atoms into suns

I was about to head off to the DMV to see about a drivers license, but fortunately someone in this house read Slashdot today and warned me that their computer system's been down since Friday.

As much as I'd like to go off on the Colorado DMV about computer security and virus controls, I won't. I do have a question, though: Why didn't the Boulder Daily Camera run a little notice about this? I read the online version every day for my local news and haven't seen a thing. I just checked the archives, and there's a short article buried in the State section, dated today (6 days after the problem began). They had a front-page story about smoke damage to the Old Navy store; the lead story in State news today is about a lawsuit to stop prairie dog poisoning -- in South Dakota; but there's next to nothing about major state offices being down for a week. Maybe it's my punishment for not paying for dead trees delivered to my doorstep.

So now I'm off to figure out why my comments on this are coming out all grumpy.

Oh, if all religious conflicts could be resolved so pleasantly. (Found here.)

On long holiday weekends we generally hang out at home, knowing that anywhere we decide to go will be packed with people. This Labor Day weekend, however, restlessness apparently got the best of us, because we packed up the car and headed off to... one of the busiest national parks in the US.

Strangely, we'd been assured on the phone that there were camping spots available, but when we got to the visitors' center we found a half-mile line to get in the main gate and only halting assurances that there might be a spot or two left when we finally got there.

So... we bailed. We took the ranger's "last-resort" suggestion and headed south and east, away from the park and onto National Forest land, where we could camp anywhere we wanted.

And a good time was had by all.

We even got to have a campfire (hooray for rain!), which allowed us to eat our traditional weekend-camping meal, plus smores. The fire is also where this trip's camp gremlin showed up. I had carved one, but then this one decided to make its appearance in a piece of burning wood. (Gremlins are hard to catch on film, so if you don't see it, don't worry about it.) It seems to have had a secondary gremlin, though, since this one showed up when I took a picture.

The only hitches were: the Jeep that came tearing up the road, then back down, sometime around midnight, the dirt bikes that tore up and down the road starting at about 8am, and the fact that it is a Law of the Universe that I must have a cold every time we go camping. Even these things didn't cause any real problems, though. (Well, the cold made me not want to get anything done last week...)

Oh, and I got to play with our new digital camera.

In an effort to hunt down more blogs written by Baha'is, I did a simple Google search for "Baha'i blog" (without the quotes). Interesting what came up, especially the further down the results list I went. There were a few blogs there that I hadn't heard of before (which will be added to my sidebar soon enough), but there are even more blogs that mentioned the Faith in just one entry. There were a number of Beliefnet "What Religion are You?" survey lists.

The ones that I found most interesting, though, were the ones where people talked about "What Baha'is believe". It's truly frightening what some people think the Faith is about. A few comments may have been out of malice, but most seemed to be genuinely misinformed. Some couldn't get Baha'u'llah's name right (not just a simple misspelling, but a different name altogether), others said the Baha'i Faith has no Scriptures of its own, one even mistook a forum comment for a quote from the Writings. Many completely misrepresent the Faith. One was so fraught with errors that it read like one of those "Kids' quotes about science" email forwards.

Of course, this sort of thing isn't exclusive to the Baha'i Faith -- I've seen and heard tons of comments about various religions that left me speechless. I try to illuminate and teach whenever I hear these comments, but mostly I wonder why I should have to.

Between my junior and senior years of high school, I attended a weeklong workshop at West Point, attended by students from all over the US. At one social event, a young man walked up to me and struck up a conversation. All was going well until he abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What religion are you?" While shocked by the strangeness of his question, I answered. (I wasn't a Baha'i at that time.) To be polite and keep the conversation moving, I asked the same question of him. He told me, then informed me, "I'm not supposed to talk to you" and walked off. I was stunned. This was a completely foreign experience to me.

That event happened over 14 years ago, and it still strikes me as strange and sad. If we can't talk to each other, how do we learn? If we can't be bothered to learn even the rudiments of each others' beliefs, how can we ever come to an understanding, respect... or peace?

Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

--from blackboxvoting.org

That's right, a private corporation, the largest supplier of electronic touch-screen voting machines in the US, has a backdoor that lets people change the vote count. Of course, with touchscreen machines there is usually no paper trail, no auditability, no chance of a recount.

This from a company whose CEO has been buddying up to Republican bigwigs and is quoted as saying he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

There have been other issues with Diebold machines. In one election, someone was able to find election results from touch-screen machines, on the Diebold computer system -- for an election in which the polls were still open. She could have easily changed the results and no one would have known. And why did Diebold have the current, running, election results on their own FTP site?

California and other places are worried enough about all this that they've banned touch-screen machines and have suggested criminal prosecution of Diebold Election Systems. This was after Diebold machines turned away thousands of eligible voters on Super Tuesday. The Wikipedia has a list of more voting fiascos, and blackboxvoting.org is a good source of current info on electronic voting.

In addition to the whole electronic voting disaster, there is the old question of the Florida 2000 election. Those still angry about what happened there are frequently told to "get over it." But there are aspects beyond hanging chads that many people aren't aware of.

Did you know Florida's voter rolls were purged (bullet point starting with "57,746 voters were listed") of tens of thousands of eligible voters before the 2000 election -- mostly Democrat minorities? (Their names were similar to those of convicted felons who did not have voting rights.) They almost did a similar thing this year, but their list was found to be so flawed -- and people made enough noise -- that they scrapped it.

There is also the small matter of Katherine Harris, who in 2000 was simultaneously the Florida Secretary of State, Election Commissioner, head of Bush's campaign in Florida -- and responsible for the voter list purges.

If you can stomach it, I highly recommend this handy Flash presentation of the Florida 2000 voter roll purge. It's not exactly impartial, but as far as I've researched it's all accurate.

I wrote most of this (minus the opening quote, which just came to my attention last night, and one paragraph) in response to someone who told me she was embarrassed that the US is going to have international election monitors this November. I told her that if election monitors are what it takes to make sure we have a fair election, in the country that touts itself as the Guardian of Democracy, we should be embarrassed. Then maybe, hopefully, it'll get fixed.

An Angolan friend of mine remarked: "One candidate loses the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots, but his brother is governor of the one state where the outcome is too close to call. The effort to count the ballots is disrupted by the Washington staffs of elected representatives from the candidate's party, and the court that ultimately adjudicates the outcome is made up largely by people appointed by the candidate's father. Sounds a lot like an election in Africa."

     --Joseph Wilson, _The Politics of Truth_, page 281
     (Joseph Wilson is the husband of Valerie Plame)