Shallow Thoughts : : politics

Voting Stories

My hiking group includes several volunteer poll workers. After an election, sometimes you hear some fun stories.

The Case of the Missing Information

Like the absentee ballot that came in with all the outer envelope fields blank.

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The 2023 Legislative Session, Student Advocates, and Hope for the Future

This year's New Mexico legislative session started Jan 17 and runs through Mar 18. As usual, they have a full schedule.

Also as usual, I've been scrambling with updates to the New Mexico Bill Tracker. This year's new feature is tags; I seeded it with a few tags I use, like health and elections, plus an LWVNM tag for bills the League of Women Voters is tracking and advocating for or against. But the list has grown quite a bit from there, and it's been fun to watch what tags other people are interested in.

One bill of particular interest this session is HB134: MENSTRUAL PRODUCTS IN SCHOOL BATHROOMS. It's driven by three Albuquerque Academy high school students, seniors Noor Ali, Sophia Liem and Mireya Macías.

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Writing a Bill

I've been super busy this month. The New Mexico Legislature was in session, and in addition to other projects, I've had a chance to be involved in the process of writing a new bill and helping it move through the legislature. It's been interesting, educational, and sometimes frustrating.

The bill is SB304: Voting District Geographic Data. It's an "open data" bill: it mandates that election district boundary data for all voting districts, down to the county and municipal level, be publicly available at no charge on the Secretary of State's website.

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Track Bills in the 2021 New Mexico Legislative Session

This year's New Mexico Legislative Session started Tuesday. For the last few weeks I've been madly scrambling to make sure the bugs are out of some of the New Mexico Bill Tracker's new features: notably, it now lets you switch between the current session and past sessions, and I cleaned up the caching code that tries to guard against hitting the legislative website too often.

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Petition for Better Los Alamos Broadband

Los Alamos (and White Rock) Alert!

Los Alamos and White Rock readers: please direct your attention to Andy Fraser's Better Los Alamos Broadband NOW petition.

One thing the petition doesn't mention is that LANL is bringing a second high speed trunk line through White Rock. I'm told that They don't actually need the extra bandwidth, but they want redundancy in case their main line goes out.

Meanwhile, their employees, and the rest of the town, are struggling with home internet speeds that aren't even close to the federal definition of broadband:

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A is for Absentee Ballot

We're "praticing social distancing" with the COVID-19 virus active in New Mexico ... but fortunately, that doesn't mean we can't hike. It might be the most healthy thing we can do, as long as we all keep our distance from each other and don't carpool.

On this week's hike, someone told me about a fun activity: since a lot of her friends are stuck at home, they're trading emails where each day, everybody writes about something starting with a new letter of the alphabet.

Sounds like fun! So I'm going to join the game here on my blog. I'm not going to try for daily posts; I expect to post roughly twice a week, usually on light topics, not geeky tech articles.

I'll lead off today with a short note: a reminder to everyone to sign up for an absentee ballot, if your state allows that, so you can vote by mail rather than going to a polling place in person.

In this time of social distancing, you don't want to be at a crowded polling place touching the same screens or pens that everyone else has touched before you; and it would be better if poll workers weren't required to be there either. It would be so much better if we all voted by mail.

When Dave and I lived in California, the state had just switched to what they called "permanent absentee ballots": at least in the bay area, ballots were automatically sent to all voters. You could fill the ballot out at home, and then you had the choice of mailing them in or dropping them off at the nearest polling place. (This was thanks to our excellent then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who also fought against no-paper-trail voting machines and for increased ballot access.)

New Mexico still uses in-person voting, though I'm happy to say we use paper ballots and allow absentee voting without requiring any excuse. But this year, it looks like New Mexico will be encouraging voting by mail; our Secretary of State has a FAQ | ABSENTEE VOTING FOR THE 2020 PRIMARY ELECTION. page with details on how to sign up, and you must request your ballot for the primary by May 28.

Check the rules for your state (assuming you're in the US). If you haven't voted in the primary yet, check now, since time may be running out! For the November general election, you probably have plenty of time.

And if your state doesn't allow no-excuse voting by mail / absentee ballots, this might be time to call your governor or lobby your state legislators asking for an exception. It's a critical health matter, this year.

Plotting War

A recent article on Pharyngula blog, You ain’t no fortunate one, discussed US wars, specifically the qeustion: depending on when you were born, for how much of your life has the US been at war?

It was an interesting bunch of plots, constantly increasing until for people born after 2001, the percentage hit 100%.

Really? That didn't seem right. Wasn't the US in a lot of wars in the past? When I was growing up, it seemed like we were always getting into wars, poking our nose into other countries' business. Can it really be true that we're so much more warlike now than we used to be?

It made me want to see a plot of when the wars were, beyond Pharyngula's percentage-of-life pie charts. So I went looking for data.

The best source of war dates I could find was American Involvement in Wars from Colonial Times to the Present. I pasted that data into a table and reformatted it to turn it into Python data, and used matplotlib to plot it as a Gantt chart. (Script here: us-wars.py.)

Sure enough. If that Thoughtco page with the war dates is even close to accurate -- it could be biased toward listing recent conflicts, but I didn't find a more authoritative source for war dates -- the prevalence of war took a major jump in 2001. We used to have big gaps between wars, and except for Vietnam, the wars we were involved with were short, mostly less than a year each. But starting in 2001, we've been involved in a never-ending series of overlapping wars unprecedented in US history.

The Thoughtco page had wars going back to 1675, so I also made a plot showing all of them (click for the full-sized version). It's no different: short wars, not overlapping, all the way back to before the revolution. We've seen nothing in the past like the current warmongering.

Depressing. Climate change isn't the only phenomenon showing a modern "hockey stick" curve, it seems.

Announcing the New Mexico Bill Tracker

For the last few weeks I've been consumed with a project I started last year and then put aside for a while: a bill tracker.

The project sprung out of frustration at the difficulty of following bills as they pass through the New Mexico legislature. Bills I was interested in would die in committee, or they would make it to a vote, and I'd read about it a few days later and wish I'd known that it was a good time to write my representative or show up at the Roundhouse to speak. (I've never spoken at the Roundhouse, and whether I'd have the courage to actually do it remains to be seen, but at least I'd like to have the chance to decide.)

New Mexico has a Legislative web site where you can see the status of each bill, and they even offer a way to register and save a list of bills; but then there's no way to get alerts about bills that change status and might be coming up for debate.

New Mexico legislative sessions are incredibly short: 60 days in odd years, 30 days in even. During last year's 30-day session, I wrote some Python code that scraped the HTML pages describing a bill, extract the useful information like when the bill last changed status and where it was right now, present the information in a table where the user could easily scan it, and email the user a daily summary. Fortunately, the nmlegis.gov site, while it doesn't offer raw data for bill status, at least uses lots of id tags in its HTML which make them relatively easy to scrape.

Then the session ended and there was no further way to test it, since bills' statuses were no longer changing. So the billtracker moved to the back burner.

In the runup to this year's 60-day session, I started with Flask, a lightweight Python web library I've used for a couple of small projects, and added some extensions that help Flask handle tasks like user accounts. Then I patched in the legislative web scraping code from last year, and the result was The New Mexico Bill Tracker. I passed the word to some friends in the League of Women Voters and the Sierra Club to help me test it, and I think (hope) it's ready for wider testing.

There's lots more I'd like to do, of course. I still have no way of knowing when a bill will be up for debate. It looks like this year the Legislative web site is showing committ schedules in a fairly standard way, as opposed to the unparseable PDFs they used in past years, so I may be able to get that. Not that legislative committees actually stick to their published schedules; but at least it's a start.

New Mexico readers (or anyone else interested in following the progress of New Mexico bills) are invited to try it. Let me know about any problems you encounter. And if you want to adapt the billtracker for use in another state, send me a note! I'd love to see it extended and would be happy to work with you. Here's the source: BillTracker on GitHub.