Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

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Current entries

Wednesday, October 29, 2003, 11:15 pm

Wild, fun, amazing concert. This isn't a music blog; I don't have the requisite knowledge or sophistication. Still, I can't help but report on last night's concert at the Michigan Union Ballroom, billed as An Evening of Bulgarian Gypsy Music. The six performers included Yuri Yunakov, saxophone star, and Ivo Papazov, a clarinetist of worldwide fame.

Balkan music is known for its asymmetric meters, such as 11/16 or 9/8 (one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two-three). The beats correspond to the footwork of traditional line and circle dances.

According to the program notes:

The Yuri Yunakov Ensemble performs Romani (Gypsy) music from the Balkan countries of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey. This music is renowned for its hauning melodies, dense ornamentation, complex rhythms, and stunning improvisations. The geographical position of the Balkans in southeastern Europe and hundreds of years of Ottoman Turkish rule have created a wealth of influences from both East and West. The ensemble plays in a contemporary style called "wedding music", named for its ubiquitous presence at life cycle celebrations ... where dancing and music are a requirement. This style, which gained popularity in the 1970s, emphasizes virtuosic technique, improvisation, rapid tempos, daring key changes, and eclectric musical literacy. A multiplicity of styles, such as jazz and rock, and a multiplicity of sources, such as Turkish and Indian music, are combined with Balkan rural and urban folk music.

The concert was not widely publicized, but it drew an audience of some 250, of whom only a handful appeared to be immigrants from the Balkans. I recognized several prominent local musicians. Quite a few folks came down from the Lansing area, including old friends I hadn't seen in years. About half of the audience took part in line dancing.

The music exceeded everyone's expectations; two musicians separately told me they could die happy now, having heard this concert.

All told, it was nearly three hours (with one brief intermission) of exciting and sophisticated music, played by internationally famed stars. An expensive ticket? Well, no. The concert was free and open to the public.

Ann Arbor may indeed be overrated, but events like this don't happen just anywhere.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, October 28, 2003, 5:30 pm

A Vignette of My Father. It seems that each expansion of online search capabilities brings new finds and surprises.

Amazon.com now offers a function to "Search Inside The Book", a full-text search on 33 million pages in 120,000 books. On my very first search, I found a vignette about my late father's boyhood — something I never knew.

It's in Ellis Island to Ebbetts Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (1993). The author is discussing various events which demonstrate the popularity among Jews of Marshall Goldberg and Sid Luckman, two Jewish football stars:

Reports of thousands of New York Jewish fans packing Yankee Stadium to see Goldberg's Pittsburgh team battle the Fordham Rams or similar accounts of Jewish fanatics who followed the professional football careers of Goldberg and Sid Luckman when they both played in Chicago provide additional testimony. So too does Justin Kestenbaum, my colleague at Michigan State, who fondly remembers reading about both men when they played for the Columbia Lions and the Pittsburgh Panthers. Born in New York City, Kestenbaum spent a good deal of his childhood at the Pleasantville Cottage School, a home for some 300 Jewish boys and girls whose parents were unable to support them in the Depression. With obvious warmth and detail, he recalls that in 1938, the year of his Bar Mitzvah, the Pleasantville boys were invited to a Jewish temple in nearby White Plains, New York, to hear Sid Luckman, then a junior at Columbia, talk about sportsmanship, the importance of a college education, football, and his pride in being a Jew.

Pleasantville was also something of a reform school for juvenile delinquents, and my father, who had been in a series of foster homes, landed there after getting in trouble. But he did go on to graduate from Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, and after serving in the Pacific in World War II, he went to college (University of Illinois) on the G.I. Bill, and graduate school (Northwestern University) on a William Randolph Hearst fellowship. From 1963 until his death in 1995, he was a professor of American history at Michigan State University.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, October 25, 2003, 9:26 pm

The Stopped Clock. My friend Aaron Larson, a wise and hugely knowledgeable young Michigan attorney, has finally given in to peer pressure, he says, and started a blog.

Among his first topics are: the search for unbiased sources on the Middle East; Iran's nuclear program; and the eerie similarity between Ann Coulter and Ed Anger.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, October 21, 2003, 9:08 am

Art Pumpkins. Last weekend, I attended a pumpkin carving party.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Sunday, October 19, 2003, 12:07 pm

Voting Systems. Today's Ann Arbor News published my op-ed piece on voting systems. To my surprise, they did not cut even one word from my text; one paragraph break was added.

I'd include a link to the editorial I was responding to, but it's already gone.

Voting improvements needed
But just eliminating punch cards won't solve all the problems

I very much agree with your editorial (Oct. 2) calling for action on updating and improving voting systems, and I second your call that the president name his nominees to the Election Assistance Commission.

However, I think your deep concern over punch card voting and "squinting" at ballots is somewhat misplaced. Yes, we should move to newer voting systems. But there are a number of other, far more critical, issues to be addressed -- including how we choose those new systems.

The punch card was invented by Herman Hollerith more than a century ago, as a way to facilitate tabulating the 1890 U.S. Census; the cards matched the dimensions of the paper money of the time. Today's punch card ballots are still that same size and shape.

Punch card voting came to Michigan in the 1970s, and in comparison to other voting systems of the time, it worked well. In particular, punch cards performed far better in recounts than the systems they replaced.

Paper ballot counting and recounting generates endless arguments about whether the X crosses inside the square. Lever-handle voting machines are subject to malfunctions that can invalidate hundreds of votes. By contrast, at least in Michigan, punch card election results have been very solid in recounts. Ambiguous ballots ("hanging chads") are extremely rare, and the state has clear rules for resolving those cases. Normally a recount changes the original result by at most a vote or two.

Why did Florida have such a bad experience in 2000? The biggest reason was the lack of maintenance on equipment. Apparently in Florida it was not standard practice to empty the chads from the voting devices; the machines were often packed with old chads. That made it difficult to punch cleanly through the card, and resulted in a great many "pregnant" or partially punched-out chads.

Florida also had the "butterfly ballot," which exposed what a poor user interface the punch card voting device is. Since the lists of candidates and the arrows are in a different plane than the punch card itself, anyone who is above or below average height will experience parallax, that is, the arrows and holes don't line up.

But the biggest problem with punch card voting is the centralized handling and ballot counting they require, which entails risks of loss, mishandling, error, and fraud. Better voting systems provide for vote counting in the polling place -- like the optical scan system Ann Arbor uses now.

A secondary problem with punch cards, along with many other computerized voting systems, is the use of secret, proprietary software to do the counting. Voters and election officials should demand that vote tabulation software be open to scrutiny by all interested parties, to ensure the absence of "back doors" and Trojan horses. In computer security, peer review is always preferable to trade secrets.

Proposals to send votes over the Internet should be rejected. There is no practical way to simultaneously ensure voter authentication and a secret ballot in the online world. Nor should we use "touch screen" voting machines with internal counters. We should have a tangible record of each vote, to act as a check on any automated system.

Further, let's not confine our focus to the narrow issue of how voters mark or punch their choices. Errors in counting individual votes are dwarfed by gross errors in tabulation. Examples from elections in recent years abound. Here are just a few:

Marquette County's precinct returns were entered into a spreadsheet; because of an error in the summing formula, the certified totals didn't include all of the absentee voter counting boards.

The city of Northville's entire vote for statewide offices was included in Oakland County's certified totals, even though the south half of the city was also counted in Wayne County.

Amboy Township, in Hillsdale County, certified vote totals that left out a large number of "yes" votes on a statewide ballot proposal.

Certified totals from the city of Wyoming, in Kent County, implied that an improbable 7,500 voters (40% of the total) had neglected to vote for Governor.

"Pregnant chads" get ample news coverage, but problems like these -- no doubt caused by fatigue, poor training, awkward systems, and inattentiveness by election officials -- affect vastly more votes.

To achieve fair, accurate elections for all offices is within our reach, but it requires more than just getting rid of punch cards.

Lawrence Kestenbaum is a former Washtenaw County Commissioner (2000-02) and Ingham County Commissioner (1983-88). He has participated in many recounts as an election worker, challenger, or attorney. He's the author of two articles on voter authentication for the ACM Risks Digest, and creator and Web master for PoliticalGraveyard.com. He's also a staff member at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

Two things I would have changed.

First, the 7,500 voters in the city of Wyoming were among people who actually cast ballots in the 1994 election. Of course it wouldn't be improbable at all that a lot of people neglected to vote in a gubernatorial election; what happened here is that the total number of votes recorded for candidates for governor was enormously less than the number of ballots.

Second, in my rush to get the piece in, I misstated one of my credentials. Of the five contributions I have made to the ACM Risks Digest since 1989, only one was specifically about voter authentication. One other was about vote tabulation problems. I meant to refer to those two articles, and I should have used a broader descriptor such as "voting and election issues." My apologies.

Update: a third point. A correspondent writes that I should "connect the dots" more explicitly: all of the tabulation errors I pointed out in the article remain in official results to this day, uncorrected. In other words, these problems were not caught at the time, and the official, final, vote totals are thousands of votes wrong as a direct result.

I don't think any results would have changed if these particular errors had been avoided or caught in time. However, it is appalling that so many votes were miscounted.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Wednesday, October 15, 2003, 4:06 pm

Old Grange, New Grange. As I mentioned earlier, I am a member of the Grange, also known as the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a venerable agricultural organization.

The Pittsfield Union Grange #882 has a hall on Ann Arbor-Saline Road in Pittsfield Township, just south of Ann Arbor. The Pittsfield Grange is a venue for folk dances and many other community events.

But the existence of the hall depends on the existence of the local chapter (or "Subordinate Grange"). Over the past twenty or so years, individual dancers and musicians were encouraged to support the Grange organization itself by becoming dues paying members. Eventually, some of the dancers came to take a greater interest in the Grange and its philosophy, history, and activities, came to know the families who had belonged to it for decades, and took leadership positions.

At the last meeting, Robin Warner, a dance caller, was installed as Grange Master, or chair. The October newsletter includes Robin's thoughts about his new role and the challenges facing the Pittsfield Grange:

As I think about what I have taken on as the new Chair of Pittsfield Union Grange, I see the next year as a time of significant change. I want to share a little of my view of the junction that we are currently facing.

There is a picture hanging upstairs in the Grange of the members in 1950. Most of them are farmers, or tradesmen whose principal customers were farmers. Many of them met at Grange functions and as families the Grange has been a central institution in their lives. Many of these members have been active at the State level and all of them have long experience with the Ritual and traditions of the Grange. Today, 53 years later, several of these people are still active members of the Grange.

Their children and grandchildren who we might expect to see as the young members preparing to carry on the Grange traditions are curiously missing, having decided not to make the Grange the focus of their social lives. In their place is a new group of younger folks who have not been introduced to the Grange as a family tradition and are not necessarily from farm backgrounds. For the most part these members have been introduced to the Grange through use of the building for various kinds of dancing and related activities.

The principal motive for joining has been a concern to preserve the hall by preserving the organization that owns and operates it. Over the last 10 or 15 years this group has grown from a small minority of members taking minor roles to a majority of the members and officers. While a few people from this group have participated in State Grange activities, for the most part participation has been kept to the local level.

Now we are at a critical junction. The people with long experience in the traditions of the Grange are becoming fewer every year. Those who are left are participating less and less actively. During the last 10 or 15 years the Ritual has not been emphasized. Participation at the Stte level and visitation to other Granges has been limited among the younger Grangers. A lot of the history and tradition of the Grange will be lost to us going forward if we don't make an effort to pass it down from the older generation before they stop actively participating in Grange activities.

So why should we care if this tradition is lost? One reason is that Pittsfield Union Grange doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is one of many Granges in Michigan and across the country. To some extent we need to work together with these organizations. Most other Granges are more traditional than we are, and we are going to challenge them with the changes that we are making. It is going to be absolutely necessary to have as much understanding of what the tradition is, and why people feel that it is important, in order to understand other people's responses to our suggestions.

Another reason to understand what the Grange has been is the fact that Pittsfield Grange is one of a small number of Action Granges. The Action Granges have been established to experiment with new ways of holding meetings and new ways of relating with the wider fcommunity. Our charge is to change the 130-year-old traditions to make them relevant in the new millenium. Our job is not to create a new organization that has nothing to do with the past organization. Our job is to take the good core of the old organization, and refocus and restate it in a way that is relevant to today, and at the same time recognizable to the people who have grown up with the Ritual and traditions.

I am looking forward to working with all Pittsfield Grangers, old and new, to meet this challenge. I believe that we will act together to combine the best of teh Grange's traditions with the best ideas of our newer members to prosper going forward.

(Reprinted with permission.)

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Thursday, October 9, 2003, 10:39 pm

Mr. Nine. I don't have any links to point to right now, but in the wake of California's special gubernatorial election, a number of reports in the national media listed the Top Eight (Schwarzenegger, Bustamante, McClintock, Camejo, Huffington, Ueberroth, Flynt, Coleman) and #10 ("Mary Carey" Cook), while ignoring the ninth place finisher.

The fellow who finished ninth got more than ten thousand votes. Among the hundred-plus "unknowns" on the ballot, he finished first by a wide margin. He even outpolled the highly publicized porn star, and former GOP nominee Bill Simon.

How did he do it? A compelling platform? Great TV commercials? An inspiring stump speech? A local base of support?

Nope. It was his name: SCHWARTZMAN. On list of 135 names in perversely random order, I suspect a great many people looking for Arnold Schwarzenegger picked George B. Schwartzman by mistake.

On his web site, Mr. Schwartzman denies this:

The 9th place success realized by my candidacy demonstrates that a little known, but determined issue based candidate, can be successful when you are innovative, common sense oriented, hardworking, and well organized.

Although some attribute my success in part to my ballot position and somewhat similar name association with Arnold Schwarzenegger, be assured this was not the case. Counties where I actively and extensively campaigned produced my best results. Counties where I minimally, or did not campaign at all, produced less impressive results. The success enjoyed by my candidacy is directly related to the issues presented, and the campaign efforts as they were directed.

I'm very skeptical of his analysis. I don't see anything about the man or his platform that would enable him to break out of a noisy field of 134 other candidates.

I suspect he got his best percentages (1) in precincts where he had the most favorable ballot position relative to Schwarzenegger; (2) in counties where the ballot layout and typography were the most confusing — e.g., with the candidates' names printed in narrow and tightly crowded bold capital letters; and (3) in areas with low educational attainment and literacy.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

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