lavendertook

Happy Thanksgiving Day! I hope all who celebrate are having a good one. And to those who don't, OK, you can have a good day too. I'm so grateful to have all my friends here--I'm not sure how you all fit yourselves into my tiny macbook air, but I'm glad you did. <3


Another October pic I took by the lake.

I had a yummy T-Day meal with zlabya and her DH and her BF. I made my signature salad, and she made a yummy chicken, sweet potato casserole, and apple crisp. Excellent company to hang out with.

Auditing the Vote

If you missed the news, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for US President started raising funds yesterday to audit and recount the votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Best comment ever reported as seen on twitter by ambree40: lanyard @lanyardigan 8h8 hours ago: Please, God: like Gollum, let Jill Stein have a totally unforeseen and critical purpose. :-D

I contributed yesterday and watching it grow has been so exciting--they're up to $4.3 million and counting. Go here if you want to contribute or just watch the donations flood in.

A decade back I was following the voting integrity push, belonged to Common Cause, and presented a paper to Congresspeople involved in the movement. When I canvassed for John Kerry down in Florida on election weekend, I listened to poll workers who saw voting machines flip their votes from Kerry to Bush.

We've made great strides in creating a paper trail in many districts in this country to check these problems, but paper backup ballots don't do any good if you never audit and take a look at them. It's just a gigantic green flag to hackers, Russian gov't connected or from anywhere, if they know we're not verifying the optical scanners by checking some of the paper ballots. We should be auditing a sampling of ballots in every state before we announce the count, and we should get used to not having instant gratification and wait a week or 3 before announcing a winner, as grueling as it would have felt to do that this year.

So, without getting my hopes too high that they will find something that will overturn the horrid results of this election (but seeing that Trump has a pattern of doing the things he accuses others of and Bannon is involved with data-mining operations, how could we not check this out), the recount here is just a needed thing to ensure the integrity of the vote. As long as we're having elections close enough that one side wins the electors and the other side the popular vote, vote audits should be made an automatic procedure through legislation. We're doing a good thing here, whatever the outcome of the recount.

Also posted at http://lavendertook.dreamwidth.org/216488.html with comments

It has been a long couple of weeks of home and car repair stressors. But I’m finally taking some time to finish my moot write up that I started a couple of weeks ago now. I was a bit absent here in the spring focusing on moot prep, and since it focusing on household stuff that got pushed aside and not so good with keeping up with posts and comments here. I’m working my way back.

So we had this moot Memorial Day weekend. (-:

FRIDAY

The moot started a couple of hours later than planned—Friday morning I heard from poor hildigard_brown that her flight out of Austin was cancelled and she was rebooked for Saturday afternoon. I was sad not to meet her that morning and for the time she would miss out on, but I took the time to relax, take a walk before the day got too hot, and then drive up to the bus station in Baltimore to pick up aliensouldream and gabi_fics (from Manchester, UK via NJ, down to DC and back up to Baltimore) getting there just as their bus got in half past noon, and there were their smiling faces and it was a happy reunion! The two of them bought so much happy cheer to be here and with all of us that was infectious.

From Baltimore we went to the hobbity Le Madeleines in Columbia for lunch and happy chatter. Claudia, you remember Le Madeleine’s, right? Actually we talked a lot about politics and I learned some things about Brexit and Rupert Murdock’s machinations thereat (crossing my fingers about the vote today.) A wonderful start to the moot. Then I dropped them at the Greenbelt Marriott to check in, while I went back up to BWI to pick up shirebound in from San Diego and lovethosehobbit from Salt Lake City and collected my lovely hugs with our reunion and brought them back to the Marriott to check in. lovethosehobbit brought really cute Gandalf & Frodo silhouette bumper stickers for all of us. I need to clean a spot on my car for mine.

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