Archive for February, 2008
« Previous EntriesNY and NJ Voting
Thursday, February 28th, 2008There’s bad news and good news on the election integrity front. New Jersey is a big, important state. Too bad it doesn’t care about conducting honest elections. It doesn’t take a lot of looking to find story after story about the bad voting machines in this state.
In New York, 80 voting districts cast zero votes [...]
Riegel v. Medtronic
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008This case is yet another example of right-wing judicial activism by our corrupt Supreme Court. Here, the court’s tortured and dishonest reading of a law passed by congress results in an order to ban injured patients from suing the manufacturers of badly-designed medical products. A similar case is being heard this term making the same [...]
Sarbanes-Oxley is Working
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008Sarbanes-Oxley is the most invasive business regulation of the new century. It is enormously complicated. It was designed to prevent many of the abuses of the Enron era, particularly those related to accounting and the ethical duties of corporate boards of directors. Sarbanes-Oxley is based on public disclosure of company information.
Sarbanes-Oxley appears to be working. [...]
How Clean is Your Election, Colorado?
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Many voting activists believe that the only honest solution to our election systems problems is to switch to hand counted paper ballots. Colorado may make exactly this move in 2008.
At the end of 2007, Colorado decertified the optical scanners used to count paper ballots. As of a few days ago, these scanners still did not [...]
How Clean is Your Election, Pennsylvania?
Monday, February 18th, 2008Instead of cleaning up their elections, Pennsylvania is making a big investment in bad voting machines! More than a dozen counties use the discredited Diebold machines. Other Pennsylvania counties are using bad voting machines from Sequoia.
Pennsylvania voting officials recognize that there are problems with the machines. Instead of starting over, they are putting [...]
Diversity and Bias in Law Schools
Thursday, February 14th, 2008Sadly, the legal profession is becoming less diverse. According to Columbia University, law school enrollment statistics show that Black and Mexican-American law school enrollment is down by more than 8.5% over the last fifteen years. (See also this article from law.com.)
The ABA House of Delegates has just approved a measure to link ABA accreditation [...]
Election Update: WA, CA and the new Holt bill (H.R. 5036)
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008The election season is becoming more ridiculous. In Washington State, the Republican Party chair called a halt to the vote counting when McCain had a 242 vote lead - with 13% of the votes waiting to be counted! You don’t need to fool around with voting machines when one man has the authority to fix [...]
Computer Passwords & the Fifth Amendment
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution says that no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. A current case gives us a chance to reconsider this basic civil right.
The defendant is a Canadian with US Residency. Border agents examined his laptop and discovered it contained child [...]
Crawford v. Metro: Another Important Employment Case
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
Crawford v. Metro is an important 6th Circuit case that the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear.
At issue is a Federal anti-discrimination law called Title VII. This law expressly protects employees from retaliation in two ways. Employees who participate in an investigation, and those who oppose discriminatory practices are supposed to be shielded [...]
Election Updates from CA & GA
Friday, February 8th, 2008The California Secretary of State de-certified most of California’s electronic voting machines, but they were in use throughout San Mateo and Orange Counties.
It’s important to keep in mind that there are two key places in an election where computers play a role. Sometimes the vote itself is cast on an electronic voting machine, as was [...]