Tracks hedge ballot measure with Indian gaming suit
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Californiaâs major racetracks Thursday opened a new front in their war on the Indian monopoly of Las Vegas-style gambling, filing a lawsuit to overturn the governorâs new gaming deals with five tribes.
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It's not just in horseshoes that close counts. The same goes for Iowa's presidential caucuses.
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have beaten back ballot measures aimed at expanding gambling in California, but he hasn't succeeded in striking deals with a majority of casino-owning American Indian tribes to share revenue.
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In the last few years, political races from Congress to county sheriff have begun to hinge on the American Indian vote.
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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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A judgement is due on a High Court challenge to plans for 17 regional casinos across Britain.
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By Review, Idaho Business  The title of the proposition: "Initiative limiting eminent domain when used for economic development; defining land use law; and permitting just compensation for regulatory takings." The measure will be on ballots statewide in November.
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California racetrack officials who want to add slot machines to their gambling offerings sued the state over gambling compacts with five American Indian tribes.
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In trying to determine where the modern Indian reservation ends and where old-fashioned tax laws begin, a Supreme Court justice worried Tuesday that a ruling in favor of an upstate New York tribe would create governmental chaos.
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SACRAMENTO  Five new Indian gambling agreements expected to be released Wednesday each promise the state up to 25 percent of gaming revenues, although little of the money will be seen for several years.
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WASHINGTON -- The fight to stem the expansion of Indian gaming hit an abrupt roadblock Wednesday when the House failed to muster enough votes for expedited passage of legislation that would have stopped its spread to lands distant from tribal homelands.   The legislation, sponsored by Rep.
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A lawsuit filed Wednesday challenges a ballot measure that would scrap Colorado's winner-take-all system for Electoral College votes and award them based on how well the candidate did in the statewide popular vote.
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The vote was a setback for two hedge funds, which had hoped to obtain greater influence in the bankâs future and keep it from selling assets at âfire sale prices.â
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Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter is circulating draft legislation, designed to prevent illegal insider trading, that would require hedge funds that accept pension fund money to register with federal regulators.
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Fighting for survival and poker Analysis The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 was rammed through Congress by the Republican leadership in the final minutes before the election period recess. According to Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ), no one on the Senate-House Conference Committee had even seen the final language of the bill. The Act is title VIII of a completely unrelated bill, the Safe Port Act, HR 4954, dealing with port security - Professor I Nelson Rose of Whittier Law School, Gambling and the Law: The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 Analyzedâ¦
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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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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.