( – promoted by odum)

I think it’s become even more obvious than it was a week ago: Democrat Thomas Salmon Jr has been elected Auditor of Accounts for the State of Vermont, dealing a mighty kick in the rear-end to outgoing GOP Chair Jim Barnett on his way out the door. Of course, as PoliticsVT reports, there’s a big chunk of votes yet to be counted:

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, Tom Salmon is still leading in the Auditor of Accounts race and has continued to pick up handfuls of votes across 13 of Vermont’s 14 counties.

It now all comes down to Chittenden county and it roughly 63,000 votes. It is truly the “big one” of the Vermont political scene and it will decide who will be Vermont’s Auditor of Accounts.

The fact is that Chittenden County is overwhelmingly using optical scanners, and as Secretary of State Markowitz said, the optical scanners are not where the numbers are changing – it’s in the hand counts. This election is over.

The optical scanners, with their paper trail and high accuracy rate, are actually pretty good for Vermont, as a technology of scale. Yes, their programming can be easily altered, but considering the scale of our elections, nobody is going to be able to do that on the sly without drawing a lot of attention. Similarly with programming patches or updates coming down from the manufacturer. Tampering is possible, but it would be dangerously easy for a citizen Board of Civil Authority to catch given that even our “big cities” are actually relatively small towns, and the implications of getting caught make it a poor cost-benefit scenario. Contrast this with the touch-screen systems which are more complex and can be easily interfaced under the guise of normal maintenence by anybody with a laptop.

But it’s hard to shake that lingering question as to why so many votes went to Levy instead of Salmon. It’s just that, once again, the ballots seem to be skewed in error to Republicans favor. The hubbub from SoS is that it’s an issue of ballot design, and I’m willing to accept that of course – but call me cynical for wishing that in a couple of these towns, vote counters would’ve double counted votes for a couple other offices to make sure they lined up as well.

( – promoted by odum)

Seems like John McCain’s really got it in for the blogs. According to an article at Think Progress, he is proposing legislation that: would treat blogs like Internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles. Some highlights of the legislation:

– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.

  – Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” – such as deleting user profiles – to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

You can read more of JD Ryan at five before chaos. But why would you want to?

Must be part of that big spam crackdown we’ve been waiting for.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist a straight line like that.)