Harrumph!

In silly self-absorption, I confess I’m still a bit player. However, in line with my index-finger heart of three years ago, I have been admiring the cityscape about to work its way off my body.

There’s an elegant symmetry to getting around to decorating the matching finger — left hand this time. It’s spontaneous art. While temporary like a vending machine tattoo, this one is there for months, not hours or days.

I’m probably not different from others in not really noticing or appreciating the body changes that should be remarkable for their beauty or other artistic value.  In fairness to humans, most mildly remarkable physical changes occur over long periods. It’s similar to waking up on a vacation or business trip to find that our toenails seem to have grown a quarter inch or more overnight or the hair on our temples have grayed during the day.

This particular body exhibit was not some incremental surprise. Instead, I whacked the nail with a hammer and knew it would become illustrated. The unexpected aspect was that from the combination of pain and quick discoloration I expected the whole nail to blacken and slough off by now.

This injury does have an urban  silhouette, a skyline with a couple of tall buildings. It reminded me of the upstairs bath in our JP house. I designed and helped tile walls and tub enclosure with gray for the background sky, black for the skyscrapers and white tiles for the lit windows all around the room. It hadn’t entered my mind that the same effect was available with the face of a hammer head.

I suppose there must be a medical term for such a clumsy injury, like subungual contusion. Really though, it symbolizes both my impatience and my ynesting instinct.

In a sort of scent-marking ritual, I have been doing this and that in the new-to-us-as-of-August house.  The previous owners of over 20 years apparently didn’t do squat to the house, but the paid to have a lot done — new windows, bike storage, fully wired and lit garage and on and on. I admit that when I find little things to fix or customize, I am thrilled and driven.

So it was between Christmas and New Years. We were soon headed off to London to visit ye olde brother-in-law’s family and I had a group of doors to batch process. Previously, I found that the door to the basement did not close easily and scraped the finish off the kitchen floor; that just took removing it, planing the bottom in the right places and remounting it. For the recent project, it was two doors that would not stay latched and one that would not latch at all.

The house was built in 1900 and inside still has the mortise locks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These iron and brass treasures are available from collectors and rehab hardware shops, rebuilt from old houses. The manufacturer (Sargent) is still stamping ‘em out but in much larger, more secure versions. The ones here are simple enough to open and play with, so long as they don’t have broken springs or worn parts. Like most people, we don’t use the skeleton keys, so the locks don’t get much wearing motion beyond the handles turning the bolt.

Two of these were easy and a bit of a surprise.The bolt was on backwards to the faceplate. That is, the vertical side of the bolt that should catch in the slot in the jam didn’t. Instead, the curved side went into the slot and the door would open with the slightest touch, wind or passing foot weight.

The locks are not totally symmetrical in that the bolt is not in the middle of the box. That means you can’t just remove the lock and turn it upside down to reverse the direction of the bolt into the strike plate.  However, removing and opening the lock let you disconnect the main spring, reverse the bolt and reassemble the mechanism. When the lock went back in and its screws were tightened, its bolt went into the right slot in the right way.

Those were easy enough. However, looking at the antique hardware — all seemingly original — I had to assume that these two bedroom doors had never closed unless someone used the skeleton keys for the deadbolt. Trusting? Lazy? Unobservant?  Occam’s razor suggests simply that no one was ever inspired over 109 years to remove and reverse these two locks’ works.

The third lock proved my nemesis though. The door to what we call the gnome closet is deep but very low under an eave. We knew that the previous owner’s only child loved the long room and considered it her play house; apparently there was no need to close it.

It did not shut because the lock itself protruded from the door and caught on the strike plate.  While the house seems well built in nearly all aspects, the same carpenter or locksmith must have worked on this door as well. The mortise for the lock was simply not deep enough.

Well, give a man a tool and he is cocky. I have a set of chisels, which I hardly ever use. Ta da.

I successfully removed the lock and worked in the hole, being careful not to damage the door or dig too deeply and cause the old mechanism to wiggle and loosen. Of course, I was pleased with myself as I worked. I had left my mark on the house, although I did not anticipate leaving one on me.

To get the lock precisely into the enlarged mortise well, I used a hammer, likely a man’s favorite tool after a chainsaw. The lock itself is very narrow and I was impatient enough to finish that I missed on my last, hardest swing.

Hence, I decorated my finger.

The pain was substantial, with the additional emotional load of my knowing I’d be sitting in a plane for 7 hours shortly and then explaining the nasty nail. Fortunately, my brother-in-law had likewise maimed himself a few times and was kind. Moreover,  his father, my late father-in-law, was famous in the family for nearly removing a thumb woodworking on a Shopsmith.

I have certainly hurt myself far worse and under more embarrassing circumstances (like those involving anger or alcohol). The bonus on this one was the free art. I thought of my finger when I saw the newspaper/sidewalk/snow art recently. I would hope that any future minor events like this come with attractive illustration.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, locks, art, home repair

• Leave a comment... (0)

Our newspaper guy left art on the sidewalk this morning. I think snow angels for flat, wet art and didn’t know there was hidden beauty in the mundane daily task.

A lot of years have turned over since I took either physics or the calculus.This morning saw some wonderful effects of momentum, vectors and such, worthy of a few calculations and a graph.

The gist is that his powerful toss from the moving minivan skimmed the half-inch sidewalk covering about 30 feet to where the papers stopped. Like a pond-skipping stone, they then left eight double curves at the lawn edge, like energy frozen in its traces. It was unintentional art.

We should note that he delivers before 5 a.m. Also, there’s a bit of heft and low friction in the package. Even though the Globe is pretty slim most days, when combined with the FT in the same plastic bag, there’s real momentum built in — particularly on a slick surface.

I do appreciate my own gift of an art exhibit, no matter how ephemeral. My footprints to the side have already sullied the canvas, plus it’ll be above freezing today and sunny. Regardless, a cheap thrill in the morning is a boon.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, newspaper, street art, snow

• Leave a comment... (1)

Online payments are the big battle for beleaguered billionaires and their slightly poorer near peers. The Rupert Murdoch types cannot abide the idea that somewhere someone is getting something they touched for free.

No doubt that the basis of capitalism is that people or corporations own goods or services they make available for a price. Anything short of profit is called charity or foolishness (often the same to some capitalists). Yet publishers in this world only want conditions to be immutable so long as their profits are as higher or higher than they have been.

Lackaday,  that very naughty net has made them look up from their counting tables.

Kind of Disclaimer

I’m prejudiced here. I have always loved newspapers and want them to flourish.

Growing up, we had two to four dailies delivered, depending on the pickings where we lived. I was a newspaper delivery boy. I went to j-school, climbed the ladder as writer, columnist and editor of the student paper (high school and college) and then worked dailies and weeklies in the South. As an adult, I’ve always gotten daily papers, as well as numerous news, literary and specialty magazines. I’m a print guy first, one who has simply added computers and net technologies on top.

I love the feel and smell of good books and magazines.

Survival of the Most With It

All that written, I have no doubt nearly all U.S. newspaper publishers and top editors are atavistic.  They have also moved in recent decades with all the speed of a sloth and the judgment of an oat tree.

I’ve touched on this a few times, like here and part two here at Marry in Massachusetts. We got a different view in a Left Ahead! podcast with Martin Langeveld. He was a newspaper publisher and has quasi-retired into among other thing a principal at CircLabs, which aims to help publishers figure out this pay-to-view thing.  (Another slight disclaimer is in order; he and his wife were classmates of mine in high school. I disagree with some of his positions, but I know and like them both.)

For this part of the discussion, the big point is that newspaper types saw the internet and its effects coming and coming and coming. It was much less like a train and more like a glacier. Unless you got out of the way or rode that glacier, it was going to take everything in its path. You had lots of time, but you had to decide what to do.

They have remained fairly paralyzed with inaction, indecision and more than a little delusion. Like watching that glacier, they saw new advertising options appear. They heard ad customers say Criag’s List was cheaper and more effective for classifieds and that online advertising offered highly targeted demographics with verifiable click through counts to ideal customers. They even heard to their humiliation that their favorite disdained group, bloggers, were getting snippets of ad revenue that should rightfully be theirs.

One type of response was to try to ride that glacier. Nearly all papers are online in one form or another. While screaming haughtily that they owned the news, damn it!, they responded to their declining ad money in exactly the wrong way — cutting expenses from the bottom, notably reporters.

Duh, as the yellowish Mr. Simpson says. Think, our product is better and worth reading and advertising in, even though we are giving you less of it, less local and foreign news, nothing unique, and nothing you can’t find in dozens of other places.

After slashing their differentiating advantage, reportage, they had yet other dumb tricks to perform. One we have seen even in our stodgy Boston Globe, is blogging.  While on the one had ridiculing and demeaning blogs, even refusing to link to those whose ideas and leads they steal, the glib Globe has its own set.

From the beginning of this reaction, we see how out of it newspaper editors and publishers can be. The model is to take decent reporters and columnists and heap blogging duties on them. At the same time there are fewer writers, the remaining ones are supposed to do that on top of their jobs. Rather than giving the writers a chance to pick up a new skill, this looks from the outside at least, like the old “you’re lucky to have a job at all and will do as we tell you” routine.

The blogs show the coercion. Their posts are uniformly boring, show little effort and take no advantage of the medium.

Money, You Say

There’s a credible argument that most existing newspapers need to and should die. Their functions actually would be better performed by new media that understand reasonable financial models, the technology to deliver great stuff in the right formats with the right content, and some courage. The latter would be to do what’s necessary to provide salable product, without being immobilized by a primitive capitalist’s terror that someone might get something of yours without paying for it.

Yet, almost to a one, print publishers seem to have tiny brain pans, more driven by emotion than intellect. You can see that in how lamely they try to extract money from readers and advertisers to make up for their losses in the past decade or so (don’t lose sight of that glacier!).

Consider the scheme too many tried to maintain their many decades old system of high cash flow and higher rates of return. Those are the realities that changed due to the net and most publishers refuse to accept that. Instead:

• Some came online after many other papers and immediately put up a solid paywall. Almost all content was in headline or incomplete form, requiring a subscription or per-article fee to view.
• Others, like the Boston Herald here,  showed its delusions like raggedly underwear. It tried to charge to read its columnists online. Let’s not even get into the value of a given piece by any of their writers, but suffice it to say, that failed quickly and totally.
• Still others look at mixed models, offering full access to subscribers and small payments for beyond a monthly limit (the metered model). The FT reports that The Guardian has considered six paywall models.

For complete paywalls,  your content has to be damned superior and useful to make a go. The number one fantasy of net-come-lately publishers is that if they pay to produce content, everyone else should be delighted to buy every morsel from them. News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch is the troll under the bridge here, threatening, popping up, then withdrawing. He rants everywhere that news is not cheap and that anyone putting anything from his publications online anywhere without his permission and payment to him is simply stealing.

He even wants to charge for online access to the sleaziest of his pubs, The Sun. Yes, the Page 3 bare breasted babe rag is that valuable, Murdoch would have it.

Amusingly enough, one of his properties, the Wall Street Journal seems to have learned enough from the Financial Times to make some cash online though.  In its announcement two months ago that it would copy these two somehow, someway, the New York Times seemed unsure whether it would be micro-payments or some other model. Its bosses do want some kind of paywall though.

A short-term answer may well lie in the partial success of the WSJ and FT experiments. They were not foolish enough to block and drive away casual surfers with solid firewalls and total blocking of content. Instead they provide an example that even the dullest publisher can profit by emulating. They charge for real value.

You don’t have to be in the financial press to consider what they do. Yet, it is obvious for them because it can translate into reader benefit. Some of their articles and columns have specialized and even unique information and analysis. Those who pay for a print or online subscription have a little (or arguably sometimes large) advantage. They are happy to pay.

So, while publishers watch the glacier some more and figure out in what direction to move, publishers can ask themselves what value they can add to attract paying customers (and loyal subscribers). The answer most certainly should not involve firing their writers. Honestly, what were they thinking?

Likewise, many local dailies and weeklies used to be best at hyperlocal content or sports or photography. They have done their best in efforts to cut costs that they eliminated the staff who could maintain those selling points.  Moreover, to use a local example, when Bostonians want hyperlocal content, they are more likely to click on UniversalHub, an aggregator of local blogs and other news, plus some original reporting. Such concentrations of news are what the net can excel at and newspapers have largely ceded.

They need to produce content so useful or so entertaining or so whatever they can be best at that people will pay for it. That may seem obvious, but publishers so far have largely tried to replace old advertising and subscription revenue with increased charges for diminished content. I like to compare that to switching your high-end chocolate chip cookie ingredients to milk instead of bittersweet chips, mystery fat instead of butter and while you’re at it, making them smaller. Oh, and raise the price. Think. Think. Think. Why would fewer people be buying your cookies?

Those who continue to fantasize that they can charge everyone for any crap they publish might think of The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger. As part of a recent talk, he included, “It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things.” He is looking at many financial models, including some version of limited paywalls, but he does not seem to delude himself.

(Tip of the toupee to the FT’s John Gapper for the source of that quote.)

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, newspapers, paywall, advertising, internet

• Leave a comment... (0)

A fellow Stop & Shop-per was my guide to using some of those particularly ugly veggies today. That’s fair enough. Dozens of times, grocery and Haymarket browsers have rushed to me when I turn with a vegetable or cut of meat and they ask what I do with it. In fact, that is a real community benefit from food shopping.

I have largely looked at the bins of uglies for a long time. Lately, I’ve been buying and then researching this or that. Latino markets, like Hi Lo in JP, the Haymarket, and more recently Stop & Shop have produce bins of the funkiest looking roots — stuff that seems to come out of an animator’s spare cycles.

Unfortunately for us ignorant sorts, the markets are generally not much help. I’ve asked. At Hi Lo, Latino shoppers would say they don’t use something, that their grandmother did but they never liked it or just “boil it.” Haymarket vendors are even less help as is Kenny and the other Italian-American staff at Baby Nat’s at the top of Roslindale.  They sell the stuff because, well, it sells. They don’t know what to do with it.

I’ve been a Haymarket regular for 30 years and Nat’s for over 20. I recall asking owner Kenny about some of the root vegetables and about the huge tins of ackee.  They move many cases of ackee on American Legion Highway to native Jamaicans. “I don’t know what they do with it, but they buy a lot of it,” he said.

My family has its own love of various uglies. After most of them migrated to New Mexico a long time ago, they got me into jimaca.  I used to think this frightening looking thing was a real ugly, like a bloated shrunken head. Yet, Texans, New Mexicans, Mexicans and Californians have it all the time and know just what to do with it. There are even website pages with details.

It’s a generally difficult with the Caribbean roots. Big sites like Epicurious don’t deign to deal with non-European specialty items like batata (top lump in image above; click for detail) or malanga (bottom thingummy). Similarly when I brought home a hunk of nãme, I was stressed and pressed to find out what to do with it. Even the few the Stop & Shop signs had any description of would only uniformly say to boil it. That reads like a stereotypical joke about Irish cooking — “Bile it.” “What if it ain’t done?” “Bile it some more.”

It’s a hard net search, particularly as search engines, as well as Wikipedia and so forth, treat nãme as the word name. That’s about as common in a string as and or the. Adding terms for recipe, Jamaica and so forth didn’t help. Eventually, I stumbled in the Brazilian link to the root (and the root of the word for the root). Nãme is the Portuguese version of nyam from several African languages, where it originally just meant to taste. It’s also were we get our word yam.

Well, sort of…the African, Brazilian and Caribbean yam is nothing like the misapplied term to a sweet potato. These nãme things are big and not at all sweet, and toxic. They can grow to six, eight or more feet long. They are highly starchy. They also require considerable boiling to remove the natural, and even fatal, toxicity, but a simple prolonged boiling neutralizes the poison.

Nãme has long been a subsistence food in Africa and is particularly useful where they don’t have rice or grains for bread or our New World potatoes. It’s grown in tropical regions in all the Americas, is available all year, and having cooked and eaten it, I don’t have to do that again. It is starchy, but neither savory nor sweet. It seems to be a vehicle for herbs, spices and main dishes.

My take-an-ugly-root-home version today was both batata and malanga. Batata is more common and better known. The woman in the store today suggested thinking of it as a white fleshed sweet potato. She boils and slices it before serving it as a side dish, generally tossed in butter. Next up will be the malangas (I bought several). She recommended first peeling and dicing it. Then cook it with chicken or other meat in a spicy stew. She said she also likes to chop it long, boil it until tender and use it with meat in a sauce where you might use noodles.

I intend to go through all the ugly root veggies I can find. Then I’ll give them my best shots at  getting advice in person or online, getting the family to join my adventure and then posting a short list with suggestions and comments. I don’t know that any will be a stand-alone delight. Then again, I haven’t tried them all yet.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, root vegetables, nyam, food, Caribbean, stranger

• Leave a comment... (5)

I do eat my kale and every day I take a lutein capsule. These are both iffy insurance and in memory of my mother.

While raised as a Christian, I don’t view this as any form of physical communion. Yet, the little, red treasure is a daily reminder of my late mom.

She and a long-term friend (a UU minister in his 90s whom I’ve been buddies with for over two decades) got age-related macular degeneration (AMD or just MD). From its start, they hated it…worse than any chronic or acute condition they had. Broken bones, heart trouble, on and on were nothing compared to not being able to read, to drive, to see.

When the macula, the inside back layer of the retina, hardens, it’s game over. The center of the eye sees less, then nothing. To a woman used to the independence of driving and to the constant stimulation of reading, it was the worst of disasters. She got three or more daily newspapers, watched news and educational programs, and read several books a week.

Similarly, my minister chum has remained a theologian and scholar into his tenth decade.Yes, he’s distressed at needing someone to guide him around the street. Even that’s nothing compared to not being able to pick up a book and read it on his own. He does what he can with computer screen readers and has some part-time secretarial help reading and corresponding. It is not the same.

Both Wanda and Farley fit Dylan Thomas’ admonition to rage against the dying of the light. That seminal verse was written to note his father’s pending blindness, although many readers assumed it was about death. Neither of the MD suffers I knew was about to go gentle into that good night, as the poet put it.

My MD preventatives include both the daily capsule and the right foods. Wanda rued her ignorance about such measures when she was young enough for them to work…or maybe not. She urged my sister and me to do as she belatedly had. It was kale and capsules.

There was no day when she did not prepare kale or have it as a leftover. It is at the top of MD-preventative pyramid. I have it several times a week as well.

Our FDA is not terrifically helpful here. The research on the major chemical that may slow or prevent MD is not advanced nor a high priority nor well funded. It would seem that the attitude is that old people often go blind and that’s that.

Health food folk, including supplement makers and vendors, have to stop short of saying lutein does anything. The bottle of the brand I take now does not go beyond DIETARY SUPPLEMENT.

There is a Lutein Information Bureau that nudges up against promises though. I assume it represents a few makers of the supplement, although its website doesn’t reveal that. “Lutein is an important natural antioxidant that may help your eyes stay healthy…” is about as far as it dares go. On the other hand, it does cite serious research that supports eye-health associations.

The cautious attitude of the scientific and bureaucratic communities may best be seen in a Tufts University mention:

The Lutein Information Bureau offers abstracts of studies that all highlight its benefits. But they leave out the numerous studies that have not shown that higher intakes of lutein actually protect the eye. (They also claim lutein benefits the skin and protects against breast cancer.) The rationale behind lutein and AMD makes sense. But more clinical research is needed to show that lutein does, in fact, reduce the risk of AMD or other eye diseases. 

Beyond my mother’s exhortations, I did snoop around research myself. It looks like there is a good chance that lutein either from capsules or food (think dark greens)  is good for macular health. Moreover, with careful online shopping, I find 20mg capsules for only a few cents a day. It seems like cheap insurance to me.

To the emotional aspect, it’s a good thing to connect daily with your ancestors. This is not exactly a ritual for me, but it does remind me daily. I swallow a red capsule and think fleetingly of my mother, of her wishes for my well-being,  of her hopes that her children fare better and avoid obvious traps, and also her fury at blindness.

By the bye, I have found, fine-tuned and created recipes for kale — soups, salads, and just cooked up. I am likely to put a couple here or on Friendly with Food. I haven’t been putting much there and it’s time to return.  Then again, I’ve always liked my greens, cooked and raw. Some don’t and there’s always those capsules.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, blindness, macular degeneration, food, lutein, kale

• Leave a comment... (1)

Even I have gotten a bit of politics fatigue with the fall and special election for U.S. Senator here. At our weekly podcast, we couldn’t seem to stop talking about what had, should, and might happen. This Tuesday, we sort of take a break.

We’ll have a food-oriented show, with only minor political content. The Boston-based Chefs Collaborative’s executive director, Melissa Kogut talks sustainable and local food.

I being I, there’s bound to be political overtones. Think is this a class thing for those who eat in fancy restaurants? What about the vast majority of middle-class as poor Americans who not only don’t know but couldn’t afford high-end politically correct groceries?

We’re sure Kogurt has considered all our questions. We look forward to learning what they’re up to and how the chefs got involved.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Chefs Collaborative, Kogut, food, sustainable, agriculture

• Leave a comment... (0)

Faith in action can work just fine. We see that in a follow-up to the tale of the New Hampshire preacher who early last year took a paroled ex-con into his home…to the anger and horror of nearly everyone. See the original post on that here.

The ex-criminal, Raymond Guay, had a particularly gruesome record of torture, murder and kidnapping. Yet, the Rev. David Pinckney was, well, a lot more Christian than nearly everyone. After getting to know Guay, the minister was convinced that Guay 1) had gone through a born-again transformation, and 2) had truly paid his debt to society.

See the original post for the details and links to the backstory. The key component is that Pickney took the paroled Guay into his home, replete with the minister’s wife and kids. The idea was to find a more permanent setting and help Guay get work. In other words, this was both rehabilitation as the justice system claims to want and Christianity as the New Testament describes it.

Pinckney’s neighbors, even some not very close, were beside themselves. Loving forgiveness? Nothing doing.

In my follow-up, Pinckney and I exchanged email. He made his offer and commitment and took what many self-identified Christians said was a gesture doomed to failure and maybe death. Not so, sports fans.  Instead:

Ray is doing very well, living in New Hampton, NH with a Christian couple on a 60 acre spread at the end of a mile long driveway…   He stays very busy on this property helping the couple, and does side jobs when they come available (he’s presently replacing a kitchen floor for a couple in our church).  His craftsmanship and work ethic are unmatchable in my estimation.   He has been accepted warmly into a church in Meredith NH and continues to find great joy in his faith in Jesus.   We stay in contact regularly and I see him at least once a month. 

Having covered justice and jail issues for newspapers and having worked with former prisoners, that is what I hoped. Rather than assume all the incarcerated are lost forever and deserving of perpetual punishment, in and out of prison, we should know that some do just fine. Invariably though, the help they get on this side of the walls and bars can make that difference.

We can’t think this didn’t depend on Rev. Pinckney. Not only is he a religious sort who actually lives his faith, he was very discerning. Unlike those women who communicate with and meet prisoners, he didn’t fall in love thinking this is someone who will really need and depend on me. He accurately assessed the man. He almost certainly is a better judge of minds and souls than you or I.

Let us praise those who make life better for another and provide an example for us all.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, ex-con, New Hampshire, Christianity, Pickney, Guay, River of Grace

• Leave a comment... (0)

While recapping my battlefield promotion from clerk to warden at a Boston polling place yesterday, I thought repeatedly of the arcane and essential ballot control in the process. At least to a tech geek such as me, it has a true beauty.

A lot of planning and training and procedure development goes into ensuring one-voter/one-ballot here. Clerical controls are in the middle of it. The city accounts for every damned ballot many times with abounding crosschecks. While not impossible to scam the system to get two or more ballots, it would be damned hard and almost certainly not worth the trouble or risk.

Follow an unused ballot from the time it arrives at a polling location.

1. Polls perk an hour before the 7 a.m. opening time. Elections workers have already brought the signs and other supplies and a police officer has brought a scanner and the blank ballots in a locked case.
2. Workers (inspectors, interpreters, clerk and warden) arrive to tape up the many necessary signs, prepare check-in and check-out table, turn on and validate the scanner andassistive ballot preparing machine, and count the ballots.
3. Depending on the expected turnout, blanks come bundled in nominal rubber-banded packs of 50 or 200. Poll workers first count bundles assuming the right number in each. These can vary by 6% (3 more or less in a 50 pack) because Elections prepares them by weight for efficiency.
4. The clerk records the supposed number of blanks in the book.
5. Before opening, inspectors hand count a group of bundles and put a Post-It on each with the actual number. The clerk keeps a running tally of each as it is brought into play to fine-tune the count of blanks.
6. The scanner tracks each ballot it accepts, incrementing its count, which starts at zero. Throughout the day, Elections calls every few hours for the number and in busy elections, particularly primaries, observers from candidates and parties may look at the total, which does not differentiate by candidate.
7. Spoiled ballots go back to Elections in their own envelope. If a voter mismarks a ballot, changes the decision before putting it in the scanner or marks too many candidates, the clerk or warden writes SPOILED on it, places it in the envelope and gives the voter up to a total of three ballots to get it right. The clerk tends to keep a tally of spoiled ballots and records them in the book at closing time.
8. Absentee ballots arrive with the officer at opening and sometimes throughout the day as Elections sorts them. The clerk or warden opens the larger envelope and each absentee’s cover envelope to find the sealed envelope with the ballot. Then each ballot is treated like a voter, checked in at one table off the voter list and out at the other table. Then the ballot is removed from the sealed envelope and fed into the scanner. The clerk records the number of absentee ballots in the book.
9. Provisional ballots for voters Elections cannot clear to for scanned ballots go into unique envelopes, one per ballot. That’s an elaborate process touched on in the battlefield promotion post. The warden provides each provisional voter with a ballot, which goes to Elections separately and is not scanned. The clerk records the number of provisional ballots as well as the voter’s name and address.
10. At poll closing the ballot procedures align. First, the officer at the check-out table and the clerk or inspector with the check-in book compare notes. They verify that they have the same number of voters checked off per page of their respective voter list. Any discrepancies give them the chance to identify anyone missed ormismarked. They end up with a total count of voters.
11. Meanwhile, the warden has generated totals from the scanner. If there is a difference between the voting books and scanner’s total, the three identify and correct it.
12. The clerk then totals ballots  the book. The total ballots received needs to equal ballots cast, accounting for the spoiled ones,provisionals, absentee ones delivered,  and unused ballots remaining. Again, all stops until the numbers are accurate.
13. The warden removed ballots from the scanner. Any that fail to scan are in one compartment; the get a re-feed and if necessary a hand count and recording in a log and the book. Write-ins are in another; they are hand recorded and placed in one envelope. The other ballots get a look for write-ins not ID’ed as such but clearly intended even without the write-in oval smeared. All scanned ballots go into envelopes that the officer delivers under lock to Elections.

If you were able to divert one or more ballots, then what? Without collusion of a worker and the officer, it would not qualify for the scanner. Even if you were able to sneak one in the scanner, it would mess up the total. Those and similar ploys would be possible, but elaborate, involving several people and surely not worth the exposure and punishments.

From my years of documenting computer software, I am impressed by the flow here. Elections has had a lot of time…with many eyes watching…to get this working well. It shows.

Cross-post: This also appears at Marry in Massachusetts.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, elections, voters, Boston, Hyde Park

• Leave a comment... (0)

I got a battlefield promotion yesterday, as the Boston elections trainers had said often happens. Our warden left right after the polls opened, not breathing well and shirt cascading with sweat. So the number two, the lieutenant, the clerk took over.

Many who know me say I can be intimidating. I snicker at that. True, I am big and I do look folk right in the eye, but I am fairly shy and was raised with Southern politeness. I am prone to let others bluster rather than mark my territory or shout anyone down.

Asked a few time before whether I was interested in a wardenship, I said I was comfortable as an inspector (the bulk of poll workers are inspectors or inspector/interpreters)  or clerk. I would just as soon have avoided the extra warden responsibilities and interactions.

It turns out what I was avoiding wasn’t so bad and might be a bit easier than the clerk duties. The primary things I had evaded played off my shyness:

• Troubleshooting potential voters who don’t appear in the voter list (that book inspectors use to check addresses and names), are on the list as inactive or requiring ID, or otherwise exceptions.
• Locating voters in the city database and directing them to the proper polling location or getting them plugged back in if they have been deleted.
• Toning down the irate who swear (often incorrectly) they had voted at that place recently, had returned the annual voter census, or otherwise entitled, damn it, to vote then and there.

The Savage Breast

Not surprisingly, my upbringing has me well suited for the latter duty. My mother ran Red Cross chapters, which are similar to polling places in a key aspect. Many volunteers are like potential voters in feeling a strong entitlement to be there and do their thing. Anything that disrupts  the seamless operation is an insult. I watched her deal with the difficult and pleasant alike and learned how to do it on my own in volunteer organizations as well as  my work.

It comes in handy as a warden. A calm and gracious explanation of the problems and resolutions turns the voter/warden contact from adversarial to cooperative. No one left unhappy yesterday, even those whom I worked with to fill out the two-page provisional ballots and affirmation of residence forms.

There were others whom I told could not vote that day. Elections had deleted one for not voting for five years and not returning the confirmation letter saying he wanted to remain on the voter list. Others had moved three or more times in the previous two years, some form as far as Mansfield, and had not registered in Boston or not registered in time. Each sat and filled in a new voter-reg card and left content. Our work is done here, Tonto.

With the tales of City Hall shortcomings common chatter at places like the men’s locker room at the WR YMCA, I was repeatedly pleased at the competence and thoroughness of the Elections staff and their database. Using ID such as a driver’s license on my end, the saints downtown located every voter with cues such as date of birth. That was true even for the nomadic sorts with multiple tent locations over short periods.

Sometimes the phone call lead to a redirection to a previous polling spot. Others meant that reg card for future elections.

Sort of Voting

The most strained and strangest process makes sense and may be necessary but is convoluted. Provisional ballots let questionable voters prepare a ballot and sort of cast it. If Elections and the warden cannot be positive that someone really qualify by residence and registration, they fill out several forms — swearing they are who they say and live where they say. Then, they mark their ballot, put it in a sealed envelope. The warden has assigned it a unique number, marked on the form that goes to Elections, on the envelope, and on the take-away form the voter gets, as well as recording the voter’s information on a list. That night or soon after, Elections staff evaluates each ballot in light of the available data to decide whether to count the vote. The voter gets a number to call on the take-away form that coupled with the ward and precinct and unique number can let Elections say whether the vote counted.

Whew. I admire those who cared enough about the process and their role in it to go through their work in preparing their provisional vote.

At the end of the polling day, the clerk and warden diverge again. Closing duties  for the clerk include filling out the detailed clerk’s book that she or he has updated all day. That has detailed tabulations of ballots as well as checklists and records of virtually every anomaly.

Closing Time

The warden ends up as the key master.  In Boston, the main voting machine in a precinct is the AccuVote terminal. The same company makes this and the AccuMARK assistive ballot preparing equipment that we use. Locked throughout the day, it tracks and stores every ballot inserted and is the linchpin of the clerical part of our ballot integrity.

Warden duties at the end of voting include:

• Retrieving the AccuVote key from the police officer on duty
• Opening the side compartment where any unscanned ballots feed (reinsert those and hand count them if they fail again)
• Unlocking the front panel, insert the bar-coded sheet that stops the machine while simultaneously pushing two YES/NO buttons, and generate three copies of ballot summaries.
• Having  poll workers and the officer sign the summaries, and posting one on the wall for public viewing next to the one with zero totals for ballots and each candidate from the morning, one in the clerk’s book, and one taped to the machine.
• Removing the actual machine (about the size of an attache case) and placing it with its cord in a case for the officer to take to Elections.
• Opening the stand for the machine to remove any write-in ballots from one compartment for hand recording and the mass of ballots from the other compartment. Those can be quickly examined for any write-ins that the scanner did not catch or the voter did not smear the write-in oval, and shuffled into marked envelopes for the officer to take to Elections.

Off the oddments  — spoiled ballots, provisional ballots and forms, voter reg cards, absentee ballot envelope and such also go into a large pouch that the officer delivers to Elections along with the machine, the clerk’s book and the keys to both voting and ballot marking machines.

For folk who see each other twice a year or less, there is an impressive efficiency at closing. There are many obvious exceptions like problems on the voter list throughout the day that the electorate notices. The setup and closing happen where the officer and custodian are the only witnesses.

I confess that I too have been known to carp about Registry and City Hall inefficiencies. Perhaps it is my closeness to the elections process and roll as a minor official in Boston’s voting army, but I have no complaints about how they handle and prepare for massive one-day pushes.

The undone business from yesterday has little to do with the election. All of us on our team want to know how our stricken warden fared. His cell went to voice immediately in numerous tries and he didn’t call those whose numbers he took. That’s an issue not in the training manual.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, elections, voters, Boston, Hyde Park

• Leave a comment... (0)