Voting at St. John’s

As I mentioned in my last post, I voted at St. John’s today.   The handicapped entrance is around the corner at the old Pioneer House entrance:

The entrance to the hall is a newly installed door inside the entrance to the left.  It doesn’t have an automatic door opener and no one was at the door, as they often were at the Salem Heights polling place.

Once inside, I checked in, but had trouble with the Automark machine for people with disabilities.  The machine was in the dead center of the room, which was split off by precinct, one side (closest to the handicapped entrance) for Pct. 1, and the other for Pct. 2 (mine).

The area in front of the Automark was blocked by a table, I presumed it was there to divide the two halves of the room.

After looking stumped for a moment, one of the poll workers asked me if I wanted to use the machine.  Affirmative.  She and two other poll workers had to get the key to activate the machine and it was a few minutes before I could use it.

I did get to use the machine and eventually cast my ballot.

I know the poll workers are mostly inexperienced;  the clerk has had to aggressively seek workers in recent years.  Worse yet, there’s still the preliminary and final special elections for the US Senate coming up. 

But those in charge of setup should put the Automark on their checklist.

Election 2009 Thoughts

As we prepare for another municipal election,  I’ve never made endorsements as such on the blog, but here are my thoughts.

First of all, I and the rest of Ward 2 have a new polling place, or really, an old place being used again:  The social hall at St. John’s Church, just next door to me.  It was used in 1995, but later polling was done at Salem Heights.

I hated and resented that for years.  Now it’s back to St. John’s.  I can’t blame people in Salem Heights or in Precinct 1 for hating this, too.  I wouldn’t begrudge them for the hate one bit.  The polling places have been consolidated this year so most wards go to one place for both precincts except for Wards 5 and 6.

I’m obliged to investigate handicapped access;  this lack of access was why St. John’s was dropped in the first place.  I asked around and was told there would be a ramp.  There’ll need to be three;  there’s one up to the entrance, one down to the foyer, and one into the hall itself if I recall correctly.

We’ll see how it goes Tuesday.

On to the candidates. Wards 3 and 5 are the only contested ward races, so for most voters, the at-large candidates are the only ones they’ll focus on. 

That brings me to Teasie Goggin, the highest-profile candidate in all the city, running for at-large.

I respect Teasie.  I’ve talked with her about one of her campaign goals, increased transparency in government.  It is something I’ve talked about, and lived.  If she is elected she will learn what I have learned firsthand!

Unfortunately, Teasie and I have never talked about the big issue that divides us, the senior center.  I fear that if I elect her, she will seek to delay the project such that we’ll be arguing it when I’m 60.  She and my ward councilor are opinionated to a fault with this.

What of other issues?  Boston St.?  I can cite another example of the transparency she is asking for in the Salem Redevelopment Authority controversy over Tavern in the Square.

Respect Teasie as I may, I can’t give her my vote.

I also feel unable (or unwilling) to vote for Tom Furey.  I don’t believe for a moment that he was deliberately malicious when he wanted to ban smoking in public housing, but that is an issue he could have dealt with differently if only he had some forethought.  I’ve learned not to expect that from many councilors, but that is no excuse.

I will vote for Joan Lovely in the at-large.  I almost always disagree with her, but respect her professionalism.  (I appreciate the hand written note on your election mailing, Mrs. Lovely.  Thanks.  But I had decided my position before getting it.)

I like Steve Pinto but don’t feel connected to him, nor to Arthur Sargent, nor to the “new” candidate, Mike Allen (ex-School Committee).

I will not cast a vote for my ward councilor, nor for Mayor Driscoll, for reasons I’ve already explained earlier in the year.  I’m also concerned about her support for casinos, a issue that has been virtually undiscussed.  Mayor Driscoll, like too many in Salem, want to think our recession is a bad dream and soon over.  On the other hand, it’s very much real and may never be over soon, as long as we depend on the quick fix of gentrification.

(Aside:  I’ve thought Shirley Walker’s very public shit fight with Murphy’s restaurant was done out of frustration;  I think she wanted to flip her condo at Derby Lofts like she did in Quincy and wasn’t able to do so.)

By my account, Mayor Driscoll is still depending on gentrification to make her and Salem go.   Not for me.

Votemark machines perform at the primary

The new Votemark ballot marking machines for people with disabilities have had their 2nd election.  Quote from Cheryl LaPointe via the Gazette:

There was, however, some confusion caused by new voting machines designed to assist physically disabled residents. Although the machines — one at each polling center — debuted during the city’s preliminary elections last September, many residents seeing them for the first time mistook them for ballot boxes.
“We need to add more signage for next year,” said Lapointe. “People were confused because the screen on the machines says, ‘Insert ballot here.’”
The machine, an AutoMARK Voter Assist Terminal model A100, is designed to aid blind, deaf and physically disabled voters. It is equipped with a computer touch screen, audio headphones. A disabled voter slides his empty ballot into a slot in the machine and casts his vote electronically, and the computer marks the paper ballot.
On Tuesday, many non-disabled voters attempted to slide their standard, secrecy-sleeve covered ballots in the small slot, jamming it up for the users who needed it.
“Several times I had to go down and un-stick the machines,” said Lapointe. “Then we’d have to retest them to make sure they worked.” She added that one of the machines is presently out of commission due to a jam.

Mrs. LaPointe didn't specify which precincts were having problems.  I know I had a problem using the machine in Ward 2 Precinct 2;  the tray that the ballot is fed into was not folded down for use, so I couldn't feed my ballot into it until someone fixed it.  It's somewhat like feeding paper into a printer.  I did get to vote with it after all.

This will be on the agenda for our commission meeting next week.

Political Alienation in Salem

The Globe is writing about "The Irritables", those citizens who don't believe in voting.  Mostly, they feel so alienated by the political process that they feel their participation doesn't matter.

I'm familiar with the argument since I participated in the Net, modems and computer bulletin boards before that.  Libertarianism and anarchism were, and still are, very prevalent political philosophies.

I don't have much of a choice but to vote tomorrow;  as I've said before, I and the Commission have fought too hard to defend our rights not to use them.  I'm certain we'll all be at our respective polling places tomorrow.

Yet, I'm very sympathetic to the "Irritables"?  How could we be so alienated from the people who we trust to run our country, our state and our community?

Whole books have been written on just that subject.  But here's a story:  I've been a volunteer at SATV ever since we opened in 1994.  In our first five years, I trained myself in all the aspects of TV production, but my best talent was (and is) in engineering and TV graphics, so my talents were well in demand by many other volunteer producers.

I was doing graphics and engineering for many shows, including almost all of the "political"  issues-based shows;  this went on for almost 7 years.  I had the opportunity to encounter a number of elected and appointed officials.

It was the most thankless job I've ever had.  To a person, most elected officials look down on the help.  When they appear on our channels, they do so as a favor to the producer and ourselves.  It's not a small jump for an official to think that those under him move to his command.

I never got the time of day from most officials as I worked to get them on the air.  One time, I was verbally blistered in public, in front of my producer and the other guest, by a candidate angry with me that I wasn't ready to put him on the air right away.

I've helped produce shows where it was obvious the host and guests were patricians,  deigning to tell the rest of Salem how they should vote and behave.  I've had producers call me to do shows at the last minute because some crony of theirs wanted the camera and wanted it right then and there.

Only once has an official been kind to me.  Some years ago, I had to work over a two day weekend to set up a show.  The show needed to be early Sunday morning as the official was campaigning in our Heritage Days parade that afternoon.

We did the show Sunday and the man stopped by the control room when the cameras stopped rolling, thanked me for my work and shook my hand.

Later on, I was at the SATV compound along the parade route, helping run cable and looking out for the other camera people.   The politicians came, one by one.

One man came up to me, shook my hand, and thanked me for my work that morning.

It was Scott Harshbarger, then running for governor.

He had my vote just then.   No other politician ever did for me what Harshbarger did just then.  Not just the handshake, but an apparently very sincere appreciation, and most importantly respect for my work.   I was very upset when he decided not to seek public office again after his defeat in the gubernatorial race.

Although I still work on one issues show, Leo Jodoin's Salem Now, I never want to work on a political show ever again.  Ever.  If I were Leo, I wouldn't even have such people on his show, having instead working-class people and others who can appreciate and respect what we do.

Sadly, many if not most, or even all, elected officials and party officials really don't respect America or its electorate.  They don't need to.  The real measure of a person, as is often said, is how they deal with people lesser than they.  Politicians fail this, and hard. 

They don't have to respect the average citizen.  They already have their power.  Lobbyists, private concerns and pressure groups give them what they need, incumbency each and every term.  Every four years, they arrange with consultants to get them the wholesale votes!   The average voter is stupid, they think, just give them their goodies and they'll go away.

In Salem, we have those groups, too.  A city councilor doesn't need to poll the voters;  he or she has the neighborhood groups, running their wards through a minority who discourage those citizens without "property values" and a large mortgage.  Developers and consultants will gladly tell the councilor how to vote.  I've often wondered just who and what the at-large seats are supposed to "represent"?

Tom Furey, one of the at-large councilors, recently got criticism for missing many meetings of the Council on Aging which he is a liason to.  Of course, politicians, like any person, often have things come up, like family emergencies and such, but the thought is firmly in mind:  Furey doesn't go to the CoA--there are more important people to meet.

I have no choice but to be knee-deep in politics.  But I sure do sympathize with those Irritables.  I just don't have an answer for them.

Voting machines ready for primary

The Salem Gazette reports that everything is ready for the presidential primary on Tuesday. The voting machines they refer to are not the Votemark machines I wrote about last fall, but the devices you slide your ballot into so that they're counted and go into the secure box. Not a lot to go wrong with those.

When I covered the special Council meeting the other night, I saw the Votemarks lined up in the back hallway in City Hall along with piles of ballots, the sure signs of an oncoming vote.

I'm undecided myself as I write this; I was a big Edwards supporter who voted for him in 2004 and wanted to vote for him in 2008. The older I get, the more I've become an angry liberal and I really admired his fight even though he, like almost every politician in the US, is in a "higher" social class than myself and most people. Then again, I liked Tsongas (RIP) and wish Scott Harshbarger would run again for public office.

I'll be there. I'll be cynical the next day but I'll be there.

Election Postscript and Voting Machines

My friend Leo is happy today: Jerry Ryan came through his recount and is still the Ward 4 councilor-elect. Leo's a big Ryan supporter; I only hope it works out--I'm a lot more cynical and a lot less enthusiastic about individual politicians than he is. One only has to look at the state house and the parade of low expectations in the corner office to know what I speak of ("Together we can...Casinos! Casinos!")

During this past election, I was very interested in how the Automark voting machines would work and wanted to try one. I could have really used it last year when I was nearly blind from complications from my cataract implant and could barely read the ballot during the gubernatorial election.

This is the Automark:

When a disabled person votes, he or she gets the ballot in the usual way after checking in with the poll workers. The ballot is identical to the ones other voters mark with pens.

The voter feeds the ballot into the machine, and follows the instructions on the screen. There are headphones with audio instructions for the blind.

The voter navigates through the ballot and makes choices through either the touch screen or the navigation keys on the right.

It is straightforward to anyone who has ordered online or made selections on a web page. (There is support for write-ins but I didn't try this so I'm not sure how that works.)

After making selections, you can either commit your ballot or go back to change your selections. Commit your ballot, and the machine will print marks on the ballot and feed it back out to you, where you then put the ballot back in its sleeve and go to the poll workers to turn it in as usual.

It's a transparent process without any of the well-known problems that beset the Diebold machines. The machine worked very well for me.

But I'm concerned. The Commission, and myself, are very interested in how many people take advantage of the accommodations for people with disabilities that we work towards. We often hear the refrain, "but how can we spend money on only a few disabled people!?", and we fight the "tyranny of the majority" all the time.

The Commission wanted to know how many disabled voters used the Automark. Apparently, the machines don't store that information. This is probably because the machine is not a voting machine like the old lever machines but is just a ballot marking device.

For example, If you cast a vote by mistake, you are allowed up to two more ballots (the third ballot counts.) The Automark can't know how many unique voters come up to cast ballots--there is no voter login procedure--but at best, how many ballots were fed through it, and they may not even provide that information.

The other problem with the machines brought to our attention during the last Commission meeting, is that they are heavy, 80 lbs. each, and at one per precinct, there are 14 of these to lug around.

Cheryl LaPointe (our city clerk) and her staff are nothing less than professional, but they were understaffed up to Election Day. Several of us on the Commission offered to volunteer to move the machines for next time, but it's not clear we can legally do that.

I only know three people who used the Automark: myself (the first voter in my precinct to do so), Charlie Reardon and Andrew LaPointe. We don't and perhaps can't know of any other voters who took advantage of the machine.

The state requires these machines so they aren't going away. We'll be using them next for the presidential primary.

Still I worry about some clerk in a town somewhere saying to the state, "The only disabled people in my town are in institutions, why do we all need these machines!"

I'd hate to lose that machine. This past election was the first time I had ever been able to cast a ballot after first being able to read it! Usually, I just guessed at it, knowing that one blob meant "Harvey" and another meant "Deval", or "No on Question N". I'm usually very well prepared before I enter the polls, but low vision is miserably demoralizing.

The Automark works very well.

The right likes to talk about civil rights organizations being obsolete because "they won already!", but this is why I'm on the Commission. We may win our rights but we still have to fight to keep them.

2007 Election Night Photos

Pictures from Election Night at SATV

Our director, Dave Gauthier.

The Election 2007 hosts, just before airtime. Mike Allen, standing, Bill Burns, George Ahmed, Mike Sosnowski and Claudia Chuber.

My crew position at the graphics console.

Claudia Chuber's excellent spreadsheet.

Salem Election 2007 final results

Ward 4 Pct 1. This is the last precinct to report at 9 PM. At Large: Looks like Lovely, Sargent, Pinto and Furey. Furey finishes fourth as he did in 2005. School Committee: Fleming, Martin and Bryant. As mentioned earlier in Ward 1, McCarthy has won the ward. Pelletier retains Ward 3.
UPDATE: Ward 4 is a statistical dead heat: Ryan, 600, Barton, 579.

Question 1 has been defeated.

Ward Four had the most votes cast, followed by Ward One; both wards had important contested races.

The Salem News reported the turnout at 35%.

I'd like to thank Claudia Chuber for her excellent spreadsheet without which SATV could not have put up the results so quickly, and Claire White-Sullivan for standing by at City Hall to phone in the results. And thanks to SATV for letting me blog this while doing my "real" graphics work.Once again the results are unofficial! [still unofficial in Ward 4 as I write this Wednesday.]


Salem Gazette coverage
Salem News coverage

Welcome to the live blog of Salem's 2007 election

UPDATE: The election's over, but I'm archiving this post and the final post with unofficial results.

Welcome to my live blog of the 2007 municipal elections in Salem, Massachusetts, for Tuesday, November 6th!

As I'm writing this, the polls have yet to close. It's 7 PM. If you're in Salem and haven't yet voted as you read this, there's still time, go!

There are six races in contention this year: School Committee, Councilor at Large, Ward 1, Ward 3, Ward 4 and Ward 5. Ward 2, Ward 6 and Ward 7 have no opposition. There is no mayoral election this year; that election takes place every 4 years and the next one is in 2009 per charter.

As I post the results, keep in mind that they are unofficial! The results are usually certified by the clerk on Wednesday, unless there is a recount.

I'm posting from Salem Access Television, where we are broadcasting the results live on Channel 16 starting at 7:35. Hosting our coverage are: George Ahmed, Inside Salem, Mike Allen, former School Committee member, Bill Burns, former city councilor, Mike Sosnowski, Ward 2 Councilor (my ward), and Claudia Chuber, former School Committee member.

Mrs. Chuber will keep track of the results as they are phoned in from City Hall, and I'll post them from my position in the control room. I'll keep this blog updated as best I can but I have a "real" job as a graphics operator and this takes precedence, or so my director tells me!

Note also that I'll be writing in a neutral point of view (NPOV as they say on Wikipedia). I don't make endorsements for or against and I'll leave the editorial comments out; plenty of time for that tomorrow!

Details on the candidates in my next post.

Liveblogging Salem Election 2007

I'll be liveblogging tomorrow night's election at SATV, where I'm working the live election coverage as a graphics operator.

I'm also interested in how the new AutoMark voting systems work for people with disabilities. These machines use the already-existing optical paper ballots, a touch screen and Braille-marked buttons to let the voter make their selections.

[The ESS Automark, image from their site and used without permission.]

I could have used that machine in last year's gubernatorial races as my eyesight was very bad. My sight ranges somewhere between "kind of blind" to "NFL official eyes". All voters can ask to use this system, and that's what I'll be verifying as a commissioner on our disability board.

UPDATE: I voted with the new machine Tuesday morning. It worked fine, and I was able to read the ballot. I was told I was the first in my precinct to use the machine. I'm sure we'll follow up with Cheryl [LaPointe, City Clerk] to find out just how many voters took advantage of the new machines.