Word: touchings
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...Glennon said his record prosecuting drug dealers has prepared him to take on City Hall bureaucrats. He favors creating a new planning board independent of the BRA, saying that the Oct. 3 meeting when the BRA approved Harvard’s science project showed that the agency had lost touch with the needs of residents. “It wasn’t a hearing. It was like a kangaroo court. It was something out of a banana republic,” Glennon said. “It was this formality that they went through to satisfy the rules...
...Nelson-Whitehouse legislation - which also requires routine audits in at least 3% of the precincts in all federal elections, and contemplates mandating paper-trail capability on any type of voting technology as early as the 2008 election - is the clearest sign yet of the stampede away from touch-screen. Its backers, like Dan McCrea, head of the Florida Voters Coalition, insist bills like this are necessary to get states to move to optical scanning, even if they are understandably reluctant to trash their investments in DRE. McCrea calls that foot-dragging the electoral equivalent of "buying a fleet of Pintos...
...Nelson-Whitehouse bill would appropriate as much as $1 billion to help states move back to optical scanning (or any method that provides a reliable paper trail). "Unless someone can come up with a foolproof method of producing a paper trail with touch-screen machines, this is how we need to go," says Nelson, pointing out that attempts up to now to make DRE paper-trail compatible have too often led to printer paper jams and other "screw...
...Nelson's consultants, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning, who oversees the state's elections, was himself an advocate of touch-screen voting as the elections supervisor of the county that includes Tampa. But since then, while he still believes the "DRE system itself" is sound, he acknowledges the system's margin for "the human error factor" has proven great enough to cause the new inertia. "There's not a lot you can do to mess up with optical scanning," says Browning. "We believe we're doing the right thing in Florida...
...while Florida (which passed Crist's touch-screen ban this past spring) has given itself an almost two-year run-up to its 2008 changes, Browning worries many states may not be able to meet the paper-trail requirements by next November, particularly since the Nelson-Whitehouse bill may not even pass until well into next year. Browning, as a result, feels the 2010 elections may be a more feasible target - and would give states more time to simply get rid of DRE and bring in optical scanning rather than spending more money in 2008 to add paper-trail capacity...