I wrote this for a diary at Daily Kos and am reposting it here. The fact that it was a non-Indiana audience is the reason for all the background material that might seem odd for consumption here.

Lake County Indiana, the second most populous Indiana county in the northwestern corner near Chicago, has been the location of a vigorous legal battle concerning early voting sites. Today, yesterday a trial court authorized early voting (pdf) at additional voting centers in Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond; and ordered that votes cast prior to the decision at these sites be counted.

Indiana allows in-person early voting as a matter of state law at the offices of the clerk of the county’s circuit court. Typically this means at the county seat. In Lake County, this happens to be the city of Crown Point. Indiana law allows county election boards to authorize additional satellite voting sites but only if it is done by unanimous vote. However, there is potential ambiguity in Lake County due to the presence of courts and offices of the circuit court clerk in cities other than Crown Point.

Prior History
Initially only Crown Point had an early voting site in the Lake County government center there. On September 23, the Lake County election board voted, along party lines, to also allow voting in Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago. The Republican members claimed that it required a unanimous decision of the election board to open voting in those offices. The Republicans on the election board who voted against opening up the offices declined to explain their vote but cried foul when the election board moved ahead with the voting sites for the more Democratically inclined Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond.

They filed suit in the county’s superior court (with a Republican friendly judge) when the statute pretty clearly states that the county’s circuit court (with a less Republican friendly judge) has jurisdiction. The superior court issued an order temporarily blocking the voting centers. Since then, the case has bounced from superior court to federal court to the circuit court to the Indiana supreme court.

The Republicans filed suit in the Lake County Superior Court requesting that the voting centers be enjoined. Superior Court judge Calvin Hawkins granted a temporary restraining order preventing the early voting in those largely Democratic cities. The Democrats removed the case to the federal court. In the meantime, a group of Democrats filed their own suit in the Lake County Circuit Court requesting that it enter an order requiring the vote centers to be open.

The federal court kicked the Superior case back down to the Superior judge. The circuit court entered an order requiring the centers to remain open. The superior court declined to intervene until the Indiana Supreme Court could take a look at the case.

The Indiana Supreme Court entered an order consolidating the circuit and superior court cases and putting them both back in the superior court. The Supreme Court specifically did not rule on whether the superior court had jurisdiction or on the merits of the case. It set forth an expedited procedure for the parties to exercise their right to an automatic change of the judge if they so desired. They did so desire, and Judge Diane Kavadias Schneider a Superior Court judge based in Hammond was selected as special judge.

The Opinion

The Indiana Law Blog has posted the opinion allowing voting at the satellite voting centers to continue and declaring that the votes previously cast at the site shall be counted.

The court entered 75 conclusions of fact concerning the operation of the satellite voting centers and concluded generally that it was the policy of Indiana to facilitate the ability of its citizens to vote and that the equities under the standards for granting injunctive relief (likelihood of success on the merits, harm of granting injunctive relief versus harm of denying it) weighed in favor of those seeking to keep the vote centers open.

Relevant statutes interpreted by the court are IC 3-11-10-26, IC 3-11-10-26.3, and IC 3-6-5.2-9

IC 3-11-10-26.3 allows satellite voting sites to be opened upon unanimous vote of the election board. This, the court held, did not happen. However, the court determined that there was ambiguity in IC 3-11-10-26(a)(1) which says:

As an alternative to voting by mail, a voter is entitled to cast an absentee ballot before an absentee voter board . . . in the office of the circuit court clerk (or board of elections and registration in a county subject to IC 3-6-5.2).

Lake County is a county subject to IC 3-6-5.2. However, the court determined that this provision could be interpreted to mean that a Lake County voter was entitled to cast a vote in the office of the circuit court clerk or the board of elections and registration, but not both. Hammond, Gary, and East Chicago are also have court facilities with offices of the clerk of the Lake County Circuit & Superior Courts and that is where the early voting is taking place. Therefore, the voting can be characterized as taking place under IC 3-11-10-26.3(a)(1) at the Circuit Court Clerk’s office and not under IC 3-11-10-26.3(a)(2) concerning satellite voting which requires a unanimous vote of the election board.

The court finds that resolving the ambiguity of the statute in favor of allowing voting in these areas is appropriate in light of Indiana’s policy for encouraging voting access to its citizens, in light of Constitutional considerations based on allowing easy access to voting in Crown Point and not Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary; particularly in light of the disparate income, access to transportation, and racial make up in those areas; and in the absence of any evidence of voter fraud or that the procedures put in place in those areas would lead to such fraud.

I particularly enjoyed this passage:

Curley Plaintiffs’ allegations of “vote dilution” have no merit because the votes of Mr. Curley and Mr. Brown will in no way be “diluted” by the casting of early ballots of other validly registered voters, any more than if they had cast those ballots on election day. The casting of ballots by other lawfully registered voters within the relevant jurisdiction is democracy, not vote dilution.

(emphasis in original).

Demographics
To give some idea of the numbers involved, Lake County, Indiana has a population of about 500,000, making it Indiana’s second largest county (after Marion County (Indianapolis)). Overall, the racial makeup of the county is 66.72% White, 25.33% Black or African American, 0.28% Native American, 0.82% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 4.96% from other races, and 1.85% from two or more races. 12.20% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. However, for Crown Point, with a population of about 20,000, about 95% of the population is white. Meanwhile, Hammond has a population of 85,000 people, of whom 62% are white (non-Hispanic), 21% are Hispanic, and 15% are black. East Chicago has a population of 32,000 people of whom 12% are white (non-Hispanic), 51% Hispanic, and 36% black. Finally, Gary has a population of 102,000 people, of whom 84% are black, 12% are white, and 5% are Hispanic.

Lake County’s 500,000 people represent approximately 8% of Indiana’s total population and, as such, its vote can be expected to play a significant part in determining the fate of Indiana’s 11 electoral votes. In addition, it has a substantial black population, and it is very much in Chicago’s sphere of influence. As such, it can be expected to break heavily for Senator Obama. For low income citizens without good access to transportation, having to travel to Crown Point from one of the other cities represents a significant impediment. Early voting is an important tool to alleviate long lines for an insufficient number of voting machines, a phenomenon which seems to be more pronounced in low income urban areas. Given how close Indiana seems to be in the polls as between Obama and McCain, the availability of early voting in Lake County could very well be a determining factor in how those electoral votes are cast.

I’m posting on a Sunday afternoon in a Durango coffee shop. The past couple of days have been fairly eventful. On Friday, I dropped Amy & the kids off at the airport and picked up my buddy, Tom. (Sometimes known in these parts simply as “T”). From Denver we drove to Leadville, saw some mine ruins, then went on and set up a camp site near Twin Lakes, Colorado. We wound up eating at the only eating establishment open at Twin Lakes. The name of the place escapes me at the moment, but it was surprisingly elegant. $20 per head, but I had an outstanding cut of bison with some veggies and mashed potatoes. Then we went back to our tent, threw down some Tylenol PM and got to sleep at about 8:30 p.m. We woke up at about 4:15 and were at the trail head for La Plata peak by 5:15 a.m. After one false start with a trail that was hard to follow at the beginning, we got moving at 5:30, allowing us to reach the peak by 9:30 a.m. As 14ers go, La Plata is probably pretty tame, but it was about the toughest thing I’ve done physically. Its total elevation is 14,336 feet with an elevation gain from the trailhead of about 4,000 feet. It took us 4 hours to get up and, surprisingly, 4 hours to get back. A little after we got back down under tree line the rains started – so as with most high mountain ascents, it’s good we got an early start.

After we got down the mountain, we took advantage of a break in the rain to break camp. After that, it was time to relax with some High Mountain Pies in Leadville — some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. After stuffing our bellies, we were ready for some R&R. But, we’re not normal people. We ended up taking a 4 hour drive down to Ouray, Colorado where they have an outstanding public hot springs. After checking into The Western Hotel and Saloon, we threw our bags in our room and went on up to the hot springs. That did a body good. My head hurt, I had done serious damage to two of my toe nails, and, most of all, my quads were screaming at me. After soaking for about an hour, we went to a local tavern and capped the day with a pitcher or two of beer and a lot of jukebox. The day started at 4 a.m. and ended at about 12:30 a.m. So, it was a full one.

Today, we got up, lounged about Ouray and took an easy stroll up to Cascade Falls and are now in Durango. Life is pretty good.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a column by Ben Stein entitled New Front: Protecting America’s investors. He expresses outrage that some (not all by any means, but all too many) corporate CEOs and executives are looting their companies under the noses of compliant, or at least delinquent and toothless, boards of directors. He calls it looting. To me, it seems more like these folks are mining our economy instead of cultivating, growing, and harvesting our economy as they should be. Regardless, Mr. Stein’s complaint brings to mind the old Woody Guthrie line from the Story of Pretty Boy Floyd:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

That this sentiment is coming from dyed-in-the-wool conservative Ben Stein is indicative of something. I’m not sure what, but I think it’s significant. Mr. Stein writes:

there is something deeply broken about the corporate system in America. Long ago, my pop was pals with Harlow H. Curtice, the president of General Motors in its glory days in the 1950’s. Mr. Curtice presided over a spectacularly powerful and profitable G.M.

For that, in his peak year as I recall from my youth, he was paid about $400,000 plus a special superbonus of $400,000, which made him one of the highest-paid executives in America. At that time, a line worker with overtime might have made $10,000 a year. In those days, that differential was considered very large — very roughly 40 times the assembly line worker’s pay, without bonus; very roughly 80 times with bonus. A differential of more like 10 to 20 times was more the norm.

Now C.E.O.’s routinely take home hundreds of times what the average worker is paid, whether or not the company is doing well. The graph for the pay of C.E.O.’s is a vertical line in the last five years. The graph for workers’ pay is a flat line — in every sense.

Now, my fellow free-market fans may well say: “Hey, stop your whining. This is the free market at work.” Only it isn’t the free market at work. It’s a kleptocracy at work. (I am indebted to another of my correspondents for the word.) What’s happening here is that the governance system for many — by no means all — corporations has simply stopped working.

He then asks what this unlovely vision of corporate America means to the soldiers and Iraq and the vision of America for which they are fighting.

Now, we are engaged in a war. More than 100,000 Americans are fighting far from home. Many don’t come back. Many come home crippled. They are fighting for a vision of a just and decent society back home in glorious, shining, blessed America. And back home, meanwhile, the looters are running wild, taking the meaning out of that vision of America, taking some — by no means all — of the beauty out of America as a land of justice and fairness.

ONE of my correspondents wrote that she, a flight attendant at United Airlines, had played by the rules, believed what her bosses told her, trusted that the laws would protect her, believed that fairness would triumph in the end because it’s America. “I guess that makes me a fool in today’s world,” she said, because now she is broke, with no job, barely any pension and no faith. While the soldiers are fighting to protect us from the terrorists with bombs, too few are at home protecting us from the terrorists with briefcases. There aren’t a lot of such terrorists, but they do a lot of damage.

Surely this is not what Colonel Denman won his medals for.

Bringing the soldiers into his column seems a bit incongruous to me. Americans who work hard and play by the rules should prosper, be they military or civilian. But if it’s the tarnished dreams of soldiers that are needed to bring conservatives like Mr. Stein on board, so be it. Perhaps it is frequently the debt obviously owed to ordinary soldiers that bolsters the middle class from generation to generation. I think social programs like the GI Bill that gave substantial subsidies to returning soldiers swelled the ranks of the middle class after World War II. Shame largely prevents us from ignoring veterans who put their lives and health on the line to do their job and allowing them to sink into a disgraceful poverty even if it does not prevent us from ignoring a coal miner that puts his life and health on the line to do his job.

Mr. Stein has a dry sense of humor, so I’ll assume he is joking when he says:

[I]f President Bush is searching for an issue, I might suggest this: common decency for the workers and the savers and investors of this country, and an end to the hideous breaches of trust that build great mansions in the Hamptons and wreck a free society.

Through my jaundiced eye, Mr. Bush has done everything in his power to ensure that decency is anything but common, to facilitate hideous breaches of trust, to increase the numbers of mansions in the Hamptons (or at least the size of the existing ones), and to sap the strength of our free society by dramatically concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.

TorporIndy has a post entitled “Dog Poop Girl.” Torpor links to this story and describes it as follows:

Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet’s Power to Shame

If you no longer marvel at the Internet’s power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl.

Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog decided that this was a good place to do its business.

The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response.

What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.

One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular Web site. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname, and issued a call to arms for more information about her.

So now, we’re pretty much in the Panopticon.

Back in the late 18th century, Jeremy Bentham was trying to devise a prison that would ensure the maximum degree of order among its inmates. He suggested that the most order could be had if the inmates were under constant surveillance. That not being especially practical, second best would be when the inmates thought they were under surveillance at all times or at least they might be. So, he proposed an architectural solution he called the Panopticon. It was essentially a doughnut where the inmates were all in backlit cells with big windows facing the center. In the center was an observation tower where the guard could see into the cells but the inmate couldn’t tell whether he was being observed at a given time.

With present technology, we all pretty much have to assume that there is a chance we’re being observed and/or recorded at any given moment. I suspect that will have the effect of 1) creeping us out; 2) improving our behavior somewhat; and 3) lowering expectations of appropriate behavior to more accurately reflect the actual norm rather than some fictitious idealized norm.

On the other hand, Bentham’s Panopticon also made provision for the inmates to be unable to see or communicate with other inmates. But, I’d argue that’s somewhat immaterial. If you are potentially being monitored at any given time, that might tend to make your comments more circumspect.

Michael Focault summarized the principles of the Panopticon:

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.

Enough situations like Dog Poop Girl and the inmates, that is to say all of us, will be on notice of the unverifiable potential of being observed. But, I suppose we are missing the element of visibility. There is no visible, central authority. Just the potential of a howling mob. I’m honestly not sure which is more frightening.

Update Turns out, I’m not even the only one to make the Panopticon association with the Dog Poop Girl. Via Technorati I found this post which states:

I think that what [Foucault] meant by this is that however dangerous the idea of a Panopticon may be, with a minority controlling a majority, how much more dangerous would it be for the majority (or what passes for the majority) to compel conformity and neutralize independent thinking.

The minority of today was the girl with poor community spirit, but tomorrow it could be anyone or anything. Appearances are everything, like in this other “example of dung”: an old friend of mine went to work in Holland for a few months and rented a cottage in the country. One Monday he discovered his car covered with excrement. Someone from the village, far from liberal Amsterdam, suggested to him that this might have happened because he had washed his car (and so performed manual labor) on a Sunday. The pretty twitching Dutch curtains at the windows of his neighbors are today the cameras in the mobile phones of the travelers on the subway.
. . .
On the same topic, I believe that the debate about privacy is important. Not so much for the observed as for the observer and commentator. It has been proved that the larger the tribe and the greater the anonymity, the more frequent and cruel are the ‘lynchings’. The Internet is so large and so anonymous… As regards the observed, taking away privacy results in conformity. This is not only a theory but put into practice in politics and demonstrated by social psychology.

In addition to the Dog Poop Girl, the author mentions street security cameras and the Star Wars Kid.