How do you feel about the quality of reporting in the news you receive?

Here is a newspaper story from the Ridgewood-Glenmont [NJ] Patch.

Here is the story as reported by NBC News4 in New York.

Here is the story as reported by Fox News.

Comments?

Election fraud does happen, but it’s often not prosecuted.   When it’s more economically or politically beneficial for state attorneys general, secretaries of state, and county clerks and prosecutors to turn a blind eye to it, it happens more easily.  The lack of prosecution does not mean violations don’t occur.

On Thursday, November 15, 2012, a federal judge sentenced a West Virginia county commissioner to 21 months in federal prison “… for lying to an FBI agent about absentee ballot applications, which prosecutors say were part of a scheme to sway Lincoln County’s 2010 Democratic primary.”  The scheme involved collusion with an employee of the county clerk’s office.

The conviction was reported in a press release from the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of West Virginia.  The details were reported in a Seattle P-I online article headlined  Ex-W.Va. county official sentenced to 21 months.

The investigation was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and investigator Jim Wise of the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office.   It appears that West Virginia has an honest and diligent Secretary of State.

The Idaho Supreme Court reversed the decision of First District Court Judge John Mitchell and ruled today that the Farragut Shooting Range could re-open.

Here is a link to the Idaho Supreme Court’s decision.  (more…)

During the past decade there was probably not a wannabe candidate or incumbent for any public office who hasn’t promised to improve government transparency.  “Transparency” has become the  cliché word of choice among those who want it and those who eagerly promise to deliver it.

What is “government transparency?”  It turns out that there is no universally accepted definition (Surprise!  Surprise!).

Still, the Congressional Research Service has decided to produce a report titled Government Transparency and Secrecy:  An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch.  The highly unclassified 39-page report was dated November 8, 2012.

Hurricane Sandy should be an eye-opener for all of us.  While we don’t see hurricanes in our immediate area, some people will remember the Mt. St. Helens volcano eruption in 1980 and then Firestorm ’91.  Many will also remember Ice Storm 1996.  Though the most recent of these was 16 years ago, they show that our area is susceptible to disasters that are at best uncomfortable and inconvenient and at worst, fatal.

One of the ongoing lessons being taught by Hurricane Sandy is that some people were personally prepared and so have been able to better adapt to the discomfort and devastation associated with relocation and the loss of personal property.   Their personal preparation helped them survive.   Instead of relying entirely on the federal, state, and local governments as well as non-government organizations such as the American Red Cross, they had some form of plan and had made some level of preparation to better help them survive.  (more…)

The agenda for the Coeur d’Alene Public Works Committee meeting on Tuesday, November 13, has a seemingly innocuous item: “Judicial Confirmation – Revenue Bonds.”  Anyone reading that would not have the foggiest idea about the importance of the agenda item.   There are two good reasons for voter interest in this first step in a longer process.

First, the price tag on the proposed CdA City sewer project is about $31 million.  Second, it will be an opportunity for voters in the First Judicial District to see if a District Court Judge follows the Idaho Constitution and statutes or whether he simply and expediently rubber-stamps a project to buy the support of the City of Coeur d’Alene. (more…)

Kootenai County Clerk Cliff Hayes sent out a press release explaining the delay in posting Tuesday’s election results online.

As reported in the release, there was a malfunction in the software which translated the tabulators’ results into a format which allowed those results to be posted on the County’s website.  The vote tabulating equipment, the equipment which reads the marked ballots and tabulates the results, performed without malfunction, so the election results were accurately tabulated.

OpenCdA asked Deputy Clerk Pat Raffee if the software malfunction affected only the results we consumers would see online on the County’s website, or did it also affect the Clerk’s ability to report the results accurately to the Secretary of State’s Office.  Deputy Clerk Raffee responded:

“We posted the same results to the Secretary of State that we posted to the website, at almost the same time, as usual.  So the period we had no postings on the website, the SOS got no data from us either; and when we picked back up posting to the website, we sent data to the SOS’s office again.”

So for those who might have been wondering, the software malfunction in Kootenai County on Tuesday night-Wednesday morning did not result in inaccurate information being sent to the Secretary of State’s office.

Accuracy was more important than speed.  That’s as true in reporting the results of the election as in tabulating them.