and all these motherfuckers running for office and then we’ll all be educated about the issues and able to make responsible, adult decisions…

[2] Comments

I’d like to address what I feel is a complete lack of perspective by the Democratic party, of respect for the bible belt by the media, and of what we call cajones south of the fiercely guarded border, by any charismatic leader smart enough to read the paper every day.

Specifically, the information documented in this (I hate to cite the rag but nothing means anything anymore so whatever, right?) Rolling Stone article and a recent analysis of Democratic strategy by the New Yorker.

People can get lost in the details. People can also completely ignore the details and still make the right decision. Most of us have been burned by the former and the people who rely on the latter enough to make any sort of decision feel like your in the rat maze of some 13 year old with a cattle prod. That’s why we have leaders who have a knack for finding a path through all the hmming and hahing.

The Democratic party doesn’t need to find the right concoction of issues to cater to a middle majority that they treat as some Damien child that can make or break their campaign on a whim. It’s a pandering without any real respect for the people whose votes you want so desperately. Anyone who’s tried to court a member of the opposite sex who knows she’s attractive can tell you how appetizing desparation smells.

The DNC is paying a third-party company a bunch of money to tell them how to speak to this foreign and flighty demographic, handing out pamphlets that sound like instructions written for robots on how to care for animals. The impression this gives is that the DNC views the middle as an alien other with incredible power, which right now is true. Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi are making murderous and embarrassing invectives against enemies of the U.S. in an effort to change the perception of Dems as soft on national security. As the New Yorker article observes, if you have to say you’re tough, you’re not.

Not only is this all very bile boiling, it’s just poor strategy. Everyone can see the insincerity, the calculations, it’s just that the loyal left - like me - agree with the ends and so continue to cross their fingers and hope for the best. I’m betting the amount of money being poured into think tanks and strategists for both parties would solve many poor countries’ infrastructure problems.

So what to do? At this point it’s difficult for the DNC to come off as having some core ideals that they didn’t just cobble together from polls. They need to pick a single voice, no matter how imperfect because they’re all imperfect, go after the incredible amounts of corruption (of which I suspect we’ve barely scratched the surface), and stop the media speculation about what the strategy will be for fall. We’re going to win, next question. Even the New Yorker is ashamed of the bickering messages being bandied about.

And most importantly, despite the media veil that says otherwise, keep in mind that Kerry didn’t really fuck up. Whether or not you think that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is full of shit, I think it’s important to note that if the same discrepancy between exit polls and actual numbers happened in a third world country, everyone would’ve called BS. Part of it is the comfort I feel in thinking that the country that I live in wouldn’t have elected an obvious liar (no matter what his politics) but I think the biggest fumbling of the trump card the Dems have been handed by way of lies and corruption would be to cater to voters who don’t want to be catered to, they want to be lead.

No Comments

Have you had a machine curse at you lately? I’m sure a few people remember reports of malfunctioning Tickle Me Elmos who some parents claimed were corrupting their children, and there’s also the Smurf toy who apparently says, “I like it when you cut me,” but these are probably nothing more than really, really funny figments of Middle American breeders’ imaginations. After all, major toymakers undoubtedly spend millions on testing and quality control to make sure their fun products are wholesome and safe… well, mostly safe.

But, I digress. This is not about kids’ toys, but rather the adult playthings of democracy: voting machines. I work in the Department of Elections of a major American city – let’s call it Fran Sancisco – and recently have been put to work testing our new voting machines. To conform to federal standards, the Department is placing an accessible voting machine at every polling place for the upcoming June 6 primaries.

“Accessible” in this case means the machines are made for use by voters with disabilities, i.e., mobility problems or impaired vision – voters who would otherwise have trouble marking a ballot by hand. You can see one here, but the thing is basically an oversized O.G. Nintendo without the fun of Duck Hunt or Hudson’s Adventure Island. However, unlike the beloved Japanese video game system of the 80’s, our new voting machines come up with non sequiturs worthy of David Duke at a NAACP benefit dinner – sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The machine works like this: you (the disabled voter) – or a friendly and helpful poll worker – feed your party-specific paper ballot into a slot in the front, and the thing then processes the info on this sheet. Upon reading the ballot (supposing it doesn’t freak out, jam, or reject it, as it often does) the machine produces a touch-screen read-out of the contents of the ballot, first with an instruction screen, then the consecutive contests, one-by-one. Imagine an ATM where you choose “Nancy Pelosi” instead of “$40 Quick Cash from Checking.”

Other than the touch-screen function, the machine also has an interface for various devices used by the disabled, like a “sip puff,” and an audio script for the blind. In our recent days of testing, it has been the computer-voiced script that has provided the most entertainment, shock, and awe.

Fran Sancisco, as some may know, is located in the great state of California. Our governor is pretty well-known; the man is a (correctly pronounced) household name in American places where they can’t say “tortilla” right. I would imagine this includes Omaha, Nebraska, home of the company that provides our voting machines. I was the first of our small staff to proof a Republican ballot for the upcoming election and found otherwise.

The damn thing said the n-word at me. And my coworkers. And boss. Even the Director of Elections. In a tinny little vocoder staccato:

“Ar-nold Sch-war-zuh- n*****”

I thought I was completely desensitized to the word (and most other things) by now, but hearing it in that dinky See n’ Say voice was pretty startling. Imagine how a blind voter would react. Imagine how a blind black voter would react.

Voting machines are controversial because people are afraid of them being tampered with. Although these machines keep a paper trail on a visible little receipt-sized roll, I believe voter fraud is plausible. It’s happened before, and not so far from this fair city. But what I’m worried about now is sheer incompetence.

The one racial slur in the audio script isn’t the sole problem with these machines. They are also supposed to function in Chinese and Spanish, as Fran San has sizeable numbers of Cantonese and Latino voters. However, the Chinese is sprayed across the screen like confetti, and the Spanish audio comes out so slow and slurred we’ve name the voice “Juan Borracho.” When navigating this mess, the picture that emerges is a system whose vendors did zilch to check for operability. There was simply no quality control.

As far as I can figure, the argument for privatizing government functions, like providing electricity or elections, is that market competition improves quality and discourages fiscal waste. The city has spent millions on a contract for hundreds of voting machines that, in their current state, will (maybe) offend blind Republicans, and disenfranchise any disabled voters dependent on second language. In outsourcing elections into the private sector, it seems to have created even less accountability.

So, to all those conspiracy theorists out there: have no fear of highly organized corporate cabals handing their rich benefactors elected office. Not in this town, anyway. Instead worry about the omnipresent modern menace of the half-assed job.

And racist trilingual Nintendos.

[2] Comments