For the Record, This Is Not An Election
Concordia has sent me a message for the record. It appears to be in response to How You Can Rig the UNOP Election. This is from Claudia Kent.
Your blog teaching individuals how to place multiple preference submissions is based upon the misconception that this is an election. For the record, this is not an election.
My entry is based not on the misconception that this is an election, it is based on the fact that individuals can place multiple preference submissions.
It is true, however, that there a wide spread misconception that this is an election. This misconception is based on Stephen Bingler’s rambling soliloquy that ended the July 31st, 2006 gathering at the Pavilion of Two Sisters at City Park in which he said that we were engaged in a “democratic process,” and that we would vote to choose our top three planners for our district and/or neighborhood.
The neighborhoods poured their energies into research and deliberation.
For the record, my entry was to show that although Concordia left a bucket to collect neighborhood research and deliberation, that bucket is full of holes.
This is a means of informing the Community Support Organization about the preferences individuals and neighborhoods have in terms of receiving technical assistance that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Greater New Orleans Foundation have generously offered.
For the July 31st event to choose boundaries Concordia expected 200 people to attend. More than 200 attended, of course, but with all the hullabaloo about the “democratic process” in which we were engaged, people wanted to include those that were unable to attend in the vote.
How could 200 people represent a city of one million? Thus, the consultation became a city wide vote.
To select someone or something through a city-wide democratic process that includes a vote is considered an election by many. If it were a mere consultation, there was ample opportunity to clarify.
What was most unfortunate was that it was unclear at the outset, what weight this vote would be given in the assignment of planners. This would have helped neighborhoods determine the amount of time and effort that should be spent.
Many people were concerned and conveyed a sense of terrific urgency. An importance was attached to this vote and that confusion was reflected in the way it was discussed.
In an August 3rd email, NPN director, Nathan Shroyer, forwarded to a wide audience, including all city council members, the concerns ACORN raised about conflicts of interest. In the message, entitled [sic] Terrific suggestions are needed for Neighborhood Planning Outreach, Voting, and Communications methodologies for Organizations and Individuals (Especially Viewed by Brewing Storm Season)! he states:
Excellent work, Steve. How can we spread these critical questions and voting methods to through the largest church, organizational, and individual methods of outreach? How can we take this good approach with Acorn and spread it to more possible City voters? I would like to work with you on this if you have an opportunity to connect with me before you leave. Good to hear from you on this. Call me up. Thanks so much!
Obviously, Nathan felt that this consultation needed to be extended to as many citizens as possible, but considering the informality of the system, how could it possibly expand to accommodate the entire city. In the parlance of software, how could it scale?
At this point Concordia should have interjected, and perhaps Concordia did, but it was difficult because the only outreach tool after August 1st was solely the web site, which, as we all know, is not an effective means to reach our devastated neighborhoods (75% of the city). If there was some other means of telling the neighborhoods the true weight of this, it should have been employed to rein in the frenzied activity.
Yes, creating multiple e-mail addresses is one way for an enterprising individual to submit more than one preference. And we knew the risk when we set up the system. However, the overriding desire was to be as inclusive of our friends and neighbors not located in New Orleans, the “Diaspora†in having a voice in making known their preferences.
At the outset, it was Concordia’s position that attendance at the Pavilion was a requirement for voting.
Again, during his soliloquy, Stephen Bingler insisted that only those attending would be able to cast a vote, because those that had missed the meeting would not be well enough informed to vote.
To ensure that only those attended would be able to vote once, we were assigned codes. Mine was 1-167, Maitri Venkat-Ramani’s code was 2-019. Those codes were never required, reflecting the fluid nature of the rules that governed this process.
This statement does not check with my experience.
Using internet technology was the best means to get there. Do you have a better solution for including this voice? I would be very interested in know what you might suggest.
Natch, but, you didn’t leave your number. I’d have called you, Claudia.
For starters, you could try going to www.thinknola.com and looking at some the projects that myself and other volunteers have successfully implemented to do outreach using the Internet. Those may give you some ideas.
To answer your specific question, you could have purchased the qualified voter file from the State of Louisiana and created a poll where a registered voter in Orleans Parish could have voted using their full name and birth date. This is how voter registration is checked at the Secretary of State web site.
A person could choose their planners. They could return and change their choices as often as they liked until the vote was captured.
You could then take the results and pull the geocoded addresses of those who voted into a GIS system. You could place the neighborhood boundaries around the addresses of the voters and you would have your consultation.
There is still ample opportunity to game the system, since someone else could buy the voter roll and reference it to gain entry, so you’d have to have add a password and a call center to handle missing passwords.
The requirement now is that a person is a registered voter, which is less onerous than requiring that a person has an email address. You would have the correct address and know they are qualified to participate, i.e. they are over 18, a resident, etc.
With enough advance work, you could remove any barriers by calling in a voter registration drive, and working with the Secretary of State to update your copy voter information file as quickly as possible.
I’m shooting from the hip here. I’m not able to do the research necessary to verify my answer as I scratch out this post. The most pressing issue is that this is not the intended use of the voter information released by the state. Yours would still be a consultation, of course, and not a real poll. Any reference to a “democratic process” would be grossly misleading on the part of Concordia, since the poll still has no force of law.
Claudia, the point is that there are professionals who can give you those answers had you consulted them. It’s all well and good to cast about for answers, asking complete strangers. In this case, you got lucky, but I’m afraid you found me too late.
Instead you have a web site with a guest book that will produce no meaningful result. You’re telling me now that this was your choice, which is a departure from the previous apologias, of the “Gosh, this is hard, you try to do it” variety.
Quite frankly, I think someone else should try to do it. Outreach should have been handled by a media firm that had experience with television. Event planning should have been done by someone with some pull with the venues. You delivered two newspaper ads, two failed events, and a web site. It was only your insistence that this poll would be meaningful that led to such widespread participation.
At the Pavilion on the 31st, Stephen Bingler said that “sometimes democracy happens in chaos,” the implication being that we could lay the responsibility for these shabby, shabby events at the foot of democracy. Did that sound so good you ran with it?
Oops!
Good to know that democracy is off the hook.
Previously
Other Voices
- The Veneer of Public Input
- Zoned Out In Debrisville
- Don’t Point That Democratic Process At Me, Mr. Bingler
- Unbalanced Report of UNOP by T-P
- Let’s Put Our Heads Together And Start A New Country Up
- Unintelligible, Noisy, Overwhelming Process
- Sunday’s UNOP Meeting
- Get Out the Vote
- Voting For a Planner
Resources
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Great post, Alan. Any confusion was sown by Mr. Bingler and his minions. They were the ones who chose to give this process the illusion of democracy. Their reaction to your comments shows precisely why they are so widely mistrusted.
Another good one, Alan!
This is the same Claudia Kent who told me that news of the Sunday event was blared from every medium possible, and in the same breath mentioned that they didn’t have the money to advertise well. So, did you advertise well or not?
Also, someone’s getting paid. What’s up with the $4.5 million allocated for planning? Who gets that? I really hope you didn’t pay your advertising agency.
As I mentioned to Sarah earlier, if this round of planning dies, democracy and our lack of participation in it will be blamed. If it succeeds, the UNOP board will take all the credit. At this point, I don’t care who gets the credit as long as the neighborhoods and districts get the money they need to survive.
My main comment is supposedly tracked back here, but I’ll put a part of that post here as a comment.
Your [Concordia's] own model states: “Concordia has been developing tools to promote the comprehensive planning and design of facilities in the context of the total community.” The total community. I think, measured against your own model, you have missed the voice of the total community and, out of principal, should want to do it again, correctly.
It’s a strangely naive cynical appeal to populism. They say “democracy” every chance they get and run attendees through exercises to help them make the momentous decision of picking their planners (who made rather campaign-like pitches to please select their team over all the others), but they’re constantly being caught by surprise - as if they didn’t think people would take them at their word and accept the invitation to participate. I think at the very least we deserve a professional cynical appeal to populism.
But then, maybe its not so naive. We’re not the ones they have to convince. As Maitri pointed out, “the people” make a great fall guy if the UNOP fails, and in the mean time, “Democracy in action” and “Residents participate” fit in a headline or a caption very nicely.
Last Wednesday at the NPN meeting a woman was asking me how she could vote, she had the form in her hand and she has neither e mail nor a fax. I tried to convince her that she could call, but she was insistant that she comply with the “rules” and set off to look for a fax.
We are stressed out enough without being led down a path that is causing folks, out of fear and concern, to extend themselves to the degree that this woman did.
Get it straight, Does it matter or not?
[...] That was the case with my recent article, For the Record, This Is Not An Election. In it, I offered a viable solution for voting. One that deserves a follow up. There are may viable solutions on offer over at Think New Orleans. Myself and other volunteers are following up on these daily. [...]
[...] That was the case with my recent article, For the Record, This Is Not An Election. In it, I offered a viable solution for voting. One that deserves a follow up. There are may viable solutions on offer over at Think New Orleans. Myself and other volunteers are following up on these daily. [...]