Humanities desk
< July 2	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 4 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 3

Questions about closed primary elections in the US

I was reading this page[1] and was puzzled by the following statement: "A poll worker can challenge a voter’s membership to the party based on which party the voter voted in the two previous election cycles." Here are my questions:

Who do the poll workers in this case work for? The federal government? The state government? The Ohio Democratic Party? The national Democratic Party?
Doesn't it violate the secret ballot guarantee when a government worker (or worst, a private organization) has access to a voter's voting history?

Sorry if these questions sound dumb. My country doesn't have primary elections so I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the whole concept of closed primary elections. WinterWall (talk) 02:44, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For the first question, I'm not familiar in detail with Ohio law, but the poll workers presumably work for either the State of Ohio, or some smaller governmental entity (e.g. city or county). For your #2, yeah, that does sound weird. Maybe it was misreported, or means something else.

However, if closed primaries are hard to understand, surely open primaries are even harder. The whole idea of a party is that people of similar minds come together to pick a candidate to represent them in the general election. If people not allied with them can pick the candidate, what exactly is left of the party? On the other hand, sure, it's hard to see why a closed primary, which is essentially an internal affair of the party, should be run by the state at all.

California, which was historically a closed-primary state, now uses non-partisan two-round voting for everything except the presidential race and party central committees. That really makes much more sense to me; parties can do whatever they like and endorse whomever they want, but the state's elections do not rely on this. The presidential race is exempted presumably because two-round voting wouldn't make much sense there — if you did use it, in the general election, voters would have to pick between the top two finishers, but one or both of them might not even be on the ballot in the rest of the country, meaning that California's fifty-plus electoral votes might go to a candidate that got no other votes at all. --Trovatore (talk) 03:02, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe in Ohio the poll workers work for the county. As for #2: the ballot is still secret. What the poll workers know is which primary you voted in, not who you voted for. So if you voted in the Democratic primaries for the past two cycles, and now want to vote in the Republican Primary, apparently the poll worker can object and force you to sign an affidavit that you support the party in whose primary you wish to vote. The thing that's unusual is that Ohio apparently *will* let people switch party affiliations at the polling station. I think in most places, one has to change party affiliation well before the election (before a given deadline) in order to vote in that party's primary. - Nunh-huh 03:16, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In Texas, you don't register for a party before voting at all; you declare your affiliation when you show up to vote in a party's primary. Traditionally, the poll worker would stamp your voter registration card with "DEMOCRATIC" or "REPUBLICAN" just before you voted, but that seems to be somewhat optional now, and its main purpose was only to prevent someone who voted in one party's primary from voting in the other party's primary runoff (which can be prevented with computer records nowadays). Every two years, another voter registration card is mailed out, and each voter starts out with a blank slate again... AnonMoos (talk) 05:49, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WinterWall, a few years ago, I signed up to work as a backup poll worker in Ohio; they would have called me if one of the regular poll workers had called in sick. If you're a poll worker, you're an employee of the county board of elections; you may benefit from reading this page put together by the Clermont County Board of Elections. When you vote in a primary election, they don't have your party affiliation on record. Instead, they simply ask you if you want a Democratic ballot, a Republican ballot, or an issues-only ballot; this is because tax levies, constitutional amendments, and other matters are often up for public votes, and they don't want to restrict them to just Republicans and Democrats. I don't remember there ever being the option to vote a third-party ballot, although I suppose one could be provided if a third party had a primary election. Nyttend (talk) 17:44, 6 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Date of birth for Howard Austen

Hello Reference desk/Humanities people.
I'm trying to find a date and possibly place of birth for Howard Austen, but no dice so far.
(Those whose leather wireless set is regularly tuned to ABC Radio National may have noticed that he was mentioned on Late Night Live a few days ago. Which is indeed where I first heard of him.)
Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 13:52, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to Fred Kaplan's Gore Vidal (2012), at p. 336, Vidal met Auster in 1950, and Auster is described as "a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker", which suggests he was probably born about 1929. In Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Christopher Hitchens says "On the gravestone in Rock Creek Cemetery, Howard is incised as 'Howard Auster', the New York Jewish name that stopped him getting a job in advertising until Vidal proposed a one-letter amendment." So you may be able to get a precise date from that cemetery. Moonraker (talk) 14:11, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, some details of the grave are online here, stating "Birth: Jan. 28, 1929, USA / Death: Sep. 22, 2003 California, USA". Moonraker (talk) 14:21, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Based on that, I would say that this Howard Auster is the same as the Mr. Austen in question—born in New York (City?), 1929. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 18:13, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Howard Auster assumed the surname Austen. He had a sister, Arlyne, who had apparently not been born by the time of that census. She later married and became Arlyne Reingold. - Nunh-huh 23:02, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to roll to Rio some day before I'm old!

Watching Crooks in Cloisters, in which Wilfrid Brambell sings a snatch of song - "I've never seen Southampton, I'll never see Brazil, but the Don and Magdalena go there when they will". Now, the words are almost the same as the start of Rolling Down to Rio by Rudyard Kipling. My question is - did Kipling base Rolling Down to Rio on an existing folk song? (If you watch the film you'll also get the chance to see Ronald Fraser sing The Farmer's Boy while milking a cow, which has to be worth your time.) DuncanHill (talk) 18:42, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Kipling's poem was set to music by Sir Edward German in 1903[2] - you can hear it on this YouTube clip. Let us know if it's the same tune. By coincidence, my grandfather was the first officer of RMS Magdelena before and during the First World War, although she had finished with the South America run and was operating from the West Indies by the time he joined her. Alansplodge (talk) 21:11, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, not entirely sure it's the same tune - Brambell perhaps not the best of singers, and it was only a snatch - but seems likely. and thanks too for the Magdalena link - I hadn't realized she was a real ship! DuncanHill (talk) 22:09, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The "rolling down" occurs in one older song title, Rolling Down to Old Maui. No idea if Kipling was aware of the song. --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 17:21, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - no I'm sure it's not that tune (though I'm glad to discover it - having a bit of a folk thing at the moment). Kipling did like to hang around with sailors (and had a friend in Gloucester, Mass. who helped him out) picking up yarns, and many of his poems fit to old folk, hymn, and music hall tunes. So I suppose he could have transmogrified bits of existing songs. I've not been able (yet) to find much analysis of Rolling Down to Rio online - will keep digging! DuncanHill (talk) 18:40, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect Kipling had either a "standard" tune in mind or none in particular - you could probably sing it to three or four tunes without much trouble :-). But based on his other work, I doubt it was a direct lift from a particular song. (On the occasions he did this, it was often alluded to in some way) Andrew Gray (talk) 22:22, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've just found our article Just So Songs, but it doesn't shed any more light on the question. Also a ship called "Don" was difficult to track down, but it seems that she was originally called SS Corcovado (1872) and was purchased by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in 1875 and renamed RMS Don. She was scrapped in 1901,[3] which was a year before the poem was published. Alansplodge (talk) 19:20, 5 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Alansplodge :) DuncanHill (talk) 15:37, 6 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]