Published - Idaho State Journal, 11/28/10

The sagacious Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “He who takes offense when none is intended is a fool. He who takes offense when offense is intended is a bigger fool.” The most efficacious means of voluntarily giving others complete control over us is by allowing them to offend us. The old truism “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” evinces the conviction that individually we have the power to allow others to “offend” us, or the discipline and maturity to not allow others that control over us. We choose, individually, whether to grant that power to another.

Sometimes, there are those amongst us who take offense for us. We didn’t give them that power to speak for us, nor did we lose our own voices in our defense, yet they assume the role of guardian of the public, usually for presumed victims of society. They perambulate through life with a massive chip on their shoulder just waiting, even daring, for someone to come along and knock it off so they can manifest immense righteous indignation at the insensitivity of those who may have even inadvertently knocked the chip off their shoulder.

We saw something like this a few months ago when Ines Sainz, an attractive female sports reporter, was the “victim” of cat calls and unsolicited advances by players and staff for the New York Jets. Ms. Sainz saw no harm in it. “It’s no big deal,” she said later. Yet there was someone there who did take offense and presumed to speak for Ms. Sainz in denouncing the team’s conduct. Obviously, Ms. Sainz is secure enough emotionally and psychologically that she didn’t feel threatened by the “sexist” antics of the overpaid adolescents of the Jets team. It was “no big deal” to her.

We had a similar situation here locally. Ralph Lillig was helping with several others working the elections and explained how he had a hard time deciding which armed forces football team to cheer for since he had served in all four branches of the military. That led contextually to a quip he’d heard from an elderly black gentleman in South Los Angeles about how Father’s Day is difficult for many of his race since they don’t know who their fathers were.

After the possible insensitivity of the remark was brought to his attention, Mr. Lillig subsequently went out of his way to apologize to all who could have been possibly offended by his remark. Yet to a few, this was not sufficient. They were resolute in not accepting the apology, even though some weren’t even there at the time, because the “chip” had been knocked off their shoulders and they resolved to make of Mr. Lillig an example. Rather than using a retold joke as a quiet teaching opportunity, the self-anointed “PC Police” took umbrage, never really accepted the apology, and sought to make an example of him. Interestingly, his attackers, who ostentatiously proclaim their roles with “Too Great To Hate,” hypocritically violated most of their own tenets they proclaim self-righteously to have pledged.

This incident was not about suppressing “hate speech,” this was about public humiliation for political purposes. You can be darned sure they wouldn’t have done to “one of their own” what they have done to Mr. Lillig!

Interestingly, Bill Cosby has been on a veritable soapbox about this same issue over the past decade. Many of his jokes and much of his book, “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” address the underlying problem. True, it’s no laughing matter, but isn’t part of solving problems as adults having the courage and maturity to talk about them, even jokingly? Ford Chairman Alan Mulally has turned the “Found On Road Dead” and “Fix Or Repair Daily” jokes about Ford on their heads by creating an atmosphere of openness in his company where they can talk about the issues, even joke about them, in order to solve them. They are now manufacturing superior quality vehicles.

No wonder Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General, has said “We’re a nation of cowards” when it comes to race issues. We can’t really talk about it, even tongue-in-cheek, without some thin-skinned ideologue assuming the role of PC Police coming unglued and crying “Hate Speech!” with no attempt at civil discussion or debate.

We have no control over what others say about us. We can only control our own attitudes and what we think, say, and do. In a country where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, we solve these underlying issues through openness and dialogue, not by suppression. But to surmount our “cowardice” in addressing sensitive social issues, we have to all increase the thickness of our own hides and talk about them, otherwise they remain under the surface, unresolved, and in perpetual limbo.

It’s difficult for me to understand how Bannock County is always, embarrassingly, the last county in the state to report election results. It’s also difficult to explain away so many seemingly minor problems in vote processing by the county as “human error,” as if that excuses lapses in security or protocol, or the actual count.

Such “human errors” were in abundance for the election two weeks ago. Perhaps the most egregious is the absentee ballot discrepancy. The clerk’s office has been very accommodating to local party officials in facilitating party workers involvement in vote counting. This is done to ensure transparency and accuracy, and is really a blessing for election officials as well as the voters.

According to the county’s reports, there were a total of 23,916 total candidate ballots cast and 23,351 issues ballots cast.  Of those totals, there were 3,694 candidate ballots cast absentee and 3,622 issues ballots cast absentee.  That represents 15.45% absentee candidate ballots and 15.51% absentee issues ballots. Yet when they were counted by the party workers, all six, who had meticulously maintained vote count records, agreed and certified there were 3,493 absentee candidate ballots tallied. That’s a differential of 201 additional votes.

All absentee ballots are held in “cans” that are sealed with serialized tape to ensure no tampering is possible. The party workers who tallied the absentee ballots had completely emptied those cans before they counted them and inspected them again before they were closed by the election staff. Yet mysteriously another batch of 25 ballots surfaced. They seemed to be in good order as the inner security envelopes were intact, but where did those 25 ballots come from?

Speaking of the serialized security tape, some of the post-tabulation containers had masking tape with penned letters on them, as elections officials indicated they had run out of the serialized security tape on election night. Yet six days after the election, more of the security tape surfaced for use on the box the discovered 25 absentee ballot were later stored in. One would think that there would be sufficient forethought to have enough security tape for proper sealing of all the absentee ballots containers.   It’s troublesome that all of the other ballot containers were properly secured, while ten of the absentee ballot containers only had lettered masking tape on them.

There were several reports of voters who showed up at the polls to vote, only to be informed that they had already voted absentee. One such voter from Lava Hot Springs, pressed the issue with the poll workers insisting she had not voted absentee. A county election official informed the poll workers that it was in error, as there was someone with a similar name who had voted absentee, so they should allow the Lava voter to vote. The problem is, the four with the same last name all live in Pocatello and had requested mail-in ballots weeks before.

Also, according to several observers, when the test count batches were run through the tabulation machines, the counts showed significant anomalies. They reshuffled the ballots and got another set of results. Finally, the system reported accurate results off of the test batch, but not without raising some questions of the programming of the voting machine.

It has been reported by some whose family members are deployed in the military that they were not able to vote absentee. Instead of receiving a ballot from the county, they received a nicel letter explaining that they couldn’t get the ballot to them in time to be counted. Perhaps their ballot requests were not submitted in time, but it would be good to know the timeline for military requests. Of all our citizens, they are least deserving of disenfranchisement.

While those directly overseeing the elections locally seem committed to complete transparency and integrity in the process, somewhere along the line that integrity is obviously breaking down. If all was working as it should, there would not be inconsistent counts from the test ballots, there would not be discrepancies in the absentee balloting, there would not be mysterious surfacing of uncounted absentee ballots, there would not be people turned away at the polls for reportedly voting absentee when they had not, and there would not be mysterious surfacing of serialized seals for ensuring security. Yes, these are all obviously attributable to human error, but the question all of us need answered is whether it’s intentional, accidental, or due to ineptitude.

In our banking system we expect complete transparency and accuracy in accounting for our deposits. In my industry, every penny of every client’s money is accounted for and safeguards are in place to ensure accuracy, accountability and security. Don’t our ballots and our votes deserve that same treatment?

Published-Idaho State Journal, 10/31/10

In this day and age when our federal government can rack up our collective debt obligations without our approbation, the last thing we should be doing is giving that same ability to local hospitals, airports, or municipal power companies. The proposed constitutional amendments HJR4, HJR5, and HJR7 do just that. They can issue public debt without a vote of the taxpayers. No thank you!

Butch Otter has done a superb job as governor managing the ship of state through some turbulent fiscal waters the past few years. Keith Allred’s criticism of Otter for a 7.5% reduction in the education budget is evidence of his inability to make difficult decisions in a real-life setting. While crucial to our quality of life and the culture of Idaho, education is not a sacred cow to be immunized from fiscal reality. Would Allred have spared education and axed that much more than the 19.45% from the rest of the state agencies? This fiscal myopia is perhaps endemic with academics who have negligible exposure to the real world of financial management. We’ve seen what academics so limited in actual experience have done on the national level, we don’t need to make of Idaho another academic laboratory of fiscal experimentation.

As Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Luna has been an ardent proponent of a customer-driven education system. That’s critical, because in education, the customers are the children and the parents. What’s best for customers is not synonymous with what’s best and most comfortable for the educational bureaucracy and establishment. Stan Olson, based on his own statements, is driven from a practitioner perspective. Read that as a euphemism for “IEA compliant” and “administration friendly.” For the past four years Tom Luna has reduced costs in his department, including his own pay, transferring the savings to the general education fund, while Olson increased his pay (including a $25,000 bonus) and benefits as Superintendent of the Boise School District while cutting pay for teachers in his district. I think Luna is right: actions do speak louder than words. And in these challenging financial times, we don’t need someone in that crucial role who is self-admittedly “bad at math.”

All of our local candidates, without exception, are in the broad sense, good people. And almost all of them are likeable. When we cast votes for elected officials, it should have little to do with their likeability, but much to do with their ideology, their character, their perception of the role of government, and what they plan to do once elected.

We often are critical of the mindset and actions of the ruling party in Washington. What we infrequently do is connect the dots with local politicians to ascertain ideological orientation. There was a benchmark in the legislature this spring whereby those dots could be connected. HB 391, which was a symbolic rejection of the individual freedom-destroying, and expanding government control over our lives, national health care reform known not too affectionately as Obamacare. The entire Democrat legislative contingent from across the state voted against that measure. Such a tacit endorsement of engorging governmental control and debilitation of individual liberty shouts volumes. Based on that one benchmark issue, we don’t need more of the national statist mentality roaming the halls of our statehouse. We need believers in freedom, and a wise and frugal government. We get that from Ken Andrus, Terry Anderson, Jim Guthrie, Lance Kolbet, Dave Bowen, and Brian Nugent.

Larry Ghan has been a fixture in county governance for as long as I’ve lived here. And that’s a long time. Larry was commission chairman in 2008 when the county budget jumped an astounding 27%. I have difficulty fathoming that not only ideologically but as a taxpayer. Howard Manwaring brings a sound fiscal mind and a fresh perspective on county governance which would be superbly complementary to the commission. I think it’s time to retire Larry.

In what shouldn’t even be a partisan race, we have the unmistakable opportunity to hire as Bannock County Assessor someone with all the experience, the credentials, the licensing, and certification that the job demands. Geoff Ranere brings all these to the position, and much more. The underlying question for all to consider in this capacity is, do I want someone who knows how to value property competently and equitably or someone who knows how to sell property? I’ll take the licensed, certified, and professionally competent appraiser any day, hands down.

Local and state political races, though less prestigious than those on the national level, will likely affect our lives much more intimately and personally than the larger elections. Learn about the issues at stake and go to the polls prepared to vote for those you feel will do the best job for our community and state.