July 9, 2003
IRV – what's the holdup?
Thanks for reporting on the ongoing battle for ranked-choice/instant-runoff voting and the stealth campaign to sink it. Like Proposition N (Care Not Cash), it was voted in by the people but has run into obstacles. Unlike Prop. N, IRV's problems are not its own making.
Alex Posorske says in his report "City Hedges on IRV" (6/25/03) that supporters came away from the June 18 Elections Commission hearing "feeling that IRV would be implemented." I, for one, was less sanguine. I was at that meeting and spoke up with other supporters as a San Franciscan who voted for IRV, as a Green who believes it is better for democracy, and as someone who has volunteered on three runoff-election campaigns in the last four years, and I found Commissioner Arnold Townsend's final comment to us rather ominous. Yes, he did say, somewhat irritably, that we all got what we wanted and the commission's job is to implement IRV. But he also said – and I quote from my notes here – "The Board of Supervisors gave us just enough money for it not to work."
Well, what does that mean?
That same week the Board of Supes unanimously approved all the funding necessary to both implement the system and educate voters on using it – $1.6 million and $526,000, respectively – with an added $250,000 put in reserve. The original inflated $2.4 million requested by Department of Elections director John Arntz for voter education was sensibly whittled down to the more reasonable $526,000 by budget analyst Harvey Rose. Rose's number closely matches the $594,000 amount recommended by the Center for Voting and Democracy folks, who specialize in IRV and know what they're talking about.
So what is Townsend talking about? Why does the Department of Elections see and cite endless obstacles to implementing IRV? It has already been delayed a full year. What is their excuse? Townsend's comment joins the tally of many such statements of doubt, negativity, and defeatism coming, often off the record, from officials whose job it is to implement IRV.
As for Arntz making plans for a December runoff, I've been told that he is required to do that until IRV is certified by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley. If so, Shelley supported IRV back when it was a mere proposition last year, so what's the holdup now?
S.M. Peters
San Francisco
Carroll's nude photos
As a past president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, trustee of the Lewis Carroll Birthplace Trust (U.K.), member of Lewis Carroll societies of England, Canada, Australia, etc., I take issue with some of Annalee Newitz's remarks in Techsploitation (7/2/03) and rise to the defense of Lewis Carroll.
The book to which you refer, "a collection of Lewis Carroll's erotic photographs of naked young girls," could only be the catalog of four photographs from the collection of the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia. These are the only survivors of undressed young girl images taken by the Victorian age's best-known photographer of children. They were made at a time when (almost) all early experimenters took "art" photos of young persons. Carroll was only one of many who studied innocence and youth. He wrote that photography was the only new medium which could freeze time and thus preserve youth and its memories.
There is no credible evidence that Carroll ever molested, in any way, any of his young models or other young people he knew. To ascribe "eroticism" to these photos is a great stretch. Carroll was greatly concerned with propriety. Among the instructions left at his death were orders to destroy or return to the models' parents all remaining negatives or prints. With this gesture alone, his true innocence is apparent. If the photos were indeed "erotic," would he have had them returned to the parents?
Little girls are eminently seductive (perhaps you might have been, too). They consciously often imitate attitudes, poses, or positions of their elders. The Rosenbach photos are innocent in comparison to some of the images of fully clothed children that are everywhere reproduced. As a photographer, Carroll admired little girls more than he did boys, partially because they could be persuaded to hold their poses longer than their restless male companions, in the days when models had to hold absolutely still for up to a minute or more for the exposures to be effective.
And what were "the censored parts of Alice in Wonderland" to which you allude? I've never heard of any and I've made a lifetime study of Carroll and his achievements. I feel that in the interest of making your points against censorship you have sullied the name of an innocent man.
Sandor Burstein
San Francisco
Annalee Newitz responds: I used the phrase "the censored parts of Alice in Wonderland" to describe how I imagined Lewis Carroll's nude photographs of girls when I discovered them and realized there was a lot more to the children's author than mad tea parties. As for whether they can be considered erotica or child porn, well, that depends on the cultural context. We have no proof that Carroll didn't regard these naked little girls – whom you describe as "eminently seductive" – as sexual. Perhaps we can resolve this dispute by turning to our pals at the U.S. Postal Service, self-appointed arbiters of what constitutes child porn. Perhaps you could send some of Carroll's naked girl pictures through the mail, and we'll see what happens.