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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Friday, December 01, 2006

A Reform Agenda

I'm seeing some movement on two major issues that I had all but assumed were dead in the water until sufficient political will was raised to get the politicians to act.

On the environment, this is completely unprecedented, right?

In an unprecedented action (I knew it! -ed.), representatives for more than 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are calling on Congress to take immediate action against global warming, according to a petition released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The petition also calls for an end to censorship of agency scientists and other specialists on topics of climate change and the effects of air pollution.

The petition stresses that time is running out to prevent cataclysmic environmental changes induced by human-caused pollution and urges Congress to undertake prompt actions:

“If we wait, we will be committing the next generation of Americans to approximately double the current global warming concentrations, with the associated adverse impacts on human health and the environment.”


You can read their petition here. This has the effect of being an amicus curaie brief in support of Massachusetts in their Supreme Court case against... the EPA. And these are 10,000 EPA scientists saying that they must regulate carbon dioxide emissions now, before it's too late. Can there be that many MORE EPA scientists?

Al Gore deserves a medal (though it'll probably go to Don Rumsfeld or somebody) for getting this issue in the public consciousness and building the support it needs to get on the main stage. I know that the incoming Senate Environment Committee chair, my Senator Barbara Boxer, is going to kick off with hearings on global warming early next year. Let's hope we can help secure a clean and safe environment for our planet's future.

The other reform that's popped up out of nowhere, thanks in large part to a simple Congressional election down in Florida, is election reform. In a stunning report (h/t BradBlog), the main agency advising the Federal Election Commission will for the first time state that electronic voting is not secure and the only way to ensure that the will of the voter is properly reflected is by using paper ballots.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.


A voter-verified paper audit trail of Diebold-like e-voting systems is not enough. If the machine is flipping votes or not recording them, that piece of paper is worthless. The only option is a paper ballot.

America is sick of these e-voting machines. They know how dangerous and flawed they are. It's time to retire them. But I honestly thought it would take longer to finally vanquish them. This report shows that the ground is moving very quickly.

We're starting to see parts of a real reform agenda as the new Congress sets to convene. I would hope that they would pay attention to these developments and deliver on these reforms.

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