Fidelity discloses its proxy votes
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Fidelity Investments' largest funds voted to oust Michael D. Eisner from the chairman's post at Walt Disney Co., in one of last year's biggest proxy battles, according to voting records the nation's largest mutual-fund firm has made public for the first time.
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The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November.
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Senator Edward M. Kennedy yesterday said he would press US pension plans to disclose proxy votes on the stocks they hold -- as mutual funds must now do -- in response to a government report calling for greater transparency in pensions affecting 100 million workers and $4 trillion of assets.
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A large majority of corporate board members surveyed this month said that a company's chairman should be able to use any legally available means to identify sources of leaks to the media.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. government board looking for ways to improve the security of electronic voting machines has taken the first step toward requiring the machines to have independent audit mechanisms, a day after it rejected a different audit proposal. The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), an advisory board to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling on its Security and Transparency Subcommittee to draft requirements for independently verifiable voting records, such as voter-verified paper trail printouts, to be used with direct record electronic (DRE) machines. The new proposal, offered by TGDC member Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls on the subcommittee to write requirements for the next generation of e-voting machines that make them "software independent" -- to include an audit mechanism independent of the software inside the machines. Rivest said he was happy the second proposal passed, even though the first failed. "I think it's very important for the safety of voting machines in this country," he said of the TGDC's vote. The Association for Computing Machinery's Public Policy Committee, critics of e-voting, praised the TGDC's Tuesday vote. "We have long held the position that there needs to be a means of verification that voters recognize as the vote they cast," the group said in a statement. "The committee ... rightly acknowledges that further research in this field is needed to provide innovative solutions to the e-voting challenges remaining." Critics of e-voting machines have called for paper-trail audits as a way for voters to ensure their votes are tallied correctly. In a November report, staff at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology advocated that the U.S. government require e-voting machines to include independent audit mechanisms, saying DREs without audit mechanisms "cannot be made secure or highly reliable." But during the TGDC meeting, H. Stephen Berger, chairman of the voting systems standards committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), questioned how other industries could create software that has few errors, such as software on electronic equipment used on airplanes. The software on a typical DRE is less than a megabyte, and e-voting vendors should be able to find a way to make it secure and error-free without adding paper trail audits, he said during debate Tuesday. "I have to believe we can verify and put very careful controls on that, so that we can get an accurate and verified record of what the voter does in the booth," Berger said. But Internet browsers have less code than the typical DRE and still have "tons of problems" with security, said Daniel Schutzer, executive director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. "If money were no object, if time were no object," e-voting machine vendors could create software that was free of bugs and could be tested and verified, Schutzer added. "Considering what we're working with ... that's still a pipe dream." Monday's failed proposal, also offered by Rivest, called on the U.S. government to develop e-voting machine guidelines only for machines that included independent audit capabilities. It would be "unwise" to allow the use of DREs that do not include independent audits, it said. Tuesday's proposal, which passed unanimously, took a slightly less restrictive approach. It called for future DREs to include audit mechanisms, and it said TGDC should "ensure that systems that produce independently verifiable voting records are reliable and provide adequate support for audits." But the proposal that passed stopped short of requiring the current generation of e-voting machines to add on audit mechanisms. "Election officials and vendors have appropriately responded to the growing complexity of voting systems by adding more stringent access controls, encryption, testing, and physical security to election procedures and systems," the proposal said. The new proposal addressed some TGDC concerns about accessibility for disabled people and what to do with existing e-voting machines, Rivest said by phone. "It's not a motion to encourage people to dump their machines in any way," he said. The Election Assistance Commission will hear a report about the TGDC action at a meeting Thursday, but the new audit standards likely wouldn't go into effect until after 2010.
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Investor's Business Daily - With the votes counted, mutual fund managers are beginning to see which of their pre-election predictions are paying off.
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As the primary season continues, observers of the electronic-voting scene ask whether it's possible to tally the ballots efficiently while restoring Americans' faith in the process. Random, mandatory audits of cast ballots show promise, but even after demonstrated successes, not everyone's on board.
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A move by Fidelity Investments to lower its corporate taxes -- potentially by hundreds of millions of dollars a year -- came under fire yesterday by tax policy advocates and a Massachusetts union official, while a business group defended the Boston mutual fund firm's strategy.
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Fidelity Investments has changed leadership on 13 funds so far this year, as it reassigns some managers and promotes others, mostly in areas investing in specific industries.
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The FBI failed to report accurately how many people it snooped on using anti-terror measures, officials said a government audit revealed today. Demands for banks and phone companies to hand over people's private information without telling them may also have gone beyond what is allowed by the Patriot Act, officials with access to the report told CNN.
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WASHINGTON: Hedge fund advisers will have to register with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and submit to examinations under a new rule approved on Tuesday in a 3-2 vote by the market-policing agency.
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At the end of last month, Harmony took legal action to prevent Gold Fields casting a &quot;discretionary proxy&quot; vote on behalf of US shareholder Bank of New York.
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The records of nearly 2.3 million consumers have been exposed after an employee of a Fidelity National Information Services subsidiary stole the information and then proceeded to sell it to a data broker.
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Fidelity Investments, the world&#39;s biggest mutual fund company, has let go two employees and disciplined 14 others for violating its policy on gifts, the company said Thursday.
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Vanguard Group Inc. voted in favor of a shareholder proposal demanding that Intel Corp. expense stock options. Putnam Funds and Fidelity Investments voted to dump Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael D. Eisner. Vanguard voted to keep him.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to vote Tuesday to bar mutual fund companies from steering their stock and bond business to brokerage firms that promote the fund companies' products.
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THE REGION Fidelity Investments is considering expanding a Texas facility, adding up to 1,500 jobs, a spokeswoman for the Boston mutual fund giant said. Anne Crowley confirmed reports in Texas newspapers that Fidelity is in talks with the town of Westlake, near Dallas, to expand a campus where it now has about 2,900 employees. One of Massachusetts' largest employers, Fidelity ...