|
May 09, 2008 Providing legal resources and election news to California election officials and the attorneys who represent them. |
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
|
« October 2007 | Main | February 2008 » November 03, 2007 "Voting Out E-Voting Machines"From Time Magazine: "It is hard to believe now what a darling touch-screen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle — which made traditional paper voting, especially the infamous "butterfly" ballots and hanging chads, look positively Third World — electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touch-screen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars. The reversal since then couldn't be more stunning — as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced this past week by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touch-screen voting (also known as direct recording electronic voting, or DRE) in federal elections starting in 2012. "We have to start setting a goal on this," Nelson tells TIME. "Voters have to feel confident that their ballot will count as intended." Posted by Randy Riddle at 06:44 PM | Permalink. . . "New Life for Initiative to Apportion Electoral Vote"From the New York Times: "Republican donors are pumping new life into a proposed ballot initiative, considered all but dead by Democrats a month ago, that would alter the way electoral votes are apportioned in California to the benefit of Republican presidential candidates. Though the financing remains uncertain, the measure’s leaders said Friday that they were confident they would get the signatures required by the Nov. 29 deadline to qualify the initiative for a statewide vote next June. The effort, begun in the summer by a prominent Republican lawyer, lay in peril in October after its top proponents quit over questions about its financing. Last week, a new organization began raising the roughly $2 million thought to be needed to get the initiative on the ballot. The new effort is being spearheaded by David Gilliard, a Republican consultant in Sacramento, aided by Anne Dunsmore, a prolific fund-raiser who recently resigned from the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani. “You can’t just fold up every time somebody says they killed you,” Ms. Dunsmore, in a telephone interview, said of the effort to resuscitate the initiative. The initiative would ask voters to replace California’s winner-take-all system of allocating its 55 electoral college votes with one that parses the votes by Congressional district. It has attracted strong opposition from Democrats because it would transform California from a reliably Democratic state in presidential elections by handing the Republican nominee roughly 20 votes from safe Republican districts. If the initiative qualifies for the ballot, Art Torres, the head of the California Democratic Party, has promised a constitutional challenge, arguing that only state legislatures can determine how electoral votes are allocated." Posted by Randy Riddle at 10:04 AM | Permalink. . . |
|
||||||||||||
|
© 2008 Randy Riddle |
|||||||||||||
