Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Electoral College Roulette

I have been playing with the online interactive Electoral College maps like:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2012/ecalculator#?battleground

The states that are considered toss-up are:

CO, FL, IA, NC, NH, NV, OH, VA, and WI

If Obama wins FL, he only needs 1 more toss-up to win.

If he wins OH, he can win with either 1 or 2 of the other toss-ups, according to their vote value, except for this:

Obama wins NH, OH, and WI and the vote is 269 to 269, and we go to Congress for their vote. The House would select the President, but the Senate selects the Vice-President.

If Romney and Obama both finish on November 6 with 269 electoral votes apiece, the true results will not be known until December 17.

That's when the electors, Democratic and Republican loyalists nominated by state party officials and placed on the ballot alongside the presidential candidates, meet in their respective state capitals and the District of Columbia to formally cast their electoral votes.

That has become a mostly irrelevant exercise in recent presidential elections. But in the event of a razor-thin finish, or a 269-vote tie, every elector will suddenly wield great power.

A handful of states have "faithless elector" laws on the books designed to punish electors who switch their votes, and some two dozen states require electors to pledge to vote for the state's winner.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

2012 IPNYC County Chairs


Over the last two weeks, the county organizations of the Independence Party all reconstituted as official parties under the election law. Thanks for all the work to help in making sure Independence Party members have a voice in NYC. Pictured are the five newly elected county chairs.

IPNYC County Chairs (l to r): Nardo Reyes (Bronx), Sarah Lyons (Staten Island), Nancy Hanks (Queens), Bob Conroy (Brooklyn), and Cathy Stewart (Manhattan).

I was elected for my 4th term as an Executive Committee At-Large member (Manhattan).









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Monday, September 24, 2012

NY Independence Party Presidential Selection

On September 22, 2012, the New York State Committee held what was designated as the Selection of a President/Vice-President ticket.

Some background.  We vote using proxy, and each member carries the votes of their constituents.  The New York Board of Elections changed the final date for a party to select their Federal candidates to September 10th to meet the date to print and deliver military ballots, due to the MOVE Act.  So voting on September 22 would miss the final date.

There were 30 members at the meeting that this year would have been 300 members.  In New York, until this year, we select one male and female to represent each of the 150 Assembly districts.  Starting next year, the State Committee will be made up of 126 members representing the 63 Senate Districts.

On the Presidential issue, there was no mention of the deadline having been September 10th.  The Chairman, Frank MacKay, passed a resolution leaving the line blank.  He said that there had been no real interest from any candidates.

Here is the candidates that will be on the 2012 ballot in New York:

DEMOCRATIC - Barack Obama/Joe Biden
REPUBLICAN - Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan
CONSERVATIVE - Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan
WORKING FAMILIES - Barack Obama/Joe Biden
GREEN - Jill Stein/Cheri Honkala
PSL-SOCIALISM AND LIB - Peta Lindsay//Yari Osorio
LBT-LIBERTARIAN - Gary Johnson/James P. Gray
CST-CONSTITUTION - Virgil Goode/Jim Clymer

So why did the other minor parties understand and make their selections on time?









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Friday, September 21, 2012

Voter Empowerment Act

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced the Voter Empowerment Act Friday, a measure designed to protect voting rights as dozens of states have recently passed laws adding restrictions to voting.

The measure seeks to both expand voter registration, a goal of voting-rights activists, and ensure "integrity," which authors of state laws cite as the reason to pass such restrictive voter ID laws.

Gillibrand joins Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who has already introduced the Voter Empowerment Act in the House.

"It should be easy to vote, as simple as getting a glass of water, in a society that believes in the immutable right of every human being to determine his or her own future," Lewis said in a statement. "We must eliminate every barrier and impediment to the electoral process to make voting fair, accessible, and an accurate representation of the will of the people. The vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society to build."

The legislation has been referred to several committees in the GOP-controlled House and has 140 co-sponsors.

Here are the full details of the legislation, from Gillibrand's office:

  • Modernizing the voter registration system
  • Authorizing an online registration option
  • Authorizing same-day registration and permitting voters to update their registration data onsite
  • Providing additional tools to alleviate any additional burdens for people with disabilities
  • Requiring all universities that receive federal funds to offer and encourage voter registration to their students
  • Simplifying registration and ensuring that ballots from all military personnel serving overseas are counted
  • Authorizing funds for training poll workers and setting standards for polling place practices
  • Requiring provisional ballots be available and counted at all polling places
  • Prohibiting voter caging and designating it as a felony
  • Protecting against deceptive practices and intimidation
  • Establishing a national voter hotline to ensure timely reporting and corrective action of voting related issues
  • Setting standards for voting machines to ensure accurate tabulation and confirmation of voter intent paper copy verification
  • Reauthorizing the Election Assistance Commission to ensure that the highest standards are being met nationwide to guarantee fair elections









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Paying for Party Conventions

The House and the Senate passed bills to eliminate the federal assistance for the two parties' presidential conventions and save $35 million.

The House vote was 310-95.

The Senate already voted their version. The bills now go to reconciliation.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Saturday, September 15, 2012

Science is Remaking the Art of Political Campaigns

There is a new book by Sasha Issenberg called "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns"

The modern science of politics is were voters have become lab rats informed by principles of behavioral psychology. Campaigns today are now awash in data and insights that allows campaigns to act on this new data.

As the 2012 election day approaches, here are five ways that campaigns are using new tools to sway voters:

1. Make them visualize going to the polls
A new concept called "the plan-making effect": that has people who are induced to rehearse an activity are more likely to follow through. They found voters who were asked to talk through their voting plans turned out at a larger rate. Spouses and roommates often engaged in collaborative plan-making. For singles, a campaign volunteer stepped in.

2. Make them think voting is "cool"
Randomly assigned voters got a phone call with one of two messages. In one, the caller's script said that "in the most recent election, voter turnout was the lowest in 30 years." The other reported that "in last year's election the vast majority of eligible voters actually voted. It was the highest election turnout in decades." Those who heard the second message turned out to vote at a rate 5 points higher than those who were presented with the dismal view. The lesson for candidates: stop begging your supporters to do their duty and instead direct them to join the crowd.

3. Predict what they're going to do
The most valuable data in modern campaigning comes from statistical "microtargeting" models, the political worlds version of credit scores. Campaigns gather thousands of data points on voters, from what they put on their registration forms, what they tell canvassers, and information on their buying and lifestyle habits collected by commercial data warehouses. Campaigns then run algorithms trawling for patterns linking those demographics characteristics to the political attitudes measured in their polling. Campaigns are interested in predicting political behavior. So they generate individual scores, presented as a percentage likelihood, that a voter will cast a ballot, support a party, be pro-choice or pro-life, or respond to a request to volunteer. These scores now stick to voters as indelibly as credit scores. A field director won't send a volunteer to a voter's door without knowing their relevant number.

4. Get them to confess (indirectly) to bias
Through 2008, the Obama's advisers never entirely trusted the polls. The challenge was separating voters who resisted Obama, or remained undecided, because of his race from those who had other reasons. So the campaign focused on a small group of white voters who reported themselves to be supporting McCain at a much higher rate then the campaign's scores predicted they should. They looked for variables that defined this group and found one when they tried a new question in their surveys: "Do you think your neighbors would be willing to vote for an African American for president?" People who answered "no" were likely to be problem voters. Everything their database signaled about political attitudes, based on their: partisanship, age or socioeconomic status, suggested they would be likely to support Obama, but they said they planned to vote for McCain. So the campaign added a new category in their database called "openness score". It measured the likelihood that someone was open to vote for a black candidate. The campaign could isolate those with low scores and deal with them in two ways: ignore them or if they looked like habitual voters who were likely to turn out, the campaign could approach them with targeted communications that focused on economic themes rather them "hope and change".

5. Let them know (gently) that they are being watched
Few campaigns want to be associated with tactics that threatened to expose nonvoters to their neighbors. But campaigns have figured out how to soften such approaches. One version widely used tells a voter "our records indicate you voted in a prior election" and says that the candidate hopes to be able to thank the voter again after this election day for their "good citizenship".









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Friday, September 14, 2012

NY BOE 9/12/12 Meeting

Here are some of my notes:

1. The Court order to fix the OverVote problem will not be done until the 2013 elections. In the 2010 General Election we used two new optical scan voting systems. I found an error in the software that did not create an OverVote if you selected two of the same candidate for a position. This happens due to New York's Fusion voting which allows the same candidate to appear on multiple party lines. The software would only select the first party it scanned, from the top down upstate and from the left to right in New York City and not tell the voter which party it selected as your vote.

2. The pre-cleared addition of the Bengali language in New York City will not be done until the 2013 elections due to a printing vendor problem.

3. They are to begin evaluating an automated ballot audit system, ClearVote. One electronic system to verify another electronic system and replace hand counting.

Only in New York.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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My Self-Imposed Term Limits

Yesterday, New York had its State and Local Primaries.

After eight years, 4 terms, I did not run for the State Committee.

There are a number of reasons for not partitioning this year. We had redistricting and the State Executive Committee changed the makeup of the committee by using Senate districts instead of Assembly districts as who you would represent. I would have to start over learning the needs of the new voters who I would represent. Then there is the issue of the New York City Organizations split from the State Committee on almost all issues. Finally I turned 68 this year and slowing down and smelling the roses was in order.

So instead of doing the political operations before a primary, Barbara and I went on a long planned vacation to Turkey and visited the European and Asian side of Istanbul up to the Black Sea area.

I am still a member of the Manhattan County Committee, will still be a member of the New York City Executive Committee, and will continue this blog.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Thursday, September 13, 2012

NYC BOE Primary Vote Count Errors

The New York City Board of Elections bungled Manhattan’s vote count after the June 26, 2012 Democratic Congressional primary far worse that it has admitted.

In 537 Manhattan election districts, workers failed to properly record some or all vote totals after polls closed, an internal review has found. That means 60% of the 887 Manhattan districts that had competitive races that day had at least one error in their returns. Manhattan, in fact, produced twice as many “discrepancies” as the four other boroughs combined.

The majority of the Manhattan errors occurred in the controversial 13th Congressional District race, a board spokesman confirmed. That’s where Rep. Charles Rangel defeated State Sen. Adriano Espaillat by less than 1,000 votes after a recount that lasted two weeks.

In late August, the Manhattan board sent stern letters to 152 Election Day inspectors. It warned them that they had violated board procedures during the June primary, and it ordered them to take an immediate retraining class or they would not be permitted to work in today’s primary election. Two-thirds of those letters went to poll workers in Espaillat’s 72nd Assembly District in Inwood and Washington Heights, board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez said. On Election Day, only a handful of the 24 poll workers assigned there were Hispanic. No or few Spanish interpreter was placed at the polls. Virtually all of the poll workers, in fact, were appointed by the board, not by the pro-Espaillat district leaders which usually pick the workers for their districts.

The Board of Elections is now promising that its new procedure of taking tallies directly from voting machine computer data sticks will eliminate past human errors.

We hear about all the Voter ID laws, but how do you protect the voters from disfunctional Board of Elections?









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

We Demand Real Debates



Found this new website.

The presidential debates are the first opportunity for millions of voters to see the presidential contenders themselves, not just their advertising campaigns. These debates are organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) - a supposedly "nonpartisan" corporation which is a puppet of the national Democratic and Republican parties, and the big corporations that fund both of them. The CPD's criteria to be included in these debates are designed to exclude independent contenders who promote ideas that challenge those in power.

We, the undersigned, demand presidential debates that include the real choices before the voters this November. The debates must include every candidate who is on enough ballots to win the White House and who has demonstrated a minimal level of support -- meaning either 1% of the vote in a credible national poll, or qualification for federal matching funds, or both. In 2012, the Green and Libertarian party candidates both meet all of these criteria.

We call on the national news media, the League of Women Voters, and every other civic organization that speaks up for the rights of regular people to organize a 2012presidential debate that includes all the qualified candidates.

We call on the Commission on Presidential Debates to change its arbitrary rules to include all the qualified contenders. And we urge our fellow Americans to rise up and demand democracy in our presidential elections, beginning today with the presidential debates. These debates belong to the people, not the politicians or Wall Street.


Use the above link to sign their statement.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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