Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Voting Stuff

I agree with Avedon Carol that we ought to have real ballots. We should also have standardized voting procedures so that folks in the poor neighborhoods don't vote on machines that are more likely to misread their ballots than those counted in wealthy terrains.

I disagree slightly that receipts wouldn't be necessary if we had real paper ballots. What I would like to see is a system where you vote via touch screen and the device spits out a little card that lists all your votes in plain English...and also has them encoded in a little barcode at the bottom. Instead of signing in to vote when you arrive, you would instead sign in as you leave, verifying that the receipt card accurately represents your votes.

On the way out, you could — totally at your choice — let poll watchers or reporters scan the barcode part of your receipt. This would be roughly the equivalent of participating in an exit poll, as many of us do now, but it would be easier and have more value. If the tally in a given precinct was wildly off the exit polls, it would probably pinpoint error or fraud in counting. Someone could also check to see that the barcoding matched the votes, minimizing another possible area of screw-ups.

Vote fraud and error are both possible with any system. The argument against the old-fashioned paper ballots — and this was not without some merit — was that they were counted in precincts without central oversight. My mother had the voting at our house a few times in the "paper" day and also early in the punchcard era. If we got all our buddies together to run a polling place, there'd be really nothing stopping us from marking a lot of Republican ballots "spoiled" and replacing them with ballots marked for Democrats...or vice-versa. Touch screens were supposed to eliminate that possibility...and I guess they have, though they've created more dark holes than they've filled. I really think the best system of all would involve me being able to take home a certified copy of my vote. Then some proof is in my hands, not theirs.

• Posted at 5:44 PM · LINK

Haven't Left Yet

...so I might as well report something about hotels for the Comic-Con. A friend of mine writes me that he has had to cancel his trip due to lack of an affordable place to stay. Says he, he had a reservation at a motel in Chula Vista, which is about fifteen minutes from the Convention Center. Then a story appeared in a San Diego newspaper that said hotels were getting $500 a night for rooms during the con, and his motel cancelled his reservation and told him he could have it back but the price would now be $700 a night. (I gather they can do this because he hadn't paid in advance for the first night.) This is for a motel room that — I just looked — advertises normal rates of $52-$62 on the Internet.

Out of curiosity, since I already have my hotel room, I just used Travelaxe, which is a wonderful and free piece o' software that can usually find you the cheapest lodgings on the web, and looked for a room for Thursday night through Sunday morn in or around San Diego. Couldn't find anything under around a thousand bucks for three nights...and these were at places that are 10+ miles away from the Convention Center and ordinarily go for less than a hundred a night.

Back in the seventies, I had a friend who lived in Los Angeles and commuted each day to the San Diego Con. That is, instead of getting a room down there, he drove home each night and slept in his own bed. Hotel rooms were something like $20 a night then and there was no shortage...but he calculated the gas prices and decided that by going back and forth, he'd save enough cash to buy a copy of some old issue of Action Comics after which he lusted. We razzed him and pointed out that he was foregoing 5-7 hours of convention each day and spending it instead on the 5 Freeway, which is always a joy. We thought he was insane then...but like a lot of people we label insane, he may just have been ahead of his time.

• Posted at 1:30 PM · LINK

Rudy Palais, R.I.P.

I don't have many details — only that he "died two weeks ago" — but I wanted to note the passing of Rudy Palais, one of comic art's most distinctive sylists. In his day, which was roughly from the beginning of comics into the sixties, he (and his brother Walter) worked for most of the New York publishers, and I believe Rudy started with a job in the Harry "A" Chesler shop in 1939. He worked briefly for DC on Doctor Mid-Nite, for Holyoke on Catman, for Quality Comics on Blackhawk, Doll Man and Phantom Lady, and for Charles Biro on the original Daredevil. His most notable assignments were a 20-year tour-of-duty drawing intermittent tales for Classics Illustrated and a number of horror comics he drew in the fifties, especially for Harvey. (He also drew for the early EC crime and horror titles.)

His work was quite organic, and some scholars of the form have compared his horror work favorably to that of "Ghastly" Graham Ingels, noting that like Ingels, Palais had a way of making creepy things ooze right off the page. In the sixties, Palais turned up in the pages of Charlton comics. I believe his last art was for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves — very odd, impressionistic short stories — and then he did some lettering work for them before retiring from comics around 1969. I never met the man but I followed his work and you could tell that he really cared about doing good comic art.

• Posted at 12:02 PM · LINK

Wednesday Morning

Posting will be light here the next few days as I haul my panel-moderating butt down to you-know-where. I'll try to put up reports on what's transpiring but can't be certain I won't be too busy/tired.

Pre-convention fatigue set in last night around 11 PM, which is later than usual. There comes a time when in the hustling and bustling to get things done, one pauses to wonder if the trade-off is worth it; if life would not be better to forego the joys of the con if it also means avoiding matters of packing and driving and compressing one's whole life for transport. You know that on the other end, it'll probably seem like a great deal but for the moment, it sure doesn't feel that way.

I also know that at some point, I will have to cope with post-convention fatigue. We'll discuss that when it arrives. I'm guessing Sunday afternoon at around 5:30.

Not much else to say before I pack the computer. If you're at the con and you see me and you want to tell me how much you love logging into this website, I won't put up a struggle. After each con the last few years, I've gotten a few notes from people who said, "I wanted to talk to you but you always seemed so busy." That may not be so. When I worked for Hanna-Barbera, I think I developed the habit of looking busy when I was doing absolutely nothing...just in case Bill Hanna walked past my office. (Mr. Hanna didn't like it when his employees seemed to be moving less than his cartoons.)

If you're not at the con, we'll miss you. Do try to make it next year. You'll have a very good time...all except for the moments, before and after, of convention fatigue. And even they aren't so bad once you see what you get in exchange.

• Posted at 9:52 AM · LINK