Tony Hillerman: Seldom Disappointed (part three): Santa Fe and Albuquerque

Cover of Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

Last night I finally got into the section of Tony Hillerman's memoir Seldom Disappointed that drew me to this book in the first place: his move to New Mexico and his gradual transition from ordinary schmo to writer.

In the third quarter of his memoir, Hillerman goes to college and majors in journalism, cycles through several Oklahoma papers before being recruited by the news service United Press. UP sends him off to the Santa Fe bureau, where the stories he dictates over the phone are transcribed directly to teletype for distribution to subscribers. When UP decides to have him split his time between Santa Fe (the capitol city) and Albuquerque (the only metropolitan center of any size) an hour away, Hillerman quits UP and enrolls at the University of New Mexico, where he is immediately drafted as an assistant to the President of the University. His job at UNM is to help the President deal with the press, and, occasionally, the same political figures in Santa Fe Hillerman had just left.

Hillerman's understated style in this section is at its best: he manages to capture the old-boy-network Third-World aspect of New Mexico in the Fifties deftly and economically, and he even captures the magical-realism of the Cricket Coogler murder and its implications without losing his own distinctive reporterly voice.

Hillerman makes the transition from graduate student to UNM faculty and from state politics to university faculty politics, adopts several children, and begins to make the transition from academic to writer; at the end of this section he's beginning to discuss but not actually write the first of his Navajo Country novels and has sketched sections from a couple of others. It's hard to fathom that with a quarter of the book to go he still has forty years to live and more than fifteen books to write.

This is the section of the book that actually seems joyful and amused at how well his life is turning out, and at the risk of falling back on cliche I have to say it's a joy to read. Hillerman's novels sometimes plod and are generally underimagined, and even he understands he's a man of limited talent as a fiction writer (he has trouble with believable villains, struggles with romance, etc.) but as an essayist (The Great Taos Bank Robbery) and a memoirist he's much better, even with his deadpan delivery and lean prose.

If everything goes well I'll wrap this book up tonight; I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it, but not looking forward to being done.

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Viva VoterView!

While listening to the guys on the 2600/Off The Hook podcast browse voter registration information I decided to give mine a try. I'm pleased and humbled to note that not only did VoterView respond correctly when given the name on my voter registration card, date of birth, and county, it also noted that I was the same person who voted eight times in various elections over the course of the last six years. 

This also means I won't be able to sneak off and vote in nearby Los Alamos county this year.

possibly the last thing we'll say about early voting

There's a post on 538 this morning referring to a poll saying 55-60 percent of New Mexicans have already voted. I'll be shocked if I get to my local polling place and find that I haven't already voted.

I'm not saying I'm going to have my vote cast for me by someone else this year; I'm just saying voter fraud is widespread in New Mexico.

one-car family

Image via WikipediaA couple of weeks ago my wife was sitting in her Subaru Forester at a stoplight a few blocks from our house when her car was hit from behind by a Dodge Ram traveling at traffic speed. Her car was totaled; I've got pictured but probably won't be posting them since she's in them, etc.

We took the opportunity to try to become a one-car family. So far there are three parts to this:

• Sharing
• Telecommuting
  
• Public transit (buses)
  
• Bicycle commuting
  

I'm splitting my days: some days I go to the office, some days I don't. My office is seven miles away, uphill, about a forty-minute bike ride in the morning, and less than thirty on the return in the evening.

My wife is taking the bus some days, some days driving the car. She's dealing with Santa Fe Trails, the local bus system. It's not heavily used, and I can sort of understand why: the routes don't necessarily fit together well, the buses can be unreliable, and the drivers are a breed apart.

Santa Fe Trails has three major depots: downtown (Sheridan/Palace), midtown (NMDOT, near the intersection of Cerrillos and St Francis), and at the mall (Cerrillos/Rodeo/Airport). More than half the routes connect downtown to the mall via various routes, and NMDOT is a good place to catch buses out of town (New Mexico Park and Ride). Three routes pass through our neighborhood: one of them goes downtown, but the other two require transfers at the mall. This would be fine if the schedules meshed at the mall, but the earliest bus that would work for me would require a twenty-minute wait at the mall.

Under most circumstances I can get to the office faster on my bike than by bus.

Fortunately my wife can get to within a couple of blocks of her office on a single bus. So far she's taken the bus five or six times; once the bus never arrived, and once her driver missed a turn and compensated by driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

We love Santa Fe Trails but consider it a work in progress.

Biking is turning out to be an education too; I've had to deal with inclement weather once and a flat tire once. I'm going to need to invest in more cold-weather biking gear. I typically pack a laptop, a notebook and a handful of papers, and a change of clothes in by Osprey Astro messenger bag. I haven't had to try using it in the rain yet, but I love it: it's big enough for a wide-screen laptop, it has several pockets, all of which can be secured, its natural position is over the opposite shoulder, and it has a strap that fastens around my midsection for extra stability.

Fortunately it's possible to take a bike on both Santa Fe Trails buses and Park and Ride buses; I was able to go to Los Alamos on Monday night, returning Tuesday morning, for six dollars. That's much cheaper than I could have driven. My libertarian side is a little disturbed at how empty these buses are, though: there's no way Park & Ride is paying its expenses with tickets.

Are we saving money yet? Beats me. So far we haven't had to take the car into town for the express purpose of doing things that couldn't be done because something broke down or didn't work.

This weekend my wife needs to catch a plane, so she's planning on taking Sandia Shuttle. It's a clear win: $45 round trip vs. 120 miles estimated at the IRS rate of 50.5 cents/mile, but we have to catch it on time. We'll see how that goes, too.

We have yet to figure out how to get to Denver without taking a van to Albuquerque and a plane to Denver. It is in principle possible to take the Chihuahua shuttle to El Paso, but I've only seen the Santa Fe transit point for that shuttle; I haven't yet found its web presence or any hint of how to get a seat.

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phone polls and second messages

Image via WikipediaMy wife still has a land line at her house; I do everything via my cell phone. A couple of weeks ago she got a call from the New Mexico Democratic Party and said she was an undecided voter. Subsequently she got a call from the Republican party (which I already mentioned), a visit from a canvasser wearing an Obama sticker, and last night another phone call asking if she were still undecided. I fielded this call, just like I do most of the calls during the dinner hour.

We've also encountered a voter registration table at our local library. I might gently suggest that it was manned by Obama supporters, not just because in Santa Fe the Greens outnumber the Republicans, but also because as I spoke to the women manning the table they touched on what appears to be the "second message" of the local Democrats: vote early.

Last night's caller was calling explicitly on behalf of the Obama campaign (why not on behalf of the New Mexico Democratic Party? I wouldn't dare guess) but he wanted to know if she's still an undecided voter and he wanted to remind her that she could vote early.

I'm puzzled by this, because I still believe that the best way to get my vote counted is to vote on election day and make it indistinguishable from thousands of others: early voting puts my vote in a small stream of paper coming into the appropriate office and puts it in the custody of someone I don't know. Perhaps I'm being cynical, but suspect there's as much incentive for one party or the other to cheat this year as any other.

The woman at the library suggested that early votes are in fact safer than election day votes, suggesting that all the voting machines had somehow been fixed to guarantee that one side or the other will win. While I realize this is a possibility, and I've seen the crucial scenes of one of the anti-voting-machine documentaries (Stealing America? I don't exactly recall.), I didn't find that it suggested anything new or unusual: ballots are always in the custody of elections officials, and they're always susceptible to tampering. Paper trails have the problem that either they compromise the secrecy of the ballot or they can be tainted.

All that being said, I don't blame the Obama campiagn workers for suggesting that people vote early: if I were a candidate I'd want to lock in as many votes as possible as soon as possible, to avoid any possibility that a late gaffe would cost me the election. That's called "pressing an advantage," and it's perfectly legitimate. I just don't buy the idea that early votes are better for the voter than those cast on election day.

For the record: I'm registered DTS (no party), and I have no land line.

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New Mexico elections

I love democracy. I really do. I love the simple elegance of well-informed voters casting votes that are then accurately counted with the majority prevailing. It's not a perfect system, and it relies on so much, and says so much: about the voters, about the issues, and of course about the system.

And then there's the article from today's Alibi, saying that someone named Jim Noel didn't report for work this past Monday:

Jim Noel sent a letter to Secretary of State Mary Herrera saying he wouldn't be reporting for duty Monday, Sept. 8, after all. This leaves New Mexico without a director of the Bureau of Elections less than two months before Nov. 4. Noel is the director of the Judicial Standards Commission, but another title spurred outrage from the state's Republicans—Noel is also the son-in-law of Rep. Tom Udall, who's in a close race with Rep. Steve Pearce for U.S. Senate. Noel's wife is Amanda Cooper, campaign manager for Udall and daughter of Udall's wife.

That's right: the Secretary of State for the state of New Mexico appointed the son-in-law of one of the candidates for an open Senate seat to be director of the Bureau of Elections.

And this from the Alibi, an Albuquerque-based free paper not often known for being a mouthpiece for the New Mexico Republican party. The article links to another Alibi article on roughly the same topic that mentions, among other things:

Three ballot boxes were discovered to be empty after the primary in Cibola County, where state Sen. David Ulibarri won over Clemente Sanchez by fewer than 10 votes.

Empty ballot boxes are kind of unusual, even in New Mexico, but late vote counts are not:

Why on the morning after an election does New Mexico not usually have its votes tallied yet? The main problem in the past hasn't been with the whole state, he says, but with Bernalillo County. (Secretary of State Herrera was the clerk in Bernalillo County from 2001 through 2006).

As for missing paper ballots in Cibola County, Ivey-Soto says he doesn't believe they're missing at all. "They were not where they were supposed to be, and they ended up getting reported as missing," he says. The county clerk opted to wait until a judge could be present to look for the ballots, he says, to avoid suspicion. The status of those ballots should be revealed soon.

...

Training election workers is difficult, he says, and that could be part of the problem. Each precinct has a polling place on election day, and an enormous amount of money is spent to set them up. Bernalillo County has more than 400 precincts. Even when two precincts are using the same polling location, each requires a precinct judge, two elections judges and two clerks. That's the case even though 30 percent of the voters cast their ballots early and another 30 percent vote by absentee ballot. "So we're spending 80 percent of our resources for 40 percent of the voters."

This last paragraph says two things: only forty per cent of votes are cast on election day, and each precinct (not each polling location) requires a staff of five.

If I recall correctly, early and late ballots are not necessarily counted; they're only counted if the election-day count is close enough that these ballots could sensibly change the outcome of the election. I don't remember what the rules are in New Mexico, and I can't seem to find them online.

Let's all hope and pray the 2008 Presidential election doesn't end in an Electoral College margin of less than five votes with New Mexico still left to count. New Mexico has a history of late, poorly-counted, poorly-monitored elections, and the person who was responsible for the worst-run county two years ago is now Secretary of State, and recently appointed an in-law of a candidate to run the elections state-wide. And all this with less than two months until election day.

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