If you haven’t already gotten an H1N1 vaccination this is a good opportunity to get one. My wife & I managed to get one at our local pharmacy (Triangle Pharmacy on Hwy 54) a few weeks back and it literally took us more time to fill out the forms than to get the shot.

I would highly recommend getting a shot. My son’s violin teacher has already had H1N1 as well as one of my son’s schoolmate. Getting the vaccine will definitely help your chances of avoiding the virus.

Gilbert & Sullivan’s

THE MIKADO

and invites you to join in a public

SING-THROUGH

at the Durham Arts Council building

120 Morris Street, Durham NC 27701

Sunday, November 1, 2009

2pm to 5pm

Scores will be available for loan or sale ($25).

——————

THE MIKADO

2010 Performances: March 18, 19, 20, 21
at the Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham NC 27701

AUDITIONS
January 2010 at the DAC
by appointment
Sunday, January 3 from 1pm to 6pm
Monday, January 4 from 7:30pm to 9:15pm
Callbacks: Tuesday, January 5 at 7:30pm

To schedule an audition or receive more information, contact
mikado.producer@gmail.com
or 919-491-2364

Audition guidelines, preferred selections, and complete show and ticket information are available at
www.durhamsavoyards.org

• Chilis Flyer

This is the Chili’s restaurant at 4600 Durham Chapel Hill Blvd in Durham.

So, if you don’t already have dinner plans this evening, please print out the flyer, take it with you and have dinner at Chili’s.  I’m sure the Durham Symphony would appreciate it.

By way of newraleigh.com, it looks like Tori Amos will be coming to the Durham Performing Arts Center at the end of July. I haven’t seen her in concert since moving to Durham from the DC area in 1998, but I remember she had a good show then. I wonder what her stuff is like now.

So, if you’re pumping your gas, it’s probably not a good idea to leave the pump unattended.

I see from the Independent this morning that the owner of Southpoint Mall has declared bankruptcy. It says their malls will continue to operate while they reorganize. I don’t really know, but it seems to me that SouthPoint seems to be doing ok. At the very least, it’s always hard to find a parking spot there. It looks like mall performance wasn’t what did the company in, but rather that they financed their growth using short term loans and were unable to roll over the debt into new loans. So, now, they’re looking to sell malls to pay off their debts. Here’s hoping that a buyer for SouthPoint can be found soon.

Me

So, apparently, there’s a blogger bash at the DPAC tonight (also see facebook event) organized by 30Threads. I almost forgot about it but thankfully remembered it yesterday! Maybe this event will be a good kickstart for me to get back to blogging. Anyway, if you’re there, please say hello.  I’ll be the guy from the picture on the right.

If you haven’t been to the DPAC yet, you might want to consider going on May 9th.  It was just announced that in association with WUNC radio, Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion will be coming to the DPAC.    Tickets won’t go on sale until March 2nd but when they do you can get them at the DPAC tickets page.

I had heard rumors of this a few months ago, but had thought they fell through.  It’s nice to see they were correct.  A Prairie Home Companion is my son’s favorite show and he just picked up two books by Garrison Keillor at the Book Exchange in their going out of business sale.

Of course, my track record with that intersection is fairly bad (even though I drive through it every weekday). The Taco Bell there burned down a few months ago and I didn’t notice until they were rebuilding it.

So, we’ll just have to see what happens with it.

Oh, and happy 2009!

• Durham Symphony
• Duke University String School

Interestingly enough, the concert for the Duke String School got a review while the 3 full performances of Handel’s Messiah, presented by the Duke Chapel Choir, did not.  Something’s a bit wrong there.

Since the election is tomorrow, I thought it would be instructive to go over the voting process.  In North Carolina there are actually two different methods that someone can vote: an inline process where the voter casts their vote and it is counted immediately, and an offline process where the voter casts their vote and it is counted at a later time.  The later process is called casting a “provisional ballot”. Both allow the voter to cast their ballot and in both cases valid votes will be counted.

So, when someone comes to a precinct, the first thing they do is check in.  North Carolina does not require ID in order to vote.  We do require ID to register, however, and as such, if a voter registered by mail or some other process where their ID was not validated by the board of elections, they will be asked to show ID the first time they vote.  After that, for future elections, they will not be asked for ID.  So, a good rule of thumb is that if you are a first time voter, bring your ID. It’s possible you may not need it but if you are newly registered, it’s a good idea to have it with you.  In either case, though, the voter is required to state to the election officials their name and their address.  At this point in the process there are three possible states:

1. The voter is in the election worker’s printed pollbook and all their information is correct.
2. The voter is in the election worker’s printed pollbook but their information is incorrect.
3. The voter is not in the election worker’s printed pollbook.

If the voter’s situation is #1, the election worker pulls off the sticky label with the voter’s information, affixes it to an Authorization To Vote (ATV) form and then presents it to the voter for them to sign.  The voter must sign this form in order to get a ballot.  Their signature does not have to be legible, but without a signature they cannot be given a ballot.

After the voter signs the ATV, they then take it to the ballot table and present it to the election official there.  The election official takes the ATV and gives the voter a ballot.  What ballot a voter gets depends on where they live and in the case of a partisan primary, what political party affiliation they hold.  (In short, Democrats & Republicans must vote in their respective primaries while unaffiliated voters are allowed to choose which primary they wish to vote in.  They can then vote in just that primary, not both.  In Durham county, where often races are decided in the primary because no Republicans run, like the city council, this causes some Republicans to register as Unaffiliated so they can vote in the Democratic primary and thereby have a part in electing the City Council.)

After the voter gets a ballot, they take it to a pollboth (or really anywhere if all the pollboths are full) and cast their votes.

After they are done marking the ballot, the voter takes their ballot to the tabulator machine and feed it in.  If the ballot contains an “undervote”, that is, if a race has fewer or no votes for it, the machine will take it without question. However, if a race has an “overvote”, that is, if the voter has marked more than they are allowed for any particular race (i.e. voting for both McCain and Obama in the presidential race), the tabulator will beep and on the display say that the ballot contains an overvote and the race that is overvoted.  At this point the voter has a choice: they can accept the overvote, in which case that race will not be tallied from that ballot, or then can get the ballot back, take it back to the ballot and exchange it for a new ballot.  The old ballot will then be “spoiled” and will not be counted.  In either case, the voter should tell the official manning the tabulator what their choice is and the official will press the appropriate button to either accept the ballot or return it.  If for some reason the voter has already left and doesn’t know that their ballot has an overvote, the election official will simply accept the ballot so that properly marked races will be counted.

Once all this is done, the election official at the tabulator offers the voter an “I Voted” sticker and the voter leaves the polling place.  This completes the inline voting process I previously mentioned. Let’s now look at the offline voting process.

We covered case #1 where the voter is in the pollbook and all their information is correct.  Let’s look at case #2 where the voter is in the pollbook, but their information is incorrect.  In this case, the election official checking the voter in checks the “exceptions” box on the ATV and sends the voter to the exceptions table.  This is because nothing can be fixed at checkin. The election offiicial at checkin simply checks people in and sends them to either the ballot table or the exceptions table.

In case #3, where a voter is not in the precinct pollbook, the election official simply sends that voter directly to the exceptions table.

Now, when a voter gets to the exceptions table there can be two possible cases:

1. The voter has an ATV with the exceptions box checked.
2. The voter does not have an ATV.

Case #2 is the simplest.  In this case, the voter simply votes a provisional ballot.  The election official gives them a provisional ballot envelope and has them fill out the yellow fields.  Once that is done, the election official looks up the voters home precinct, records that, if possible, and gives them a ballot.  Hopefully, here, the voters is directed towards a pollbooth that is separate from the normal ones because whatever happens we do not want this ballot to go into the tabulator.  Once the voter fills out their ballot, they fold it up and place it in the envelope and seal it up.  Somewhere in this process, the election official takes 3 sticky labels with a unique number and places one of them on the envelope, one of them on the provisional ballot pollbook, and one of them on an information sheet which is given to the voter.  The information sheet has information on how the voter can call the board of elections to see if their vote was counted or not.  At this point, the voter is offered an “I Voted” sticker and they are done.

In case #1, there are several options. Most of the time, this case will be because a voter has moved.  In this case, there is a box on the ATV for them to fill out their new address.  If they have moved to somewhere within the same precinct they can simply fill out the change of address form, get the correct signatures and then proceed to the ballot table to get a normal ballot and vote the normal inline process.  However, if the voter has moved out of the precinct, things get more complicated.  If they have moved out of precinct less than 30 days ago (that figure is from memory, so hopefully it is correct) but still live in the same county, there are two things they can do:

1. Vote a provisional ballot
2. Do a precinct transfer

In case #2 they will fill out the appropriate boxes on the ATV and then take that ATV to their new precinct, present it to the official at the exceptions table, and proceed through the normal inline voting process where they will get a ballot at the ballot table and vote as normal.

If, however, they have moved out of the county, of if they have moved more than 30 days ago, the voter must vote a provisional ballot.

Throughout all this process a strict count on the number of ballots is kept.  All ATVs are numbered sequentially and this count is checked against both the number of ballots given out and the number on the ballot tabulator.  In addition, it is checked against the provisional ballot pollbook.  At the end of the day, the number of ballots is added up and compared to the number of ballots that the precinct started with at the beginning of the day to make sure everything matches up.

What happens, however, if there is an exception situation?  If the tabulator breaks down, there is a special compartment directly under the tabulator that can be opened to accept ballots.  This is known as the emergency bin and is used to hold ballots until the tabulator can be fixed at which point the ballots are fed into the tabulator.  Whenever a ballot is fed into the tabulator by someone other than the voter, the election official must announce in a loud voice what they are doing!

Polls open at 6:30am and close at 7:30pm.  Anyone who is in line at 7:30pm is allowed to vote.

There’s more, but I’ve run out of time now.  I’ll have more later, but that should be enough to get a basic idea of the process.  Any errors in the description are entirely mine and I’m sure I’ll hear about them.

Anyway, if you haven’t voted already, go vote tomorrow!

Just what does this have to do with Durham, though?  Durham has election officials too and many of them right now are spending many hours staffing One Stop Early Voting sites.  Many more will spend upwards of 14 hours on election day making sure that the polls are open and that everyone gets to vote.  While they do get paid for this, it’s still a very long day.  However, without them, the election simply could not be held.  So, if you haven’t voted yet, when you do, please say thanks to the people working the polls.  And, if you really care about democracy, ask how you can sign up to help for the next election.

This week is going to be fairly packed for me, election training-wise.  This evening I have provisional ballot training at 6pm.  Then Thursday I have general training and Friday I have tabulator training.  Should be fun.