New "Gold Standard" electronic voting bill proposed in Maryland
The TrueVoteMD Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland has been working for a couple of years now to get 'paper trails' for electronic voting. Their concern -- and mine -- is that without them, electronic voting can not be verified to have carried out voters' wishes in elections. Think about it: with paper ballots, at least you have the chance for someone to doublecheck the vote count. Without them, anyone with the right skills and opportunity could change vote tallies -- and no one might ever be the wiser.

TrueVoteMD has been working to change the Maryland State Board of Elections (SBE) reluctance to add paper trails to electronic voting systems, now in widespread use throughout the state. Despite numerous known problems with these systems, these efforts have faced foot dragging opposition from Maryland legislators like Sheila Hixson, chair of the Maryland House Ways and Means committee. Earlier this year, a Maryland "paper trails" bill to fix the problem was set aside in favor of a bill to merely "study" the problem.

Meanwhile, however, there has been progress elsewhere in the country, and now TrueVoteMD has developed Golden Standard" model legislation:

We looked at the legislation, which was passed in the 26 other states, took the best of what was there, and then added in our own knowledge to come up with this “Gold Standard”. This legislation would cover all the different concerns of paperless voting and could work with either a printer attachment onto the current Diebold systems or with optical scan."

TrueVoteMD summarizes the key points an ideal bill should include:

· A voter-verified paper record—used as the official ballot of record in case of discrepancies between machine and hand counts in audits and recounts, and it must be:

- independent of any ballot image stored in a computer memory,
- available to each voter to inspect and verify before their vote is cast,
- able to withstand repeated handling during recounts, and
- impossible to associate a voter with the record of the voter’s vote.

· Voting system accessibility for those with disabilities.

· An accessible and observable vote aggregation and tabulation (vote counting) process – initial election results for each polling place must be posted on County and State Board of Elections websites in order to detect voting equipment failures and prevent vote tampering.

· Mandatory random audits of 5% of all the votes cast in randomly selected polling places in each County and Baltimore City.

· Public notification and demonstrations of all electronic voting equipment prior to each election.

· Notification of all voting system failures – The SBE must notify the public of equipment breakdowns, software or hardware problems, discrepancies in audits and certification procedures, etc.

The organization has drafted a draft tailored to Maryland for the 2006 legislative session, titled "An Act concerning ELECTION LAW - VOTING SYSTEMS – VERIFICATION, ACCURACY, SECURITY AND ACCESSIBILITY."

Happily, this is an issue that may finally make some progress this legislative season. In the wake of recommendations by a bipartisan commission led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, Governor Ehrlich, who vetoed even the the "study" proposal last year, has said he's "receptive" to paper trail legislation, and both Democratic gubernatorial candidates (Doug Duncan and Michael O'Malley) have announced their support for voter-verified paper trail legislation. A legislative hearing took up the issue this week in Annapolis. For more information and updates, and to learn how to help out, get in touch with TrueVoteMD.org. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:10:00 PM -- |    

 
Who are we? Wildcats!
Oak Ridge High School will play Brentwood's Ravenwood High School in a bid for Oak Ridge's 9th Tennessee football championship on Saturday. The game will be played at 7pm CST, 8pm EST in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The Oak Ridger is covering the story, of course:

The Oak Ridge team will be leaving from Oak Ridge High School at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. Everyone is encouraged to come down and give them a sendoff fit for potential champions. They will travel to Outback, eat, then hit the road. They will stop in Cookeville for a walkthrough on the turf at Tennessee Tech. Fans are encouraged to convoy with them until they exit in Cookeville.

That should be fun! I played in the ORHS high school band a little over 30 years ago now; the football team was competitive back then, too, and won the state championship in 1976. Being a small part of the show during the game and at half time was pretty fun -- even if I wasn't much of a clarinet player.

Over Thanksgiving, I went to the semifinals game in Oak Ridge with my brother, and watched ORHS break out to an early lead and then grind down a surprisingly ineffective Murfreesboro Riverdale team, 17-0. The game wasn't even as close as that looks -- Oak Ridge failed to score on one first and goal situation.

It was a big upset: Riverdale had made the finals the last 5 years in a row, beat ORHS last year in the semifinals, and hadn't lost a game since 2003. But their running back couldn't get consistent yardage, their passing game didn't work very well, and several turnovers finished the job.

My brother was surprised by what seemed like a meager Murfreesboro turnout; it may have made a difference, because the noise from the home crowd section was pretty deafening. Head coach Stanton Stevens seemed to spend about as much time grabbing a cheerleader horn and leading "Who are we? WILDCATS!" cheers as he did directing the team. I guess it worked. Key items: empty detergent bottles with rocks or pennies or something inside. You get a couple of dozen football moms and boosters shaking those things in your vicinity, you're not going to hear much else during the game, or for a while after it.

Watch this space for a photo or two from that game, if they turn out. Meanwhile, here are a few from the Nashville Tennessean. I'll be adding an update when the results of the championship game are in.


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UPDATE, 12/3: Via the CoachT.com message board, it appears Ravenwood won 14-7. Congratulations to them, but also to the Oak Ridge team for a great season.
UPDATE, 12/5: Steve "Doc" Combs, the ORHS band director from 1960-1980, died last week. He was a wonderfully nice man, and was very dedicated to music in Oak Ridge. He was also an excellent, patient teacher both of gifted musicians and ones like myself. He will be missed. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Keeping the promise
It's World AIDS Day; this year, the theme is "Keeping the Promise" -- a slogan partly intended to hold countries to past promises in fighting the spread of HIV. The World AIDS Campaign editorializes:

To many observers, the litany of broken promises to reverse the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS rings hollow against the unrelenting advance of the epidemic throughout the world.

Their November 29 report ("Promises, promises: Statements, Commitments, and Declarations on HIV/AIDS since 2001") is an often dispiriting listing of fine-sounding pledges -- or, more frequently, dressed-up statements of the problem -- followed by little or no action. As readers here know, the U.S. government must be counted among the guilty on this score. More can be found at the group's "latest" web page.

Peter Lamptey, president of the Institute for HIV/AIDS at Family Health International, prefers to accentuate the positive in an op-ed at the Boston Globe titled "Keeping the promise on AIDS"*:

Many nations are meeting these goals and achieving even more. Their dedication demonstrates that the most effective policymaking to fight AIDS takes place not in New York or Geneva but on the front lines of the epidemic. The leaders of these countries are taking aggressive, visionary action to protect their citizens and mitigate the economic and social impact of this devastating global health crisis.

The countries he mentions include Brazil, Botswana, Cambodia, and Uganda. What all have in common is leadership willing to confront their countries' public health situations realistically and nonjudgmentally.

What Brazil and Botswana also have in common is a willingness to purchase and use large quantities of generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. I've maintained in the past that it behooves all of us to make sure drug makers continue to research and create new pharmaceuticals, and believe that goal needn't be at odds with making such drugs available at low prices. My idea would be to commission drugs developed for HIV with a substantial lump sum prize or payment, with the patent transferring to the government or world government body commissioning the drug. Advances from naval timekeeping to private space flight have been stimulated in similar ways (although without the patent transfer provision, I think).

But in the meantime I applaud countries which consider the lives of their citizens more important than intellectual property right disputes, and which act to keep the basic commitment any nation should have to its citizens: to work and fight for their lives.


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* Full disclosure: my spouse also works for FHI.
UPDATE, 12/1: Natalie Davis has a post with a personal touch and a lot of news links on the subject. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Nice Try Brigadier General David Broder
Josh Marshall is soliciting nominations for the "Nice Try Brigade" -- "reporters, pundits, commentators and whoever else trying to minimize the undeniable partisan dimension to the multiple and overlapping scandals breaking out all over Washington, DC."

The Washington Post's David Broder surely merits prominent mention on that list for his op-ed today, "A Pox on Both Parties," which starts as follows:

To understand why the level of public disillusionment with politics is so high in this country right now, it helps to go back a dozen years.

It helps to go back a dozen years?! It turns out it doesn't help at all, of course, once you see where Broder is headed. You see, it was the defeat of Clinton's health care plan that doomed the Democrats:

By the spring of his second year, the most politically important of those priorities -- the overhaul of the health care delivery system -- was hopelessly mired in committee, unable to muster enough support even to bring it to a floor vote in the House or Senate. The problem that Clinton had recognized as most disturbing for families, for business and for all levels of government was left to fester, unsolved. [...]

At some level, the message that many voters took away from the experience was that Democrats may talk a good game, but they don't deliver.

The kicker comes when Broder equates this apple to the rotten orange of Republican corruption and incompetence today:

The self-described "compassionate conservative" has been so lax in his budgetary policy that deficits have reached dismaying levels, and compassion was compromised by gross incompetence in the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Meanwhile, after 11 years of unbroken majority, congressional Republicans are displaying the same personal arrogance (in grabbing for favors) and the same penchant for petty scandals that plagued the Democrats after their 40-year run.

So Clinton's hard fought political defeat trying to keep a progressive promise twelve years ago is equivalent to taking bribes, telling incompetent cronies "heckuva job," and ignoring one's own supposed conservative principles.

"Unprincipled, corrupt incompetence" is to "principled politics"-- whether successful or not -- as "down" is to "up." Or as "David Broder" is to "worth reading." posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Mallaby on Wal-Mart
The Washington Post's "unalloyed joys of globalization" cheerleader Sebastian Mallaby gives it the old college try with "Progressive Wal-Mart. Really." but swings and misses early:

There's a comic side to the anti-Wal-Mart campaign brewing in Maryland and across the country. Only by summoning up the most naive view of corporate behavior can the critics be shocked -- shocked! -- by the giant retailer's machinations. Wal-Mart is plotting to contain health costs!

But what Mallaby calls "containing health costs" is Wal-Mart's campaign to avoid paying its fair share of its workers' health care costs -- instead of fobbing off that expense on the rest of us.

More substantively, Mallaby claims to refute that Wal-Mart is bad for poor Americans by citing studies that Wal-Mart's low prices dwarf the economic costs of wage suppression -- for which he cites Wal-Mart critic and UC Berkeley economist Arindrajit Dube's estimate of $4.7 billion. Citing a New York University economist -- supposedly inoculated from criticism as an ex-advisor of John Kerry -- Mallaby asserts that food discounts alone "boosts the welfare of American shoppers by at least $50 billion a year," and goes for broke claiming that the "savings are possibly five times as much if you count all of Wal-Mart's products." Who knows? The savings are possibly 100 times as much, or 1.09 times as much.

Max Sawicky points out that Mallaby has quietly changed the subject with the $50 billion figure to the aggregate price benefits -- to poor, rich, and in-between alike. Mallaby later at least acknowledges those silly federal programs for the needy are "better targeted." And Mallaby himself also acknowledges -- well downstream of the original use of the figure -- that the $4.7 billion in lost wages are data cherry-picking too: the figure focuses entirely on Wal-Mart, not on its suppliers.

There are similarly disingenuous arguments to come on the issue of Wal-Mart's parasitism of the public health care system, such as it is:

Moreover, it's ironic that Wal-Mart's enemies, who are mainly progressives, should even raise this issue. In the 1990s progressives argued loudly for the reform that allowed poor Americans to keep Medicaid benefits even if they had a job. Now that this policy is helping workers at Wal-Mart, progressives shouldn't blame the company. Besides, many progressives favor a national health system. In other words, they attack Wal-Mart for having 5 percent of its workers receive health care courtesy of taxpayers when the policy that they support would increase that share to 100 percent.

Of course "progressives" want poor people to have means-tested Medicaid benefits, whether they're employed or not. That doesn't mean they want people to be poor the way Wal-Mart's unionbusting, timeshaving practices guarantee they will be. And it especially doesn't mean they are compelled to welcome the nation's largest employer gaming the system to give itself an advantage over "chump" companies that go ahead and pay for more decent health care.

The "national health care" argument, meanwhile, has been made by better (and less disingenuous) critics than Mallaby. To the honest proponents I say, fine, this may all be moot someday when there's a national health care system in this country. And to Mallaby I say, we can surely count on your vigorous help with that, right? I didn't think so.

Mallaby's piece eventually boils down to a profession of his faith, and an appeal to the reader's avarice:

But globalization and business innovation are nonetheless the engines of progress; and if that sounds too abstract, think of the $200 billion-plus that Wal-Mart consumers gain annually. If critics prevent the firm from opening new branches, they will prevent ordinary families from sharing in those gains. Poor Americans will be chief among the casualties.

Mallaby may have indeed shed some big, wet, crocodile tears at this point. But the rest of his argument makes it clear poor Americans rank somewhere between last and dead last on his list of concerns. The fundamental weakness of the price vs. wage tradeoff is that it's so easy to see where it leads -- both in China and in Wal-Mart-Land: to a kind of new sharecropping, wage slave, company store economic system where workers are too poor to afford anything but lowest prices, and too beaten down to be able to turn down any but the lowest wages and 'benefits.' As publius ("Legal Fiction") pointed out a few weeks ago:

My point, though, is that citing lower prices alone is never sufficient to win the debate. As I said, it’s relevant, but never dispositive. That’s because there is a limit to what we will accept (morally) in exchange for low prices. So, whenever you hear that a practice lowers prices, there is always a necessary follow-up question – At what cost?

For instance, let’s say that China (or Wal-Mart) used slave labor to make its clothes. The clothes would certainly be cheap, but we wouldn't accept them because the low cost was a direct result of morally reprehensible slavery. In this case, low prices would not justify the practice.

Slavery is of course an extreme example. In reality, questionable employment practices exist along a spectrum. While we can all agree on rejecting low prices caused by slavery, surely that is not the only place to draw the line. For instance, what about low prices caused by child labor? By 7-day, 14-hour workweeks? By practices that release mercury into the ocean? And so on.

Mallaby's dubious assignment of Casablanca's "Captain Reynaud" role ("shocked -- shocked!") to Wal-Mart critics seeks to accomplish the dual goal of making critics seem hypocritical and Wal-Mart a comparatively honest, if perhaps rough hewn ("not saints") practitioner of real world global capitalism.

Let me return the favor: in this little set piece, Mallaby -- who, as a guaranteed winner, can afford to be relaxed about the globalization sweepstakes -- seems closer to Peter Lorre's Ugarte, the "gambler" who has, ahem, come into the only pair of tickets out of town. You remember: the one who asks Bogart, "You despise me, don't you?" To which Bogart replies, "if I gave you any thought I probably would."


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UPDATE, 12/1: Yglesias disappoints on the subject, Sirota spanks him for it. An earlier Yglesias post shows he's not altogether off in right field: he seems to wish the debate were about unionizing Wal-Mart per se, which he supports, not about Wal-Mart paying welfare/Medicaid-worthy wages, which he somehow doesn't see as the flip side of the same point. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:10:00 AM -- |    

 
"Face the consequences of my actions like a man"
Randy "Duke" Cunningham has pleaded guilty to graft and taking bribes from defense contractors, and has resigned from the House of Representatives. While I'm not going to feel sorry for him, I respect him quite a bit more after reading his resignation announcement:

When I announced several months ago that I would not seek re-election, I publicly declared my innocence because I was not strong enough to face the truth. So, I misled my family, staff, friends, colleagues, the public -- even myself. For all of this, I am deeply sorry.

The truth is -- I broke the law, concealed my conduct, and disgraced my high office. I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions, and most importantly, the trust of my friends and family. [...]

I cannot undo what I have done. But I can atone. I am now almost 65 years old and, as I enter the twilight of my life, I intend to use the remaining time that God grants me to make amends.

The first step in that journey is to admit fault and apologize. The next step is to face the consequences of my actions like a man. Today, I have taken the first step and, with God’s grace, I will soon take the second.

Via Max Sawicky, who adds, "The contrast with his assorted colleagues in Congress and the White House is obvious."


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UPDATE, 11/28: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee introduces the Democratic candidate who will contest Mr. Cunningham's open seat: Ms. Francine Busby.
UPDATE, 11/29: Digby isn't the soft touch I am. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:45:00 PM -- |