Again, again I cry, What of the Jail Cell in the basement of the capitol building, used throughout the 1800's to hold anyone congress found to be in contempt. The judiciary can thus be consulted AFTER THE FACT for confirmation of the solemn and proper nature of this citation of contempt. If Judges in their proper course find Congress' justifications lacking, of course the person(s) may be released. However, the burden is then on the defendant to be prompt and proper in their defense, deliberations, and legal ponderings.
On behalf of the good citizens of these United States of America, I cry, Havoc! Let slip the dogs, let us take the debate to the higher plane of prompt action. I pray thee Congress, take by your assemblage that confidence that befits the just representatives of the People. Assert thee your relevance and assuage this wrong. These contemptible scoundrels trodding heavily your constitutional duties and sauntering off, noses in the air. The time to act is at hand, Congress! Let your oath-sworn duties of oversight return to you a sense of dignity and forthright action !
All the country cries out for action... Shall we be waiting forevermore?
We the people demand: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Dreaming of Cheap Power
I'm having a dream of cheap electric power and wondering what it would mean...
Ok, so presume an electrical generation technology, whatever technology it is, goes into massive production. Let's pick one for giggles - solar. What it is doesn't matter - the power it generates and the socioeconomic consequences are the interesting thing to me.
Our "giggles" tech is solar, in the form of solar panels that can be manufactured for 1 cent a kilowatt or less in very large quantities. This is not that far off, really. See this National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL Presentation . It says on Page 15 that the break even for electricity from PV instead of coal / nuclear is $2 per Watt-peak. The 'Watt-Peak' measurement is the amount of electricity in watts that a module can generate in full sun.
Okay, say it's 5 years from now, and Obama has won and put a signficant budget into renewable energy tech, and it has yielded the somewhat predictable result of lowering costs consistent with the last 15 years of experience curves (see wikipedia for 'experience curve').
This means US production capacity of solar is about 320,000 MW, which is about 33% of our usage. This curve gets nicer the next 2 years, and we're looking at a shutdown of all coal-fired, oil-fired, and natural-gas fired power plants for daytime base load. Existing nuclear plants can handle nighttime loads.
What has just happened to the domestic economy?
1. Coal mining in the Appalachian range ceases. Miners are out of work, which is probably beneficial to their health. Government programs step in but only partially help. Depression hits in isolated areas around these plants.
2. Installation of commercial and residential solar and wind calls for large numbers of qualified electricians.
3. Many houses decide to go off-grid. Others install larger systems and generate power to sell to the utilities.
4. Coal-fired plants going offline leads to sharp drops in carbon dioxide emissions. The U.S. becomes compliant with the Kyoto Treaty even though we never signed it.
5. Mercury and sulfur dioxide emissions from coal plants cease, leading to cleaner air all up and down the eastern U.S. seabord (coastline).
6. Residential and commercial installation of batteries for nighttime use drive experience curves for batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. This drastically lowers costs for this early technology. PHEV (Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) or EV (battery-only electric vehicles) become much more popular due to their simplicity and lower cost.
7. Detroit (the big 3) stop production on the last direct-drive internal combustion engine since it is cheaper and easier to create hybrids.
8. Some large disasters happen with home battery installations causing large fires (LiOH batteries can do that, especially cheap ones). Standards change to put batteries in fireproof rooms or in concrete/metal cases outside the home much like air conditioning condensers.
9. Someone figures out how to use electric energy to create natural gas out of air, water, and coal. Many cars switch to natural gas.
10. American spending on Iraq, a credit crunch, and bad inflation combine to produce a drop in the stock market as global investors turn to expanding economies instead of the USA. Gradually the business cycle returns to normal and the economy expands again. Luckily, there is production of PV locally, and there's many jobs to be found due to green energy investments (due to high prices on the international market for oil).
11. Global oil consumption is way down due to the fall in exchange rate for the dollar. This reduces demand, which drops price. However, inflation raises prices again, and consumers feel the pinch.
12. Less real money for oil is going to middle-eastern countries, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Russia. These economies suffer greatly. Saudi Arabia and several other governments have revolutions which put reactionary, fundamentalist governments in place. These could have been prevented by transitions to J-Curve power-sharing governments with checks and balances. Loss of income destabilizes the ruling elite, but in the end the power devolves to the masses and slowly stable democracies or balanced monarchies emerge.
13. China emerges as the largest economy in the world. PV output from Chinese plants exceeds any other countries. Large installations in the Gobi desert power much of China's infrastructure.
14. India surpasses the USA in size of the economy, due to U.S. shrinkage as well as Indian growth. Indian wealth drives up demand for finished goods, moving production plants (industrial manufacturing) for ultra-cheap goods to Africa. Low wage jobs in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, start migrating to Chad, Niger, Liberia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, etc.
15. China launches several probes of the moon, Mars, Venus, etc., showing off economic strength and technical prowess.
16. A medium-size epidemic kills several hundred thousand in southeast asia, and the rest of the world is scared. There is talk of requiring health checks and quarantine areas to international airline flight arrangements.
17. The Artic sea becomes ice-free in the summer. Ellsmere Island and Greenland start to slough off large icebergs. There is serious talk of global sea level rises of feet, not fractions of an inch. Belgium, Italy (because of Venice), and Bangladesh start shouting about global warming instead of just being "very concerned".
18. Due to decreasing income, Russia decends into instability along the left of the J-Curve. Authoritarians win there, but lose control of the security situation due to insufficient funds and a sprawing country with a bad economy.
19. Primarily due to bad economics, a Russian nuclear weapon (from the former Soviet Union) is stolen/purchased and detonated somewhere in the world, for political reasons. Tens of thousands are killed and a city decimated. Suddenly, cost becomes no object in the search for and sequestration of all remaining nuclear arsenals as well as chemical and biological weapons.
20. The nuked city and global reaction to it drastically reduce demand for nuclear power plants; some in the process of being constructed are stopped.
21. Global carbon dioxide production starts to decrease but just barely in 2018. It then falls sharply as developing nations turn off coal and turn on to the now-cheaper renewables.
22. Existing CO2 in the atmosphere raises temperatures enough to melt and split off a sizeable chunk of the West Antartic ice sheet, raising global sea levels over 1 foot inside of 3 years. Panic ensues in low-laying countries. Bangladesh starts a war with India for resettling rights on higher ground. Several pacific islands are lost entirely.
23. CO2 emissions rights are traded on all world exchanges. The Arbor Day Foundation (ADF) becomes the largest recipient ever of a corporate donation, $4 billion, from the government of Belgium. ADF starts planting trees worldwide, including massive numbers of almond, olive, and palm trees across the middle east.
24. A category-4 hurricane strikes Philadelphia and causes large scale destruction in nearby states as well, including New Jersey and even into New York. Increasing numbers of severe hurricanes are blamed on global warming.
25. Britain's summer, and that of western Europe, is noticibly foreshortened and sea temperatures are blamed. The EU makes a deal with Brazil to purchase, cease development on, and put under military control an increasingly large section of Amazon rainforest, to prevent deforestation.
--- That's it for today. lots of bad news. But lots of good news, too. The average people living in the middle east are going to be better off, with more of a chance at representative governments, but it's also riskier for them if they make autocratic choices along the left side of the J curve. People the world over are in worse shape environmentally from the effects of the changes, but they are forced to make better ecological decisions by obvious circumstances affecting their checkbooks.
As the problems mount, the onus for green change becomes huge. On the other hand, so many changes in so little time present vast problems for maintaining stability. Reactionary conservatism is usually the result of this kind of instability, but the conservatives can take the "green" label away from the left in the name of religion, less government interference (deregulation of energy production and distribution), etc.
Ok, so presume an electrical generation technology, whatever technology it is, goes into massive production. Let's pick one for giggles - solar. What it is doesn't matter - the power it generates and the socioeconomic consequences are the interesting thing to me.
Our "giggles" tech is solar, in the form of solar panels that can be manufactured for 1 cent a kilowatt or less in very large quantities. This is not that far off, really. See this National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL Presentation . It says on Page 15 that the break even for electricity from PV instead of coal / nuclear is $2 per Watt-peak. The 'Watt-Peak' measurement is the amount of electricity in watts that a module can generate in full sun.
Okay, say it's 5 years from now, and Obama has won and put a signficant budget into renewable energy tech, and it has yielded the somewhat predictable result of lowering costs consistent with the last 15 years of experience curves (see wikipedia for 'experience curve').
This means US production capacity of solar is about 320,000 MW, which is about 33% of our usage. This curve gets nicer the next 2 years, and we're looking at a shutdown of all coal-fired, oil-fired, and natural-gas fired power plants for daytime base load. Existing nuclear plants can handle nighttime loads.
What has just happened to the domestic economy?
1. Coal mining in the Appalachian range ceases. Miners are out of work, which is probably beneficial to their health. Government programs step in but only partially help. Depression hits in isolated areas around these plants.
2. Installation of commercial and residential solar and wind calls for large numbers of qualified electricians.
3. Many houses decide to go off-grid. Others install larger systems and generate power to sell to the utilities.
4. Coal-fired plants going offline leads to sharp drops in carbon dioxide emissions. The U.S. becomes compliant with the Kyoto Treaty even though we never signed it.
5. Mercury and sulfur dioxide emissions from coal plants cease, leading to cleaner air all up and down the eastern U.S. seabord (coastline).
6. Residential and commercial installation of batteries for nighttime use drive experience curves for batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. This drastically lowers costs for this early technology. PHEV (Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) or EV (battery-only electric vehicles) become much more popular due to their simplicity and lower cost.
7. Detroit (the big 3) stop production on the last direct-drive internal combustion engine since it is cheaper and easier to create hybrids.
8. Some large disasters happen with home battery installations causing large fires (LiOH batteries can do that, especially cheap ones). Standards change to put batteries in fireproof rooms or in concrete/metal cases outside the home much like air conditioning condensers.
9. Someone figures out how to use electric energy to create natural gas out of air, water, and coal. Many cars switch to natural gas.
10. American spending on Iraq, a credit crunch, and bad inflation combine to produce a drop in the stock market as global investors turn to expanding economies instead of the USA. Gradually the business cycle returns to normal and the economy expands again. Luckily, there is production of PV locally, and there's many jobs to be found due to green energy investments (due to high prices on the international market for oil).
11. Global oil consumption is way down due to the fall in exchange rate for the dollar. This reduces demand, which drops price. However, inflation raises prices again, and consumers feel the pinch.
12. Less real money for oil is going to middle-eastern countries, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Russia. These economies suffer greatly. Saudi Arabia and several other governments have revolutions which put reactionary, fundamentalist governments in place. These could have been prevented by transitions to J-Curve power-sharing governments with checks and balances. Loss of income destabilizes the ruling elite, but in the end the power devolves to the masses and slowly stable democracies or balanced monarchies emerge.
13. China emerges as the largest economy in the world. PV output from Chinese plants exceeds any other countries. Large installations in the Gobi desert power much of China's infrastructure.
14. India surpasses the USA in size of the economy, due to U.S. shrinkage as well as Indian growth. Indian wealth drives up demand for finished goods, moving production plants (industrial manufacturing) for ultra-cheap goods to Africa. Low wage jobs in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, start migrating to Chad, Niger, Liberia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, etc.
15. China launches several probes of the moon, Mars, Venus, etc., showing off economic strength and technical prowess.
16. A medium-size epidemic kills several hundred thousand in southeast asia, and the rest of the world is scared. There is talk of requiring health checks and quarantine areas to international airline flight arrangements.
17. The Artic sea becomes ice-free in the summer. Ellsmere Island and Greenland start to slough off large icebergs. There is serious talk of global sea level rises of feet, not fractions of an inch. Belgium, Italy (because of Venice), and Bangladesh start shouting about global warming instead of just being "very concerned".
18. Due to decreasing income, Russia decends into instability along the left of the J-Curve. Authoritarians win there, but lose control of the security situation due to insufficient funds and a sprawing country with a bad economy.
19. Primarily due to bad economics, a Russian nuclear weapon (from the former Soviet Union) is stolen/purchased and detonated somewhere in the world, for political reasons. Tens of thousands are killed and a city decimated. Suddenly, cost becomes no object in the search for and sequestration of all remaining nuclear arsenals as well as chemical and biological weapons.
20. The nuked city and global reaction to it drastically reduce demand for nuclear power plants; some in the process of being constructed are stopped.
21. Global carbon dioxide production starts to decrease but just barely in 2018. It then falls sharply as developing nations turn off coal and turn on to the now-cheaper renewables.
22. Existing CO2 in the atmosphere raises temperatures enough to melt and split off a sizeable chunk of the West Antartic ice sheet, raising global sea levels over 1 foot inside of 3 years. Panic ensues in low-laying countries. Bangladesh starts a war with India for resettling rights on higher ground. Several pacific islands are lost entirely.
23. CO2 emissions rights are traded on all world exchanges. The Arbor Day Foundation (ADF) becomes the largest recipient ever of a corporate donation, $4 billion, from the government of Belgium. ADF starts planting trees worldwide, including massive numbers of almond, olive, and palm trees across the middle east.
24. A category-4 hurricane strikes Philadelphia and causes large scale destruction in nearby states as well, including New Jersey and even into New York. Increasing numbers of severe hurricanes are blamed on global warming.
25. Britain's summer, and that of western Europe, is noticibly foreshortened and sea temperatures are blamed. The EU makes a deal with Brazil to purchase, cease development on, and put under military control an increasingly large section of Amazon rainforest, to prevent deforestation.
--- That's it for today. lots of bad news. But lots of good news, too. The average people living in the middle east are going to be better off, with more of a chance at representative governments, but it's also riskier for them if they make autocratic choices along the left side of the J curve. People the world over are in worse shape environmentally from the effects of the changes, but they are forced to make better ecological decisions by obvious circumstances affecting their checkbooks.
As the problems mount, the onus for green change becomes huge. On the other hand, so many changes in so little time present vast problems for maintaining stability. Reactionary conservatism is usually the result of this kind of instability, but the conservatives can take the "green" label away from the left in the name of religion, less government interference (deregulation of energy production and distribution), etc.
Monday, July 28, 2008
using libcurl, pycurl on for xml post
I had to do an xml call to get data from a remote server. it had to be a post request.
This is a simple example of using PycURL (pycurl) to access the libcurl library. I had been doing a python popen3() call to '/usr/bin/curl' and passing the params. This was ugly. A co-worker recommended pycurl. So, here it is, the sample code:
c = pycurl.Curl()
c.setopt(pycurl.URL, ncServerURL)
c.setopt(pycurl.POST, 1)
c.setopt(pycurl.HTTPHEADER, ["Content-type: text/xml"])
c.setopt(pycurl.TIMEOUT, ncServerMaxTime)
c.setopt(pycurl.CONNECTTIMEOUT, ncServerMaxTime)
c.setopt(pycurl.NOSIGNAL, 1) # disable signals, curl will be using other means besides signals to timeout.
c.setopt(pycurl.POSTFIELDS, xmlRequest)
import StringIO
b = StringIO.StringIO()
c.setopt(pycurl.WRITEFUNCTION, b.write)
c.perform()
ncServerData = b.getvalue()
This would only work after I installed pycurl. However, I'm running this on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and Hardy wanted apt-get to install libcurl version 7.18.0. But pycurl wanted version 7.18.2 minimum. So, I had to go back a version on pycurl. Recommendation: hand-install pycurl version 7.16.4 (the one previous to 7.18.1) and it will work.
Enjoy!
This is a simple example of using PycURL (pycurl) to access the libcurl library. I had been doing a python popen3() call to '/usr/bin/curl' and passing the params. This was ugly. A co-worker recommended pycurl. So, here it is, the sample code:
c = pycurl.Curl()
c.setopt(pycurl.URL, ncServerURL)
c.setopt(pycurl.POST, 1)
c.setopt(pycurl.HTTPHEADER, ["Content-type: text/xml"])
c.setopt(pycurl.TIMEOUT, ncServerMaxTime)
c.setopt(pycurl.CONNECTTIMEOUT, ncServerMaxTime)
c.setopt(pycurl.NOSIGNAL, 1) # disable signals, curl will be using other means besides signals to timeout.
c.setopt(pycurl.POSTFIELDS, xmlRequest)
import StringIO
b = StringIO.StringIO()
c.setopt(pycurl.WRITEFUNCTION, b.write)
c.perform()
ncServerData = b.getvalue()
This would only work after I installed pycurl. However, I'm running this on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and Hardy wanted apt-get to install libcurl version 7.18.0. But pycurl wanted version 7.18.2 minimum. So, I had to go back a version on pycurl. Recommendation: hand-install pycurl version 7.16.4 (the one previous to 7.18.1) and it will work.
Enjoy!
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Tried Used HVAC places
I sent a bunch of emails yesterday to various companies that buy and sell used HVAC equipment. I said I wanted to buy used blower fans.
I don't think I'm going to find any of these. Alas.
I don't think I'm going to find any of these. Alas.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Vertical Axis Windmil - Materials problems
I've been trying to do preliminary design work on a windmill as a for-fun project. That is, besides the fact that I've got a lot going on around the house fixup-wise, I thought it would be a fun build.
So, basic decision #1:
Question: propeller or vertical axis wind turbine?
Answer: Unequivocally, I'm going with VAWT:
- very tight suburban location with high trees nearby
- aesthetics important;
- chaotic winds are typical
- simple build is better, this is practice.
Decision #2: Surface area available to wind?
Answer: Probably maximum of 1 to 3 square meters.
Decision #3: Type of turbine?
no answer yet. I found it's very hard to buy squirrel cage / blower fans as a one-off. Everyone wants to sell me 500 of them at once, for lots of money.
I called a company in Canada and found they were already going to be making some for another customer and would just extend the production run for me. The price was about $120 for a crossflow blower fan, which is a cylinder 30 inches tall by 8 inches diameter with the outside serrated and each tab bent at an angle (google 'crossflow blower' to find an example).
That's 240 square inches of wind-face for $120 = about $0.50 per square inch. This might be a great solution for someone, but I'm too cheap for this. This is a for-fun project and I'm budgeting about $200 for the whole thing. Since I'd need about 10 of them to get my surface area, I'd be 5x my budget and still without any other major components. Plus, I'd have to wait a couple of months since I'm tacked onto another order, but I understood that.
The lady at this company was very nice, though, and kind to speak with me given I'm a random person to call her and ask such a wierd question. If you're interested, the company name is www.eucania.com.
I'll have to think more about how to do this more inexpensively. I'm thinking I'd like something like a savonius rotor, since it's cheap to make. I just put out the call to my mother and her church group to start collecting a bunch of extra-large V-8 juice or grapefruit juice cans (the 6-inch diameter fans). I know that'll be cheaper, but it's going to be a more complex build, and I'm going to be fighting complexity this whole time.
So, basic decision #1:
Question: propeller or vertical axis wind turbine?
Answer: Unequivocally, I'm going with VAWT:
- very tight suburban location with high trees nearby
- aesthetics important;
- chaotic winds are typical
- simple build is better, this is practice.
Decision #2: Surface area available to wind?
Answer: Probably maximum of 1 to 3 square meters.
Decision #3: Type of turbine?
no answer yet. I found it's very hard to buy squirrel cage / blower fans as a one-off. Everyone wants to sell me 500 of them at once, for lots of money.
I called a company in Canada and found they were already going to be making some for another customer and would just extend the production run for me. The price was about $120 for a crossflow blower fan, which is a cylinder 30 inches tall by 8 inches diameter with the outside serrated and each tab bent at an angle (google 'crossflow blower' to find an example).
That's 240 square inches of wind-face for $120 = about $0.50 per square inch. This might be a great solution for someone, but I'm too cheap for this. This is a for-fun project and I'm budgeting about $200 for the whole thing. Since I'd need about 10 of them to get my surface area, I'd be 5x my budget and still without any other major components. Plus, I'd have to wait a couple of months since I'm tacked onto another order, but I understood that.
The lady at this company was very nice, though, and kind to speak with me given I'm a random person to call her and ask such a wierd question. If you're interested, the company name is www.eucania.com.
I'll have to think more about how to do this more inexpensively. I'm thinking I'd like something like a savonius rotor, since it's cheap to make. I just put out the call to my mother and her church group to start collecting a bunch of extra-large V-8 juice or grapefruit juice cans (the 6-inch diameter fans). I know that'll be cheaper, but it's going to be a more complex build, and I'm going to be fighting complexity this whole time.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Political Data Management
By Kevin J. Rice,
June 6th, 2005
I recently joined the Illinois Eighth U.S. Congressional District’s “Data Committee”. It’s a party organization seeking to assist any Democrats running for federal, state, county, local, school board, and other elections. The Data Committee is a group of 6+ IT people and we’re trying to come up with tools and techniques that can help the larger organization be more effective.
The user needs go are huge and vital to actually helping get our people elected:
- Names, addresses, phone numbers (etc.) of people who have contributed time, money, and efforts in the past and/or who have indicated they might in the future;
- Names etc. of people willing to volunteer in distributing literature, being election judges, etc.
- List of all elected positions for each jurisdiction (local governments, school boards, village trustees, township trustees, water districts, county government, state and federal government);
- List of who is currently occupying those positions and their party affiliation if possible (so we know who to help);
- Some determination of the boundaries of each of these jurisdictions on a map;
- A list of all the (primarily residential) mailing addresses in a given jurisdiction;
- First and last names for the people living at those addresses;
- A list of the eligible voters for a given jurisdiction;
- A list of people (with their addresses) who are NOT registered to vote living in a jurisdiction (to visit with our registrars to help them get registered);
- A list of people (with their addresses) who have voted in previous primary elections and if they voted in the Democratic primary, Republican primary, or as an independent;
- A list of people (and their addresses) who’ve voted in the full elections;
- A walklist: a list of likely voters (those who have voted in the past in Democratic primaries), sorted in order by address in such a way that a person walking down a street could look at the list and quickly determine where stop and make contact;
- Having a walklist indicate if that person has recently moved there or has been there a long time;
- Having a walklist indicate if that person is elderly and might need a ride to the polling station (so we could offer that service);
- Having a walklist indicate if they were willing or enthusiastic about having a sign in their yard;
- Having a walklist indicate if they typically gave money and if so how much (roundabouts) and how (by mail, online, etc.) so we could thank them in person for their past gifts and offer them a chance to contribute again;
- Having a walklist indicate with some short notes anything of interest about that person – if they’re interested in running as a candidate, if they’re willing to also contact their neighbors and distribute literature, or help in any other non-monetary way, if they have an deep interest in some specific topic like water quality issues or some local issue, and the positions of the current candidates and incumbents on that issue;
- Having the walklist indicate if they speak any other languages (Spanish only, for instance) so the person walking would know they’d need to have a Spanish speaker along, etc.;
- Having literature tailored to their address with a list of the candidates and who of those we’re endorsing (some independents are endorsed by one, both, or neither major party);
- Having a sample ballot pre-printed for their address with our candidates marked clearly, in the same format as the real ballot, so they can just walk into the polling place carrying that one sheet of paper and they’d know who we’d like them to vote for;
The complications to implementing this are many and huge:
- As a registered political organization (to register, we file a form with the state of
- This list is compiled by the state but is often different than the same one (very often a less accurate one) provided by the county;
- Some counties only provide hardcopy of their lists, with less than ideal image quality;
- We are prevented by law (with criminal penalties and stiff fines) from releasing any of this information to the general public. Marketing firms and stalkers (if there’s a difference) would like to have this data, too;
- The State of
- I’d love to suggest that the
- There are a frightening number of jurisdictions (areas that elect people). Many jurisdictions overlap, and very often a precinct (a geographic area for which there is one polling place) will contain multiple different jurisdictions – some residents will be in one water board district and others not; some will be in a city and others in a rural fire protection district, etc.;
- During the election, “poll watchers” are permitted to access the precinct records to see which eligible voters have not yet voted. We can then activate a call list or dispatch cars to give rides to these voters to and from the voting station; However, this is a paper based process and someone would have to have an automated way of handling this to be truly effective, unless the number of non-voters was very low;
- Americans move fairly often. U.S. Census Bureau says on average, Americans move every 5 years (http://www.uwex.edu/ces/cced/CommunityIndicators2.htm). This means the historical voting record data we have (which includes address as well as name) is useless if the person has moved, unless they have moved within our jurisdiction, and at that point we have a further problem to match them to their history and flag that the old house as having new tenants;
- Our area is experiencing rapid home building, and is experiencing population growth. New residents have different concerns and voting patterns than established residents. New homeowners are frequently young parents and have concerns very different from unmarried, middle aged, empty-nester, or elderly voters;
- Everyone who moves complicates the name vs. address matching process for voting history and current resident’s name;
- Apartment blocks are even more volatile (short-term residents) than average and their residents may not have registered to vote in their new locations yet;
- Some people live in areas that have historically been totally Republican dominated, but disagree with this silently. Thus, they’re not comfortable putting up yard signs that say, “Vote Democrat!” (or vice versa). However, sometimes a yard sign that just shows the candidate’s name and not their party are okay for these people, because they can claim they didn’t know if the person was Democratic or Republican. Or, the candidate can run as an independent and we can help them anyway, to displace a monolithic party apparatus/candidate.
- Many political offices have people running unopposed because no one knew they could run for that office;
- Many people don’t know what commitments of money, time, and (invasion of) privacy are required for running for political office. They might be willing to run if they had a more accurate picture of the process;
- Before the elections, we often have to call up candidates and find out whether they affiliate with the Democratic or Republican. Sometimes we can tell based on their ballot-type histories (above) but other times we just don’t know. This requires time.
- Sometimes just finding out who is running at all is difficult;
- Lastly, sometimes the county clerk redraws the precinct boundaries. The legitimate purpose of this is to evenly distribute voters so polling places are not too crowded and there’s no lines, etc. However, this sometimes happens just a few weeks before the election and (if I’m really correct) the county clerk isn’t under any obligation to tell anyone about it besides the candidates running in those precincts. This wouldn’t matter except that if the clerk is a Republican, they redraw the boundaries and tell the candidates, but they also tell various people in the Republican party . Then, the party can mobilize, contact their likely voters, and tell them that the location where they’re going to vote has changed. This could lead to large numbers of primarily Democratic voters showing up to the wrong place on election day. This kind of thing happens all the time across the
These and other problems face candidates and those interested in promoting a political party’s aspirations. We know there is a way to solve this set of data problems.
Further, and very importantly, these same problems are faced everywhere. Is there an open source solution to this? We’d like a set of tools that can help. Requirements would seem to be:
- It’s open source, so we know we’re not being handicapped by a biased program;
- It doesn’t favor any political party or have branding associating it with a political party, so it could be used internationally;
- Should make the voting process easier (with a sample ballot) so people don’t stand in the voting booth thinking, “Do I like this guy or is he a bad guy?”
- Should thus increase voter turnout;
- Should increase transparency in government and the voting process;
- Should allow people to have a more accurate idea of what’s involved in running for office;
- Should allow interaction with the average voter to allow them to voice their concerns and have questions answered by the candidates, or request a candidate visit;
- Should allow easier communication of pertinent info about races that are frequently ignored but are nonetheless quite important (retention of judges);
Obviously, there’s a long way to go here, but it would be nice if the open source community could start a solution for this.
Software for a handheld computer, like a palm pilot, for the walklist would be great. Maybe even a barcode scanner – they could scan a barcode instead of typing of “Now entering data for address 123 anywhere, Dave Brown”, they could just have sheets of paper that had a barcode for Dave brown at that address etc.;
Just some ideas. Maybe someone with software already could open-source it and everyone could use it, or at least certain party organizations could license it freely. Regardless, we need a place to start.
-- Kevin J. Rice,
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