THIS IS MY VIRTUAL LIVING ROOM. COME ON IN AND SAY HELLO. THE BAR IS OVER IN THE CORNER -- HELP YOURSELF, BUT MIND YOUR MANNERS.

Friday, March 28, 2008

The Audacity of Hope


Posted by: Wave Maker / 11:03 PM/ |

Thursday, March 27, 2008

StrawVoter Launch Will Give Real Time Public Opinion

A very close friend of mine has recently launched the beta version of a new opinion tracking website that could revolutionize our ability to determine public opinion on any given issue. From the website (launched TODAY!):

StrawVoter is a non-partisan digital polling tool for people who can't wait to know how political opinion is aligning on a daily basis around the country. It's a grassroots experiment for making detailed polling data available to the average voter.

From the website's creator, Chatham denizen Matthew MacIver:

The creation of StrawVoter was driven by an admittedly self-serving idea and two untested assumptions.

The idea: create a tool that would let me see detailed, demographically rich poll data at key moments in this turbulent political season. A web-enabled polling tool that, in exchange for answers to a few simple demographic questions, would give every participant - every StrawVoter - a summary of all such data collected in each Congressional district, each State, across the nation.

Why? Because I can't easily and cheaply get this information elsewhere. Of, of course, we're all bombarded by poll results - but they're highly aggregated, rarely provided in consistent time-series form, focused primarily on the issue of the hour and absolutely opaque when it comes to methodology.

And they often become the news by virtue of the context in which they're presented. Private polling often turns political leadership into political followership and then is used to recursively reinforce public opinion. Public polls by Fox and CNN have to be interpreted with the appropriate spin-discount-rate (your mileage may vary) - thank goodness for a free press.

But I wanted more raw detail presented in a value-free wrapper. StrawVoter is the result. It's a non-partisan hobby site. I generate no revenue from it (although I may defray expenses with some Google ads.) I want good commentary to share with the StrawVoter community, but I won't post rants or candidate missives. I want to post special polling questions derived from good feedback based on the data that lands here.

Will it work? The idea will be proven or not based on two basic premises.

The first is that many, many Americans want this type of insight, too. I'm marketing this virally and pin great hopes on the exponential power of social networks. We'll see if that works out. I'll be posting volume figures as time goes on.

The second is that most Strawvoters won't want to game the system by registering multiple times or filing faulty demographics. No-one has satisfactorily solved digital polling authentication (or for that matter mail ballot authentication) and I personally doubt that anyone will anytime soon. So, no, we can't check you against your precinct roll.

But we did what we could. We've placed CAPTCHA devices (courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University) on registration and voting pages to slow down the people who have no lives and may want to laboriously register and vote again and again. And although virtually all alpha testers thusfar first wanted to make an avatar from their demographics, they also soon realized that the results they wanted to see would be jeopardized by their flights of fancy. And, finally, given a set of samples of even modest size, we have the Central Limit Theorem working to our advantage.
So that's the story. Vote often, but only as yourself. Give me some good polling fodder, too. I'll expand StrawVoter as results and comments come in.

Enjoy the site.

Mathew MacIver
StrawVoter.com

So, there's only one thing to do - go register, send the link to everyone in your contacts list, and post it on your own blog!
Posted by: Wave Maker / 2:06 PM/ |

Thursday, March 20, 2008

"No Pressure, no deals, nothing"

This is Speaker Sal DiMasi in response to questions surrounding the odd and controversial vote by the legislature's Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies (who named this committee?) to recommend that Governor Patrick's casino bill "ought not to pass."

But DiMasi's claim is beyond incredible. It is hilarious. It is medacious.

After weeks of what can accurately be described as a full court press, with the Speaker himself calling individual members into his office to personally lobby against the bill -- members stating publicly to the state house press corps of the intense pressure -- the Committee, led by DiMasi's ardently anti-casino Rep. Dan Bosley, initially comes up with a 9-9 tie vote?

A tie? Incredible.

And why the tie, with an odd number of members?

Because one House member, Representative Robert L. Rice Jr. (D - Gardner) ABSTAINED FROM VOTING.
On the most controversial and far-reaching public policy issue to come before the legislature since gay marriage, one duly elected representative of the people couldn't pull the trigger. Unless Rep. Rice has a clear and obvious conflict of interest that would lawfully prevent him from voting, he should be taken into the public arena and flogged.
_________________________

With one profile in cowardice taken care of, the focus falls on Republican Rep. Richard Ross, whose district includes one of the states struggling race tracks. The Plainridge facility is not a typical thoroughbred racing facility. It is for trotters (or "standardbreds")-- a segment of the racing industry that is to thoroughbred racing what pentanque is to Major League Baseball.

Here's what Ross had to say:

Another member, Rep. Richard Ross, R-Wrentham, told The Associated Press he dropped his support for the bill after the owners of the Plainridge Racecourse, a 91-acre harness racing facility in his district, said they would rather take a shot at the House passing a separate bill to install slot machines at the state's four racetracks.

"I got a loud and clear message from my district ... that they really wanted me to vote for the adverse report," Ross said. "Really, until the eleventh hour, 59th minute, I was on the phone."

Similar slot machine bills have failed in past years, but Ross said DiMasi promised he would allow it to come to the House floor again.


DiMasi promised he would allow a racetrack slots bill to come to the floor again.

DiMasi's response to that question?

"That's a question for another day," DiMasi said when asked about the prospect of the slot machine bill coming up for a vote. ...

DiMasi denied putting undue pressure on lawmakers or making any promises to help ensure the committee vote against Patrick's bill.

"Not at all," DiMasi said, adding that he made "no deals, no bargains, nothing" to members of the committee.

But Ross indicated that he had met with DiMasi before casting his vote and had also been told by the Plainridge people that DiMasi "has promised them that we would have a dialogue in the next couple of weeks on ... the slots bill and that we would actually bring it before the membership alone and it would have nothing to do with the casinos."

That sounds like a deal to Ross. Don't bet on this man in a poker game, folks.

So, it appears, at least this chapter of the Great Casino Debate has come down to a rather typical phenomenon -- one representative with an important business constituent representing his "district" (on the basis of a promise from the Speaker that he claims he didn't make) and one other not representing anyone at all.

There is another element to this vote that should deeply trouble observers of democracy. Legislative Committee votes are to be taken in open sessions where the public and the press are able to observe the process. In this instance, however -- for reasons yet unexplained -- "two votes were taken by email and phone" and counted inside closed offices instead of committee rooms.

This is how Democracy works on major public policy matters in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Posted by: Wave Maker / 6:42 AM/ |

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Amen, Brother



As a boy, I used to fall asleep in church, but I wouldn't have missed this show.
Posted by: Wave Maker / 7:18 AM/ |

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