San Diego Ballots Would Have Ousted Mayor
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A complete review of disqualified ballots in San Diego's mayoral race showed Wednesday that write-in candidate Donna Frye would have ousted Mayor Dick Murphy had those votes been counted.
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For 16 months, the whistleblower was ignored. Diann Shipione, a trustee of San Diego's pension plan, sent letters to the mayor, wrote opinion pieces in the newspapers and spoke to the City Council, warning that the fund was a ticking time bomb and that the city was the "municipal Enron."
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SEATTLE - The second time Duncan M. MacDonald sent in an absentee ballot, an election worker in Federal Way called to ask about the paw print on the envelope. But it took three ballots before the prosecutor contacted the voting dog's owner.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Among the security concerns that have been raised is the possibility of someone being able to cast multiple ballots. Other concerns are about a sudden power outage and whether data would be lost in such a scenario.
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Sean Harrigan was ousted as president of the $177 billion California Public Employees&#39; Retirement System (Calpers). In a 3-2 vote in San Francisco, the California state personnel board pulled Harrigan from Calpers where he had served for five years.
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The state must reject provisional ballots if they are cast in the wrong precinct, a federal judge said Thursday in the latest in a series of opinions on how such votes should be counted.
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The League of Women Voters of San Diego said Tuesday that it will not appeal a judge's ruling in the city's mayoral election, dealing another setback to Councilwoman Donna Frye's write-in bid.
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Disputed ballots, if counted, would be enough to elect long-shot Donna Frye to be San Diego mayor.
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One person suggested that City Councilman Tom Rawles be taken out back and beaten. Another said someone should put a bullet in his head, and a third that he should be buried in the cement his construction company uses.
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BERKELEY, Calif. California refused to run up the score or beg for poll votes. Maybe the Bears should have. Cal was left out of the Bowl Championship Series.
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SAN DIEGO ---- The credit rating of the city of San Diego was temporarily suspended Monday by Standard &amp; Poor&#39;s, one of the major rating services of municipal finances.
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For more than two months, San Diego has not known who its mayor will be, and for almost four years, the Chargers' LaDainian Tomlinson has been running.
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For years, Joycelyn Henry voted at the same neighborhood church. So she was surprised last year when she was told she was in the wrong precinct.
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(InfoWorld) - A California judge is likely to order a Berkeley city initiative back on the ballot because of local officials' mishandling of electronic voting machine data, a public-interest lawyer arguing the case said Friday. In a preliminary ruling Thursday, Judge Winifred Smith of the Alameda County Superior Court indicated she would nullify the defeat of a medical marijuana proposal in Berkeley in 2004 and order the measure put back on the ballot in a later election. A hearing on Friday morning in advance of a final ruling brought out nothing that indicated Smith would deviate from her preliminary decision, said attorney Gregory Luke, who is representing Americans for Safe Access. The medical-marijuana advocacy group is suing the county, assisted by the technology rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. The case points to the dangers of electronic voting systems, which make it harder to ensure fair elections, Luke said. Electronic voting machines have been widely adopted in the U.S. since the disputed presidential election of 2000. Laws in California and some other states now require paper records of all votes, but the California law wasn't in place for the Berkeley election. Both sides argued their cases before Smith on Friday in a last-ditch hearing on the proposed sanctions, according to Luke. The hearing brought out nothing new that suggested Smith would change direction, he said. Americans for Free Access sought a recount of the vote on Measure R, which would have established procedures for opening marijuana dispensaries in Berkeley. It lost by fewer than 200 votes. A recount wasn't possible because the city didn't share the necessary voting records, in violation of election laws, Judge Smith ruled in April. In May,Â the county agreed to share some data. The county reused voting machines from Diebold Election Systems without saving sufficient data to carry out a recount or review the election process, Luke said. Officials failed to save key evidence even after the suit was pending, he said. Data from the vote in question has only been found on 20 of the hundreds of machines used in the election, according to Luke. In addition to ordering another vote on Measure R, Judge Smith's preliminary ruling called for the county to pay the $22,604 cost of the recount as well as attorney's fees and the cost of a trip to Diebold offices in Texas. Ordering a new vote is a rare move for a court, Luke said. "This is a very severe sanction. ... and it's warranted," he said Friday. Luke expects a final ruling in the case within two weeks. The county could appeal to a higher court if the ruling goes against it, he said. Attorneys for the county were not immediately available for comment.
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Two New York Hispanic leaders said they would be upset if Hillary Rodham Clinton's Hispanic campaign manager was replaced because of primary losses they believe should be blamed on former President Bill Clinton and others.
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An openly gay candidate lost his bid on Saturday to become mayor of Dallas in a race that attracted wide attention because of his sexual orientation.