This is a very silly story, but how can I resist a story that involves Russian vowels? According to this Atlantic story by Farangis Najbullah, the ever-controversial Vladimir Zhirinovsky “has now targeted a letter in the Russian alphabet”:
The letter in question is the vowel “ы”—a difficult-to-pronounce sound for non-native Russian speakers that is usually transliterated simply as “y” in English. Zhirinovsky says he wants the letter removed from the Russian alphabet, calling it a “nasty Asiatic” import. The vowel came to the Russian language from the Mongols, Zhirinovsky was quoted as telling the State Duma on March 12.
“Only animals make this sound, ‘ы-ы,'” he said, adding that the regular ‘и’ (‘i’) is enough for the Russian alphabet. ‘Ы’ doesn’t exist in any other European language, argued Zhirinovsky. “This primitive, Asiatic sound is the reason people don’t like us in Europe,” he told lawmakers.
The politician seemed to have a longstanding issue with the “guttural” letter, which he claimed his son wasn’t able to pronounce as a child. “He once told me, ‘Dad, dad, look, there’s a ‘мишка’,” the Russian word for ‘bear.’ “I thought ‘What ‘мишка’? A bear? But he meant ‘мышка’,” the word for “mouse.”
There’s not much to say other than “what an ignoranimus!,” but it’s amusing, so I thought I’d pass it on. (Thanks for the link, Adam!)
Usually, people are proud to be able to pronounce sounds which are problematic for their neighbours. And most young children take a few years before their pronunciation blends with that of adults. So Zh junior pronounced ‘mouse’ like ‘bear’. What other sound would Zh senior suggest instead of the offending vowel?
Oddly topical suggestion from the wikibio’s review of Zhirinovsky’s Greatest Hits: “has advocated forcibly retaking Alaska from the United States (which would then become “a great place to put the Ukrainians”).”
How I love the letter, “ы” — what would Solzhenitsyn say, he’s likely standing behind Zhirinovsky, tapping his head and saying, “This one is cuckoo!”
I should try writing a poem on the letter, “ы” — because of the affection I have for ir.
Here’s some encouraging advice for Zhirinovskiy’s son, from today’s New York Times:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/weighing-my-words/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
By the way, how does the lad handle the first syllable of “Zhirinovsky”? Maybe it’s easier for him to pronounce because the vowel is spelled и, not ы.
The best approximation in English would probably be the phonemes represented by “i” in the words “sin” or “tin”. Eastern Slavic “ы” derived from long “u”, i.e. “mūs” in Latin and Old English vs. “mysh”.
Zhirinovsky appears to be one of those right-wing political clowns of which the USA has so many – for instance Pat Buchanan. I wonder if Buchanan holds strong views on vowels ?
I particularly liked “Only animals make this sound, ‘ы-ы’”. That’s not true, of course – Russians make that sound. I think Zhirinovsky means either that animals shouldn’t make that sound, or Russians shouldn’t.
Zhirinovsky says: so eliminate the vowel ! Another solution would be to eliminate the animals making that offensive “wee-wee” sound, but that would mean getting rid of all those cute little piglets. Zhirinovsky is no fool: he knows that cutlets have a larger support base than vowels do.
Ever read the Strugackij Brothers novel ‘Трудно быть богом’? It has a character, an animal, the ‘голый вепрь Ы’.
It’s Zhirinovsky that needs disemvoweling!
It’s funny in the first place to have a Rissian nationalist named Żyrinowski.
Rodger C: Indeed. But it’s not as un-Russian as his father’s original last name, Eydlshteyn. (I wish I was kidding.)
Ever read the Strugackij Brothers novel ‘Трудно быть богом’? It has a character, an animal, the ‘голый вепрь Ы’.
Yes indeed; I wrote a bit about the novel here, and I’m surprised to see I didn’t mention the голый вепрь Ы, because I remember greatly enjoying it and planning to say something about it at LH.
There is an old tradition behind him, started from Konstantin Batyushkov: «И язык-то по себе плоховат, грубенек, пахнет татарщиной. Что за «ы», что за «ш», что за «щ», «ший», «пры», «тры»? О, варвары!»
См.: http://cognblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/%D1%8B/
That’s great, it was worth making the post just to learn that!
Isn’t ы needed to make the Russian vowel system complete? All vowels come in pairs, one ‘hard’ and one ‘soft’ (palatalized): а-я (a-ya), о-ё (o-yo), у-ю (u-yu), э-е (æ-ye) and ы-и (y-yi). Why would the unpalatalized i stand out as an Asian import?
Is “the” English vowel system complete ? It’s very yingy-yangy to expect that things must come in pairs. That’s the Asian connection..
It’s probably just feeding the troll to respond to this sort of thing, but plenty of non-Russian European languages have this vowel, more or less.
Cymru am byth!
(Mongol influence on Welsh has not hitherto been generally remarked upon.)
Come to think of it, Classical Mongolian in fact *doesn’t* have this vowel. The i-vowel patterns in vowel harmony with both front and back vowels, but the presumed proto-Mongolian contrast of a front and back high unrounded vowel had been neutralised in favour of the front vowel.
The modern Mongolian languages have done funky things to the vowel inventory which have turned it into an ATR harmony system instead of front/back.
Phonemes* often come in +- pairs. It is one of the reasons binary feature structures are still popular in phonology. But gaps are also common – there’s no /z/ in ‘Wegion, for example, and no voiced counterpart to /k/ in Dutch.
* Yes, I know.
Stu: It may be that English doesn’t have a ‘hard-soft’ yingy-yangy thing. But instead it has (like all Gmc languages) a short-long contrast (partly obscured though in modern English by its strong diphtongization). Russian, on the contrary, doesn’t differ short from long – all vowels are ‘half-long’. Asian or not: ‘some’ contrast I believe could be found in all human vowel systems – pitch/tone is a third alternative.
Even PIE had such contrasts, as we have inherited in e.g.the i-a-u of drink-drank-drunk (Sw: dricka-drack-drucken, Ger: trinken-trank-getrunken) or spring-sprang sprung (Sw: springa-sprang-sprungen, Ger: springen-sprang-gesprungen).
I once had a colleague, a Romanian-born linguist (!) who had studied in France, who once explicitly told me that this phoneme, in Romanian (where it is spelled â or î) was “ugly”. I certainly had the impression that the absence of this phoneme in French and its presence in Russian is what colored her perception of this phoneme’s “ugliness”.
My Welsh forebears evidently felt otherwise:
Written Welsh “u” was in Middle Welsh pronounced like Modern French “u” in “tu” but in modern Welsh it has become the allegedly ugly sound in question (falling together with written “y” in final syllables) except in the speech of the benighted South Welsh who have fronted it to “i”, presumably in order to avoid the taint of Mongol sympathies …
(The name of the country, Cymru, is actually simply a deliberately graphically differentiated form of Cymry “Fellow-countrymen, Welshmen” made after the time of the sound merger.)
And Tolkien thought Welsh sounded beautiful. Take that, Zhirinovsky! Man’s an Orc.
So another example of *y > ɯ! (Just like in Quanzhou Chinese!)
Another fun example that came to mind from Belyi’s Petersburg:
— «В звуке „ы“ слышится что-то тупое и склизкое… Или я ошибаюсь?..»
— «Нет, нет: нисколько», — не слушая, Липпанченко пробурчал и на миг оторвался от выкладок своей мысли…
— «Все слова на еры тривиальны до безобразия: не то „и“; „и-и-и“ — голубой небосвод, мысль, кристалл; звук и-и-и вызывает во мне представление о загнутом клюве орлином; а слова на „ еры“ тривиальны; например: слово рыба; послушайте: р-ы-ы-ы-ба, то есть нечто с холодною кровью… И опять-таки м-ы-ы-ло: нечто склизкое; глыбы— бесформенное: тыл — место дебошей…»
Незнакомец мой прервал свою речь: Липпанченко сидел перед ним бесформенной глыбою; и дым от его папиросы осклизло обмыливал атмосферу: сидел Липпанченко в облаке; незнакомец мой на него посмотрел и подумал «тьфу, гадость — татарщина»… Перед ним сидело просто какое-то «Ы»…
Wonderful! How I love Bely…
@David Eddyshaw: I had never noticed the similarity between non-rhotic “orc” and “oik” before. Thanks!
As a Russian student, I didn’t struggle too much with making the sound ы in words like vy and ty and such. But In saying the letters of the alphabet, its name in isolation was very hard for me. My teacher (American) pronounced it in an emphatic way that had what seemed like two syllables, and I felt silly imitating it.
“Come to think of it, Classical Mongolian in fact *doesn’t* have this vowel.”
Hat, isn’t “Asiatic” the go-to form of demonization in Russian culture? It’s a little ironic, given the man’s ancestry, but he sounds pretty assimilated.
@Lane: But ‘yery’ is two syllables. (That’s what we called it in high school Russian fifty years ago, anyway.)
As I recall, Trager and Smith had a nice symmetrical (3×3) vowel system for English, rounded out by the yeryish high middle unrounded ‘barred i’ as in ‘jist’ (unstressed ‘just’) or ‘roses’.
Why would the unpalatalized i stand out as an Asian import?
“ы” is pronounced unrounded and further back in the mouth than the unpalatalized i in the other Slavic languages (including Ukrainian and Polish). It’s not just Russians who think the vowel sounds “Tatar” – Ukrainian nationalists make claims for the “superiority” of Ukrainian for the same reason.
Apart from native Slavic words, ы is found in some loans from Turkic languages (башлык, ярлык, кумыс). Zhirinovsky majored in Turkish at the MGU’s College of Oriental Languages (now Institute of Asia and Africa). If he wished to give an example of an “Asiatic” language rich in ы-like sounds, why did he name Mongolian rather than Turkish with its dotless “ı”? He might have mentioned the ı to у shift in some loans, like фундук from fındık.
(BTW a Russian nationalist with a Polish/Ukrainian name is not unnatural, so to say, if his nationalism is of an imperial variety.)
As a child, I was more sensitive to the sound and color of words and yes, ы tended to make some ugly – дырка or кадык or бобыль… although пустырь, постылый or рында were OK. Voznesensky’s скрымтымным is on the scary side. I still see ы as dark brown with an aubergine tinge, a bit like rotting tuna flesh. I wonder if modern Russian pronunciation is indeed barbaric compared with the way educated Petersburgers spoke 100 years ago.
Filler text to escape the spam trap. More filler text to escape the spam trap. Yet more…
||:||:||:Мы супер-удмурты-ы!!!:||:||:||
It’s not just the Tatars…!
Back to the OP…
Fun fact: very few people west of Poland even know that Russian has any such sound.
Really, with -ri-? Not with -ry- or -rzy-?
That’s how his name is currently rendered in Polish, but presumably it would be Żyrzynowski. There’s a Żyrzyn in the Lublin Voivodeship.
I had mercifully forgotten about him.
That said, if Russia had a functioning democracy, he would by now have been elected president, following the current global trend.
Even so, following the same global trend, he wouldn’t have been elected president four times…!
Yes, the US rigging elections for Yeltsin in the ’90s didn’t work out as well as had been hoped. (One is tempted to think “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”…)
Huh?
Are you not aware of the massive help US “advisors” gave to keep our friend Boris in power and prevent those horrible Bad People from taking over?
Indeed, it was even celebrated on the cover of Time.
“Rigging an election” doesn’t make me think of mere dishonest campaigning. In 2016, the flood of micro-targeted fake news wasn’t the rigging, even though it alone would have warranted repeating the election in any country with a sane constitution – the deletion of a few hundred people from the hacked voter rolls of a few selected precincts rigged the election.
Are you not aware of the massive help US “advisors” gave to keep our friend Boris in power and prevent those horrible Bad People from taking over?
I think you overestimate the power of any advisors either straight up or scare-quoted. Unless they somehow taught Russians how to stuff ballot boxes or play “merry-go-round” (do Americans even know what it is?) there is nothing they could have done. I am not sure whether there were even elections, that is whether there really was even a hypothetical chance of presidency changing hands or Yeltzin’s coterie would have staged a coup with or without him at the top.
In December 1995, Boris Yeltsin was deeply unpopular (to be frank, he was hated by people who were starving due to his poorly implemented economic reforms) president with approval rating under 5%.
In July 1996, Boris Yeltsin won the reelection with 54.4% of the vote.
Magic!
“merry-go-round” (do Americans even know what it is?)
I had to look it up: widespread election fraud due to people voting in more than one place. In the U.S., you vote according to where you live, and lists of eligible voters are distributed to each polling place. Exactly what you need to do in order to vote varies from state to state: I just have to show up and sign a paper, which is then compared with a paper containing a copy of my signature from when I registered to vote in my district decades ago. Impersonation fraud (which would be necessary to vote in more than one district) has a rate in the single digits. Even people committed to the claim of serious problems with fraud have only been able to turn up about 1200 fraudulent votes in a population of 235 million registered voters, some of which are undoubtedly administrative and clerical errors.
Our problems are low rates of voter registration and voter turnout. (Fraudulent registrations do happen, but somehow Mickey Mouse never actually shows up to vote despite being registered.) . As has been said, it’s hard enough to get Americans to vote once, never mind twice.
In Russian use karusel’ (merry-go-round) works like this. Someone fills in a ballot for the preferred candidate, waits outside a voting place for a voter to show up and gives that voter the filled in ballot with the promise to pay them when that voter casts the filled ballot and returns the blank one back. And round and round it goes…
Ah. That would be impossible here, because you don’t get the paper ballot until the election official hands it to you wrapped in a jacket like a folder. You go to a small desk with sidewalls for privacy, fill it out, put it back in the jacket, carry it to the mark-sense voting machine, feed it in, and get told that your vote was registered. You are then given an “I voted!” sticker to wear (if you want to) and off you go.
Before the recent switch to paper, such tricks were even more impossible. You went into a booth containing a board with an array of small handles, one for each candidate for each office, and rotated the handle corresponding to your choice. Mechanical interlocks made it impossible to rotate more than one handle for a given office. You then pulled a large handle, the positions of the small handles were recorded by the machine, and all of them were reset to the “no” position. The problem with this ingenious device was that it sometimes failed to record your vote, or indeed, failed to record any of the votes, with the machine registering the same at the end of the day as at the beginning.
…where “here” is one of 13,000 districts that hold their parts of local, statewide and nationwide elections in one of 13,000 different ways.
Hardly that many. In New York State, there is very little local option and a great deal of uniformity: the 722-page election law makes sure of that. Other states probably do differ in how much local option there is. In some election districts, there are no mark-sense machines and votes are counted by hand.
(An election district in NYS is a chunk of land entirely within the borders of a Congressional, State Senate, State Assembly, and local voting district, as well as all political boundaries such as counties, Indian reservations, cities, towns, and villages. The aim is to keep the number of people in an ED right around 1000, though this is not always achieved.
Река Ы.
The name is apparently from Nenets и’(д) /jiːʔ/ ‘water.’
Fun fact: the Serbian term for carousel voting is… the Bulgarian train
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_train
I was amused in reviewing the old thread to see John Cowan claim that the “Bulgarian train” approach would be impossible here in the honest-and-administratively-efficient United States. Amused because once upon a time 43 years ago when I was in 12th grade and taking the elective Political Science class with the late Mr. Smith (1937-2017, and an excellent teacher) he explained in great detail how corrupt vote-buying schemes had worked in practice in our own little corner of the U.S. perhaps 20 years previously (there had supposedly been some clean-up efforts more recently …) and it was very much a recognizable variant of the carousel approach. (He also explained that the corrupt vote-buyers benefited from the goo-goo legislation closing the liquor stores on Election Day because that meant that if organized vote-buyers had a supply of cheap booze at hand, they could buy the votes of desperate winos more cheaply and effectively in kind than they could have in cash.)
He didn’t say it would have been impossible 63 years ago because the U.S. was so honest and administratively efficient. He said that method would have been impossible in 2018 because of a specific procedure in his district (and, I assume, similar ones in many others—New Mexican ballot papers are big and would be pretty hard to smuggle into a polling place).
As far as I know, vote-buying is unstoppable now that everyone carries a camera. You take a picture of your ballot or the machine settings or whatever and show it to the person with the money. I hope someone’s going to prove me wrong.
I like the point about the liquor laws, though I wonder whether they reduce (or reduced) voting mistakes or brawls or both.
Allegations of something called ‘family voting’ in the UK by-election yesterday.
This from the rump of the Tories. Of course nudge, nudge, wink, wink we all know what colour and creed it’s all about.
Seems to me to be too far south for that, and this would also predict /i/ rather than /ɨ/. Within Komi itself, a better fit could be *jɨ ‘ice’. This is assimilated to /ji/ in the dialects in the area (and in the Komi-Zyrian literary standard), but perhaps not before the borrowing of the name into Russian.
You take a picture of your ballot or the machine settings or whatever and show it to the person with the money. — fortunately, in a couple of years the briber won’t be able to tell whether the photo/video is real or AI
xkcd on ballot selfies
Seems to me to be too far south for that, and this would also predict /i/ rather than /ɨ/. Within Komi itself, a better fit could be *jɨ ‘ice’. This is assimilated to /ji/ in the dialects in the area (and in the Komi-Zyrian literary standard), but perhaps not before the borrowing of the name into Russian.
Makes sense.
xkcd on ballot selfies
Why does he say laws against them “do more harm than good”? What harm can possibly be caused by not doing something that was successfully not done for centuries?
In general, not doing something that wasn’t done in the past is harmful if doing the new thing is good For example, when smallpox vaccination was developed, a hypothetical law against it would have been harmful. I don’t know what good RM thought ballot selfies do, though—maybe encouraging people to vote because they see others voting and they get to show off?
@mollymooly: What a relief!
“Instruct” is one thing; “watch” is another.
That’s how the Mafia did it as soon as it became possible. (Except… I doubt they offered money so much as continued survival.) I think phones are outlawed in polling places in Italy now.
No clue.
The Italian cellphone ban (as of 2008) is mentioned in this vintage story about a parallel restriction in Malta, from which I learn the phrase “voto di scambio,” which is however less colorful than e.g. “treno bulgaro” would be.
http://archive.maltatoday.com.mt/2008/04/06/n6.html
What harm can possibly be caused by not doing something that was successfully not done for centuries?
Fun fact (not sure if this is an answer to the question).
Part of why female suffrage was granted so early* in NZ (1893) was the patriarchy expected Māori men would prohibit their wives from voting, so diluting the ‘native vote’. The grog industry fought against all those crinolined ladies in the Temperance movements.
* That is, early amongst Europeanish democracies.
I recall reading some decades ago that there would have been no UK Conservative governments since WW2 if women hadn’t had the vote. I suspect things are very different nowadays, however.
Why does he say laws against them “do more harm than good”?
i very much doubt this is what munroe had in mind (though i wouldn’t rule it out, either), but it seems to me that the actual practice of enforcing that kind of ban in the u.s.* would make its main effects voter suppression and fishing expeditions leading to large numbers of arrests – aimed at the usual targets, of course. in some districts, people approaching polling places would be asked to surrender their phones to a armed stranger in uniform before entering – many would just walk away; some would argue (and then often be arrested for “obstructing justice”, because some of the men in uniform would be cops or deputized); some would never see their phones again (some of the men in uniform would be entrepreneurial freelancers, in particular from regime-aligned paramilitaries like Active Clubs). in some districts, people bringing their ballots to the voting machines would be accused of having photographed them (some might even have done so, since they hadn’t been told not to by the poll workers), and their ballots would be impounded – many would also be arrested for objecting. the searches of arrested people, and especially all the phones confiscated in these various ways (whether permanently or temporarily) would be a treasure-trove for fishing expeditions of all kinds (leading to still more arrests and charges), for state data-mining (and lucrative contracts for managing the data extraction in the field, as well as its processing), etcetera.
.
* and in other places as well (all of this is at heart just the exercise of the “discretion” granted to state violence workers within any state structure), but i’ll just speak to what i know about where i live.
in some districts, people approaching polling places would be asked to surrender their phones to a armed stranger in uniform before entering – many would just walk away; some would argue (and then often be arrested for “obstructing justice”, because some of the men in uniform would be cops or deputized); some would never see their phones again
Ah. None of that had occurred to me, but of course you’re right (and also right that it’s probably not what he had in mind, about which I’m still curious). Clearly I haven’t fully adjusted to the world in which I find myself.
It was drilled into us – in the 4th year of school, I think; in any case in the late 80s – that the ballot is secret, and it was explicitly explained that this is because if you know how enough people voted, you can figure out how the others did, then you can punish them, and then democracy is gone. A few years later das allgemeine, gleiche und geheime Wahlrecht, the general*, equal** and secret*** right to vote, was emphasized as a major historical achievement. That must be why there’s no tradition hereabouts of bragging about how you voted. In any case, it’s why the picture from Alabama I linked to shocked me majorly.
I assisted at an election in Berlin a year ago. Nobody collected any phones, FWTW.
* basically all adult citizens (voting age later lowered to 16)
** 1 voter, 1 vote
*** as in “ballot”
When the secret ballot (sometimes called the “Australian ballot” back when it was a novelty) was adopted in the U.S. as a high-minded reform it had two fairly explicit justifications:
A. Protecting voters from intimidation ex ante and/or retaliation ex post against/for casting “unpopular” votes; and
B. Reducing corruption by making it more logistically challenging for those running vote-buying schemes to verify that they were actually getting what they were paying for.
If you think only of A, as apparently many people in the U.S. do these days, it’s easy to think of the secrecy as a right personal to the individual voter which the individual voter may elect to waive, on the same basis that you are free to put a bumper sticker on your car proclaiming which political candidate you support just as you are free to have your car’s bumper remain non-committal. Policy rationale B is the one that more clearly supports a ban on ballot-photographing, although of course there’s a more subtle point that “peer pressure” to join in the fad by posting your ballot photo on social media or whatever can tend to undermine policy A if those who decline to display such a photo are identified as suspicious potential dissenters from majority opinion. (I personally think it’s vulgar and anti-social to walk around with one of those “I voted” stickers, as if trying to shame those with principled reasons for abstention.)
That said, the ancient regime of non-secret voting is sometimes preserved in contexts like the old-timey New England town meeting, often romanticized as emblematic of American democracy. I believe a few of the smaller Swiss cantons still cling to that as well.
@rozele: The last time I had to go into a courthouse, I was surprised when a uniformed and I think armed man told me I couldn’t take my phone in. I did not surrender it; I took it back to my car. While I was there, nobody argued and nobody’s phone was confiscated. I live in a poor and majority-Hispanic area, which I think should make it more vulnerable to abuse according to your view. I realize that preventing people from voting might be more advantageous to the Establishment than preventing people from appearing in court, and people might not be willing to go back to their cars if there are long lines as there are to vote in some places, but I think a rule against phones in polling places could easily be made to work without harm.
@everyone: In many U.S. states, voting by mail or dropbox is easily available, and that’s completely open to bribery, intimidation, filling out a ballot for one’s incapacitated or dead family member, etc. As I think I’ve mentioned here before, someone in my town was convicted of coercing her employees to vote by mail according to her instructions. It just doesn’t seem to be common enough to do anything about.
Thanks, those are useful points.
@Jerry: The two primary federal courthouses in Manhattan have such a strict no-phones policy that (zut alors!) even lawyers are not exempt unless they have a permission slip signed in advance by a specific judge for a specific day. But you just give your phone to the deputy marshals manning the metal detector downstairs and they give you a claim check and you then retrieve your phone from them when you leave. (Side effect: the upper floors are among the very few remaining locations in Manhattan with multiple functional payphones.) Practice in the state courthouses is looser and federal policy varies from place to place – last year I was at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia, which had a looser policy but one sufficiently complex that I apparently was in some sort of edge-case gray zone. Although I ended up just letting them hold my phone in preference to standing there for five minutes while they conferred and adjudicated whether I had to.
Since most courthouses already require you to go through a metal detector on the way in, making sure no one takes a phone (or other camera-equipped device) in does not require anything much more instrusive or delay-causing than what’s already the case, which would not be true for a phone ban inside polling places. Which doesn’t mean a phone ban is not achievable in polling places, only that there are fair questions about whether the incremental costs (including but not limited to the spectre of selective enforcement in pursuit of some unsavory agenda) are or aren’t worth the incremental benefits.
Perhaps soon enough gizmos smaller than current phones and doubling as wristwatches or eyeglasses will have the capability to snap cell-phone-quality images such that the practical feasibility of a ban would shift again.
When we talk about secret balloting nowadays, it tends to be about voting in elections. However, there is also the question of voting by legislators. Italy had secret ballots in their parliament until around 1990, which was obviously a big problem, because it made it hard to hold legislators to account.
people might not be willing to go back to their cars if there are long lines as there are to vote in some places
J.W.’s mention of Manhattan makes me think that, hard though it is for me to imagine, there might be a few places in the country where the alternative to checking your phone at the door is not leaving it in your car.
“a right personal to the individual voter which the individual voter may elect to waive” —
The shouted vote in Ireland in 1989. At 0m16s an elderly female voter calls out “Fianna Fáil” to the official who is holding her ballot paper. Secrecy is further compromised by showing her on national news, though at least her face is hidden. Not shown in the footage would be the official listing the two Fianna Fáil candidates and asking which got her no.1 preference and which no. 2. (I guess he would not mention the Independent Fianna Fáil candidate.)
Senator Dick Roche (Fianna Fáil himself) commented in 1993: “It was pointed out to me that not all of those who shouted their votes were illiterates. One of them was a BA graduate of UCG.”
Illiterates still vote via intermediary, though quietly. Blind voters did so until a 2017 Court case mandated some accessibility measures, tricky with single transferable vote paper ballots.
@Jerry: Indeed, a few years back (pre-pandemic) I had professional occasion to go into a non-courthouse building outside of the NYC metro area where lawyers were likewise forbidden from bringing cell phones, and on that occasion I left it in the car. That was several hundred miles upstate at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Correctional_Facility, which has plenty of free parking spaces for both staff and those visiting the residents. But, again, it had rather severe security protocols in place for visitors that you would not expect at a polling place.
I can’t remember what I did the last time I was in the “suburban” federal courthouse in White Plains, N.Y.
“there is also the question of voting by legislators” — In Ireland legislators business is public; however:
* senators are elected indirectly by secret postal ballot by legislators and local councillors. The secrecy provisions were tightened after some 1940s vote buying incidents.
* election by Dáil members of its speaker has been by secret ballot since 2016. This demanded by government backbenchers unwilling to be whipped to vote for a lackey. This process was strained almost to breaking point in 2024–5, when government backbenchers objected to being politely requested to vote for a wingnut.
Oof. I hadn’t heard about her. I’m sorry.
I cannot empathize with that, no. You’re free to cast an invalid ballot; that has the considerable advantage of being counted.
(Every ballot should have the option против всех – “against all” – that Russia had until Putin abolished it after his first election.)
If they’re still registered, sure. Voter registration not being updated automatically is a US specialty…
I don’t think it’s entire cantons; but there are places that do this on the municipal level at least.
In the U.S. the против всех option is not generally available except in Nevada, where it is definitely a thing. But not a thing that has been sufficient motivation for me to relocate to Nevada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_These_Candidates
Sister Boom Boom was a member of San Francisco nun-themed drag troupe Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In 1982 she ran for city supervisor, with occupation listed on the ballot as “Nun of the Above.”
If campaign X launches a spoil-your-vote campaign, and y% of votes are spoiled, that does not mean y% of voters support campaign X. Some will have spoiled for other reasons, some from incompetence. In Ireland tallymen are proverbially eagle-eyed and will tell adjacent news journalists if many papers are defaced with “we demand X” or whatever, but campaign X tends not to tell supporters precisely *how* to spoil their vote. This is probably deliberate, so they can plausibly claim the full y% support. What’s needed, especially in areas lacking sufficient tallypersons, is a write-in vote-spoiling option. Digital ballots could facilitate this.
Some of this depends on the details of the particular electoral system. In systems that require a majority (rather than first-past-the-post plurality) the question is always majority of what, and in particular whether a pure abstention (ballot left entirely blank for the relevant office) is part of the denominator or not. Sometimes the answer is that a blank ballot is not part of the denominator but a spoiled ballot (sometimes called a “scratch” in the jargon, and including but not limited to a write-in vote for “Squirt the Wonder Clam” or some other unqualified-because-fictitious candidate) is part of the denominator. An explicit против всех option is a good way of making such an intent clear, although in Nevada the “none of these candidates” option doesn’t actually work that way, because whatever named candidate gets more votes than the others still wins by plurality w/o needing a majority. Whether the status quo politicians who set the rules *want* to facilitate a good way of making such an intent clear then perhaps becomes the question.
first-past-the-post is a bad metaphor for plurality voting. If you want a track-and-field analogy, field events are apter than races.
It’s not my metaphor! I just use the idioms my native language supplies me with without necessarily endorsing the soundness of all of the analogies buried in their etymologies. (I don’t think I’ve ever said or written first-past-the-post in the context of a literal race because “post” to mean finish line is not really available in my idiolect.)
I cannot empathize with that, no. You’re free to cast an invalid ballot; that has the considerable advantage of being counted.
Fuck the anarchists, eh? Do you also find religious mandates unobjectionable as long as they don’t actually persecute nonbelievers?
Apologies to JWB for my nuance fail. I should have started with “Incidentally,…” or some such.
In the case of an election where the winner is foregone, either because they are unopposed or because their opponent is awful, voting blank helps register dissatisfaction. I don’t know if that is commonly done or how often it has the desirable dispiriting message. I certainly have done it myself.
Fuck the anarchists, eh?
Surely any true anarchist would welcome a way to demonstrate that they are not merely apathetic?
…Admittedly I failed to think of what happens if you don’t get a paper ballot. If you do, go ahead, write “fuck all y’all” on it. Or write “meh” on it, depending on your mood. I certainly would do one of these if faced with the situation that 1) all candidates were about equally awful or equally boring and 2) I didn’t have to fear that by not voting for the least evil I’d contribute to letting a greater one win.
Did you just seriously compare voting to a religious ritual?
(And I wasn’t even calling for compulsory voting, just arguing that trying to encourage voting even by peer-pressure-adjacent means like “I voted” stickers – which, BTW, aren’t a thing over here – doesn’t do any harm.)
Did you just seriously compare voting to a religious ritual?
Yes, I did. That, to me, is essentially what it is.
trying to encourage voting even by peer-pressure-adjacent means like “I voted” stickers – which, BTW, aren’t a thing over here – doesn’t do any harm.
There we are in agreement.
While I appreciate mollymooly’s illustrative anecdotes about Irish electoral matters, I am rather alarmed to report a suspicion that the Facebook algorithm is monitoring languagehat discourse, having just for the first time ever decided that I should want to see a post from a TD with whom I had not been previously familiar advising me that “Support for Aontú at a record high. Aontú is the best organised opposition to the damage of this government.” On a purely linguistic note, I do appreciate the “to the damage of” phrase, which is not something that works in my own variety of English but which I can nonetheless appreciate as an adornment of another variety of English.
the active NOTA option (with candidates who lose to it disqualified from a second round of voting) was circulating in the 1980s in systems-thinking reform circles – i think i may have encountered them in The Book of Lists, or something like that. which is only really relevant here because i associate those same circles with things that are more directly hattic, like dvorak keyboards, re-introduction of thorn (though never, oddly, yogh), and light sapir-whorf.
NOTA in an instant-runoff election sounds very interesting.
What would the yogh stand for? /j/, so y could be restricted to its vocalic functions?
NOTA
As I understand it, this is how the Hugo awards saw off the attempts of various far-right miserable/deranged caninelets to rig prize votes.
We deliberated a lot about various voting systems in the aftermath (mostly on the Nielsen Haydens’ blog) and there was a lot discussion, but I think the system we ended up with is quite good. It is not quite the one I strived for, but it is close enough.
Me: filling out a ballot for one’s incapacitated or dead family member
DM: If they’re still registered, sure. Voter registration not being updated automatically is a US specialty…
I have no trouble believing that in many countries, deaths are reported quickly to the election officials, but what about incapacitation? Or are people who aren’t physically capable of voting even by mail just not allowed to vote?
One of the logistical problems that often prevents counting of mailed ballots before election day is that a small number of voters will die between mailing their ballot and the official date of the election. Those ballots have to be removed from the pool, and that can’t happen after the ballot envelopes are opened, since the ballots cannot be connected to who cast them once they are out of their envelopes.
Depends on the state. My mother, knowing in early September that she wouldn’t survive to November, checked very carefully that the ballot she submitted as early as possible would be valid. It was, and she got an official notification from the state a few days later that it had been counted.
Where I’m from, you can actually have a “flying electoral commission” come to you… I don’t know how to arrange that, though.
Also, counting any ballots before the day of the election is not only illegal but treated as a gigantic scandal*, so the envelopes of mail-in ballots are only opened on that day or even the next. If the registry is up-to-the-minute, any voters who died in the meantime will no longer be there, and their unopened envelopes will be set aside as if they had come from the wrong precinct.
* The idea is that if any results leak, they could unduly influence how (and whether) the remaining voters vote. That’s also why early in-person voting hasn’t spread much beyond the US. I can’t imagine it’s a grave problem in real life, though.
Wow, I’m learning all kinds of things. I had no idea that in some states, early votes were disqualified if the voter died before Election Day (the midnight that starts the day? the time the polls open?). Is the county clerk or whoever notified automatically, or is it up to the survivors?
Or that in other states you could get, or always got, a notification that your early not-in-person vote had counted. I believe that in many states, early votes aren’t counted till the polls close, for the same reason as in Europe. (We recently had a Zoom vote in our Faculty Senate, and I was shocked, almost, to see that the software showed the running totals.)
I also had no idea that in some countries the authorities were serious enough about requiring voters with disabilities, and prisoners without the relevant disability, to be helped by officials that they have flying electoral commissions (“fliegende Wahlkommission” (besondere Wahlbehörde), and I’m disappointed to see that both versions are more than one word). I’ve read and marked a ballot for a friend with bad vision who was voting in person. Would that have been allowed in Austria?
official notification from the state a few days later that it had been counted
In my state they use the system of 2 envelopes. On the outer envelope the name and address of the voter is printed and the voter must sign it. There is an alternative procedure of certification for voters who cannot sign. In any case, electoral commission either accepts or rejects this outer envelope. And this is the information that the voter can access prior to the election day. The actual counting happens on or after the day of election.
While disenfranching the long-deceased is often promoted as an anti-corruption measure, disenfranchising those deceased so soon before election day that they had managed to vote while still alive seems disrespectful.
@D.O.: Thanks.
@J.W.B. I agree in disliking that. I’d say that if people voted legally, their vote should count. State policies are summarized here. I see that my state is one of the 26 that has no policy on the matter. I imagine that means that the vote would count.
What would the yogh stand for? /j/, so y could be restricted to its vocalic functions?
i can’t speak for that particular strain of late-20thC script reformer, but if they had taken up the yogh that would be my guess – if memory serves, they were in principle all about eliminating ambiguity* (thus pro-thorn and i think anti-c).
.
* clearly the most easily achievable goal for english spelling.
@Jerry: I live and vote in an “allows challenges” state but I would be interested in hearing from a local electoral-process insider how often such challenges are or aren’t raised in practice. I suppose it might come up more in a small town setting where the people involved in vote counting both actually recognize the names on the envelopes and are likely to know who in the community has died in the last few weeks? Although political operatives diligently scanning the obituary pages for recognizable names of the other party’s known partisans is an interesting image.
Early in-person voting has become a significant thing here in the last few election cycles. It is probably preferable to increased absentee/mail-in voting for multiple reasons but I assume would make insisting on a still-alive-on-election-day criterion more challenging since the point after which you can no longer confidently identify and thus remove from the pile the ballot cast by the decedent is more likely to have been reached before election day. (Indeed, to the extent that point has not been reached the instant the ballot is cast, the authorities may wish to avoid publicizing that.)
Maybe the first thing you’d need to do is find out how dead people are removed from the rolls. I have no clue on that.
Ballotpedia notes that a study by the Pew Center for the States “concluded that there were an estimated 1.8 million deceased voters still on voter lists,” and on the other hand that according to the Brennan Center for Justice, “a 2007 investigation of about 100 ‘dead voters’ in Missouri revealed that every single purported case was properly attributed either to a matching error, a problem in the underlying data, or a clerical error by elections officials or voters.” Also,
“In 2017, Toni Lee Newbill, a Colorado woman, pleaded guilty to voting in the 2013 general election and in the 2016 Republican primary in her father’s name after he died in 2012. Newbill’s attorney stated that she continued to receive mail ballots for her father after his death. He said Newbill had attempted to remove her father’s name from the state’s voter list and voted for him after continuing to receive ballots for him. CBS Denver reported that the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder office sent Newbill a form to have her father removed from the voter list in January 2015. Newbill was fined $500 and sentenced to 30 hours of community service and 18 months of unsupervised probation, Colorado Springs Gazette reported.
“In 2007, three poll workers in Tennessee pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges, including casting two votes in the names of deceased people in the 2005 state Senate special election in favor of Democrat Ophelia Ford. Results showed Ford 13 votes ahead of her competitor, but results were voided after fraud allegations; Ford won a subsequent election for the seat. The Commercial Appeal reported that Verline Mayo received two years of probation, 200 hours of community service, and $1,000 in fines. Gertrude Otteridge and Mary McClatcher each received one year of probation in addition to community service and fines.”
I’m not clear on the point of disallowing early votes by people who died before election day. To the extent that it’s to avoid fraud (which may be a sentimental gesture) by family members, that reason doesn’t apply to early voting in person. I wonder whether it’s because of some feeling that Election Day is sacred (see Hat’s comment) and even if we allow voting on earlier days, we have to pretend it happened on Election Day.
By the way, my town is having an election tomorrow, and there’s <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/usa/santa-fe-new-mexican/20260225/281663966484914"controversy over a ban on cell phones at the polls.
Even though Barack Obama’s grandmother died two days before election day 2008, Hawaii election officials counted her absentee ballot.
(According to one source, she also voted 4 million times in 2020.)
@Jerry F.: one issue in the current U.S. is that the various groups that complain about attempts to “suppress” voting have historically claimed that organized bureaucratic efforts to prune the lists of registered voters of those who are no longer eligible (let’s say on account of being dead) are “suppressive,” and indeed you can always conjure up a hypothetical situation in which someone who shouldn’t be pruned is. But that’s part of what’s behind oddities like the county clerk you reference telling the dead guy’s daughter that they won’t take him off the rolls until she takes the initiative to do a bunch of paperwork.* And of course part of this as maybe alluded to earlier is the laudable American tendency to not WANT the government to have a Panopticon master database that has constantly-updated perfect knowledge about everyone, although sometimes that just leads to denial of what’s already out there and thus an unwillingness to actually use it in sensible ways.
*I think when I was widowed I may have actually taken the initiative to have my late wife’s name promptly removed from the voter list, after getting her Amex account shut down etc. But if so that was probably from the purely selfish motivation of not wanting to have to see her name adjacent to mine in the sign-in book when I voted (hopefully with a blank space confirming that no one purporting to her had voted earlier in the day?), which was an emotional risk only posed by the specific way they did the process here back then but no longer do.
Yes, I’m pretty sure; I expect it requires some extra paperwork, though.
It’s that elections are about the future, in which the dead have no stakes.
The tyrannical implications of that can be avoided in other ways (…and this one is a single word in German).
I find Bundesverfassungsgerichtsgesetz aesthetically more pleasing than Datenschutz-Grundverordnung.Y(k)MMV.
It’s that elections are about the future, in which the dead have no stakes
By induction, the votes of the old should therefore count as less than the votes of the young. Actually, I’m not sure that’s a bad idea at all …
It’s that elections are about the future, in which the dead have no stakes.
Not so philosophical, I would guess, merely bureaucratical. Orderliness must be maintained.
Early voters are naturally also shielded from any last-minute developments, like a candidate eating a baby or dying. That also causes some unwanted unevenness, which is acknowledged but ignored, on balance I think for the better.
No doubt soon enough some fancy AI software program will purport to figure out which voters are statistically less likely to live until the end of the term(s) of office for which the winners of the current election are to serve, so that the weight of their votes can be reduced proportionately. See also proposals for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demeny_voting.
official notification from the state a few days later that it had been counted — Correction: I’m not sure that the official e-mail said “counted”; it may have said “received” or something like that. They could have validated the outer envelope without opening the inner one.
Political blogs here were breathlessly reporting the number of votes cast day by day in early voting in Democratic and Republican primaries and trying to read something in the tea leaves.
It’s that elections are about the future, in which the dead have no stakes
Is it only an inability to respond quickly enough that prevents election officials from disqualifying the few people who die after voting but before the polls close, or before the results are certified?
I see that the reason Obama’s grandmother’s vote counted was the delay in getting “sufficient proof” of her death from the Department of Health to the elections office. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/9293713/obamas-late-grandmothers-vote-still-counts/
(New snow in Hawaii? Oh. Never mind.)
Everyone knows Obama’s grannie’s death was suspicious. The conversation went something like “Barack, I am so happy I will live to see you in the Whie House!” “Forget it, Grandma, I need the sympathy vote….”
I was just about about to get a local _Linz_ residency rather that a local _Sofia_ residency, so as to vote in local elections for city council and mayor _there_.
Nonono, he called her tūtū. (Western Hawaiian, which hasn’t undergone t > k.)
David Marjanović : who was Michael Swanwick?
…I have no idea…? …Wikipedia has this science-fiction author, who is still alive; the name of one of his works rang a bell, but I didn’t know any of its contents, which turn out to be really remarkably silly.
I knew he’s an SF writer, but I didn’t know what he wrote. He apparently wrote Vacuum Flowers and Stations of the Tide, which have heard mentioned a lot.
@DM: I liked Bones of the Earth quite a bit. I don’t remember what looks like the silliest thing mentioned in the Wikipedia summary, though. I realize a lot more of it may look silly to you than to me.
I liked The Iron Dragon’s Daughter even more, despite a trivial onomastic blunder, and I forgive it for its part in popularizing “fey” for fairies, elves, gnomes, etc.
I’m evacuating a popular social network because I’m friends with too many “famous” people there, and their protocol can not handle that. Back in 2025 I thought network effects could handle that — apparently not. I should have done that a year ago. I’m only there still for communicating with them in an official capacity, and they’ve kept separate accounts there for personal communication.
Stations of the Tide is pretty good. I haven’t read any of Swanwick’s other works.
The premise of Bones of the Earth sounds pretty stupid (and precisely calculated to annoy DM.) But it would all depend on the actual execution. Lots of perfectly good novels are based on premises which are objectively silly.
Chip just commented about Michael Swanwick on the unmentionable social media platform. They’re apparently currently discussing — well, if you have Chip or Michael there…
EDIT: I’ll delete this and ask Samuel Delaney if it is ok to quote the whole thing — quoting just parts of it I think is not ok. He posted it two hours ago and he was with Michael Swanwick and some other people.
The great Ibáñez the Greatest took that to the next level. On the cover of one Mortadelo y Filemón comicbook, one of the two main characters amusedly asks the other*: “Extraterrestrial shrink viruses… have you ever heard anything that stupid?” The other smiles and circles his finger by his temple. The first chapter is about… extraterrestrial shrink viruses. It is exquisitely hilarious. So, we have a master having a completely stupid idea, mocking it, using it anyway, and succeeding.
(…They make you shrink. They’re not psychiatrists. On the cover, in a part where the main characters aren’t looking, two cats are playing tennis with their shrunken boss as the ball. …The boss of the main characters.)
* my translation of the German translation
Vacuum Flowers is a good novel, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. However, it certainly has some silly elements.