Digital
Democracy?
Glitches with electronic balloting
place in question integrity of 2004 electoral process
4
March 2004
The
excruciatingly narrow presidential contest in Florida
four years ago left the nation eager to adopt a more
reliable voting system -- one that wouldn't systematically
disenfranchise swaths of voters or raise suspicions
of tampering. The goal was to eliminate the crude
machines, puzzling butterfly ballots, and hanging
chads that cost thousands of voters their choice in
2000.
Nearly
10 million people are voting via computer this primary
season. Most election officials in e-voting states
hailed the outcome of Super Tuesday as a success for
the largest test of electronic kiosks to date. Still,
some of the six million California citizens who tried
it found machines that didn't boot up and coding software
that failed to match votes with those who cast them.
Some poll workers found that the programs they were
called on to administer weren't the ones they'd been
trained for. Encoding problems even omitted propositions
from some ballots. [Full
Story]
Defender
of the Free World
Librarian Trina Magi stands up to the
Patriot Act
By Rob Gurwitt | January/February
2004 Issue
When
the USA Patriot Act passed in October 2001, it contained
language in Section 215 making it easier for federal
agents to look into the business records of, among
other places, libraries and bookstores. In particular,
agents no longer need to show probable cause before
getting a judge's approval to round up private records;
the act also makes it illegal for the keeper of those
records to tell any one else -- including the customer
or patron involved -- about the investigation.
To
Magi (whose last name is pronounced "Maggie")
and other librarians, all of this strikes at the heart
of free inquiry: the right to privacy. "It's
one of the basics of librarianship, to respect privacy,"
says Gail Weymouth, chair of the Intellectual Freedom
Committee of the Vermont Library Association, "to
understand that what people read isn't necessarily
what they believe, and to give them the ability to
come in and find information without any chilling
effect." [Full
Story]
Food
for Thought
27 November 2003
A
new U.N. report says that hunger around the world
is increasing, with the number of undernourished people
up to almost 850 million, an increase of 18 million
from the mid 1990s. Perhaps more shockingly, at least
in this country, is that around 30 million Americans
aren't getting enough to eat this year. Food for thought
at Thanksgiving.
The
U.N. report, from the Rome-based U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), said the latest figures
"signal a setback in the war against hunger."
And the U.N., which in 1996 set itself the goal of
cutting the numbers of hungry people in half by 2015,
is now having to scale back its ambitions. [Full
Story]
Deficit
Disorder
26 November 2003
The
passage on Tuesday of the $400 billion Medicare bill,
within a day or so of the delivery of the $400 billion
defense bill, and around the same time as the near-passage
of the gargantuan, pork-laden energy bill, brought
into sharp relief a surprising but undeniable feature
of the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled
Congress: they spend money like the Republican stereotype
of Big-Government Democrats, with total disregard
for fiscal responsibility.
The
bipartisan Concord Coalition, which monitors federal
spending, called the first six months of 2003, the
"most fiscally irresponsible in recent memory."
The result is a budget deficit that looks set to soar
to $500 billion at the end of 2004. [Full
Story]
Chad
2.0
Computer voting was supposed to revolutionize
elections. But has it just updated old problems?
November/December
2003 Issue
The
lessons of Florida's 2000 election debacle were painfully
clear: Butterfly ballots and punch cards are no way
to run an election. Vowing never again, Congress pledged
nearly $4 billion to fund voting modernization, and
tech firms rushed computerized voting terminals to
market, promising modern convenience and digital accuracy.
But
a closer look at electronic voting finds the new machines
far from fail-safe. Tech experts say voting-terminal
technology lags years behind the state of the art
in both encryption and design. Not only are the machines
susceptible to the kinds of voting mishaps--undervotes,
misvotes--that produced Bush v. Gore, but they also
may be vulnerable to hackers bent on stealing an election.
[Full
Story]
Toxic
Immunity
Faced with a hazardous-waste
crisis, the Pentagon is pushing hard to exempt itself
from the nation's environmental laws.
by Jon R. Luoma | November/December
2003 Issue
"It
feels like somebody wrote a new rule -- the bigger
a mess you make, the easier it should be to just walk
away," says Laura Olah, a Wisconsin activist
who heads a grassroots group called Citizens for Safe
Water Around Badger. Badger, in this case, is a former
Army ammunition plant near the town of Sauk Prairie,
Wisconsin -- a sprawling industrial complex that operated
from World War II through the mid-1970s and produced
not only munitions, but a flood of toxic wastes. Today,
a witches' brew of contaminants, including the heavy
metals mercury and cadmium and the cancer-causing
compounds carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene,
is seeping into the groundwater beneath the 7,300-acre
site. For more than a decade, several local farm families
unwittingly drew their well water directly from the
heart of the contamination; in the nearby Wisconsin
River, sediments are contaminated with more than 20
times the allowable amount of mercury.
Olah
says her group just wants the Defense Department to
clean up the site before it abandons Badger entirely.
But the Pentagon has missed a series of deadlines
in a cleanup agreement with the state of Wisconsin.
In recent years, it has also backed away from a plan
to remove large volumes of contaminated soil from
the base, proposing instead to fence off and monitor
the toxic hot spots. [Full
Story]
The
Making of the Corporate Judiciary
How big business is quietly funding
a judicial revolution in the nation's courts
by Michael Scherer |
November/December
2003 Issue
Like
many of President Bush's lower-court nominees, William
H. Pryor Jr. has had a hand in just about every legal
social theory that drives Senate Democrats to outrage.
As the attorney general of Alabama, he pushed for
the execution of the mentally retarded, compared homosexuality
to bestiality, defended the posting of Bible quotes
at the courthouse door, and advocated rescinding a
portion of the Voting Rights Act. He called Roe v.
Wade "the worst abomination of constitutional
law in our history."
So
when Pryor, a boyish 41-year-old, came before the
Judiciary Committee in June wearing a carefully folded
kerchief in his pin-striped suit, opposing senators
clashed over whether such views disqualified him from
the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans, led
by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, praised Pryor's distinguished
career, his numerous awards, and the hundreds of letters
supporting his nomination. They tossed him softball
questions about his "mainstream" approach
to the law. [Full
Story]
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