Hi all...
See this from the front page of today's Times?...(great example for us here-- let's do this in Dutchess!)...
[true, my resolution passed for link to county website to CarbonRally.com, and link was added-- but we need to do more!]
From "Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy" by Leslie Kaufman
[see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/science/earth/31compete.html ]
Paraphrasing-- "Homeowners rated on energy use and compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size using same heating fuel...Sacramento Municipal Utility District started this last April with 35,000 customers...Puget Sound Energy of Seattle started this last September with 40,000 customers...Central College/Pella, IA held competition among students to see who could be greenest"...
[...note as well-- Vassar College recently held a similar competition among their dorms on campus too...]
Also-- the article notes-- "In Massachusetts, the BrainShift Foundation, a nonprofit that uses games to raise environmental awareness, recruited towns to compete in a reality series, called "Energy Smackdown," which is shown on a local cable station. At the start of this year's season, 10 families from Cambridge, Medford and Arlington formed teams and competed against one another in conservation categories that included waste, heating fuel, electricity and food"....
Sounds like fun, right?...
So-- let's make this happen here in Dutchess in '09, folks!...
I've already reached out to the folks @ http://www.EnergySmackDown.com and http://www.BrainFound.org in Mass. to make this happen here, submitted documentation to our County Legislature's offices on this, and sent a letter to my contact @ Central Hudson-- as there in Mass. the local utility, National Grid, worked hand in hand with the City of Medford and TV3 Medford to make this happen-- why not here?...
[doubt need for this?...check out 350.org!]
Ball's in your court, people...
If you want to help bring http://www.EnergySmackDown.org here to Dutchess, contact us asap-- and zip off a letter to countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!...
Joel
489-5479/876-2488
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
[an energy smackdown for Dutchess-- Vince McM/WWF would be proud!]
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From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/science/earth/31compete.html ...
Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: January 30, 2009
A frowny face is not what most electric customers expect to see on their utility statements, but Greg Dyer got one.
He earned it, the utility said, by using a lot more energy than his neighbors.
"I have four daughters; none of my neighbors has that many children," said Mr. Dyer, 49, a lawyer who lives in Sacramento. He wrote back to the utility and gave it his own rating: four frowny faces.
Two other Sacramento residents, however, Paul Geisert and his wife, Mynga Futrell, were feeling good. They got one smiley face on their statement for energy efficiency and saw the promise of getting another.
"Our report card will quickly get better," Mr. Geisert wrote in an e-mail message to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
The district had been trying for years to prod customers into using less energy with tactics like rebates for energy-saving appliances. But the traditional approaches were not meeting the energy reduction goals set by the nonprofit utility's board.
So, in a move that has proved surprisingly effective, the district decided to tap into a time-honored American passion: keeping up with the neighbors.
Last April, it began sending out statements to 35,000 randomly selected customers, rating them on their energy use compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size that used the same heating fuel. The customers were also compared with the 20 neighbors who were especially efficient in saving energy.
Customers who scored high earned two smiley faces on their statements. "Good" conservation got a single smiley face. Customers like Mr. Dyer, whose energy use put him in the "below average" category, got frowns, but the utility stopped using them after a few customers got upset.
When the Sacramento utility conducted its first assessment of the program after six months, it found that customers who received the personalized report reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard statements - an improvement that Alexandra Crawford, a spokeswoman for the utility, said was very encouraging.
The approach has now been picked up by utilities in 10 major metropolitan areas eager to reap rewards through increased efficiencies, including Chicago and Seattle, according to Positive Energy, the software company that conceived of the reports and contracts to produce them. Following Sacramento's lead, they award smiley faces only.
"This is the next wave," said Todd Starnes, a residential energy efficiency manager with Puget Sound Energy, which started a pilot program in suburban Seattle with 40,000 customers in September.
The utility thinks behavior modification could be as effective in promoting conservation as trying to get customers to install new appliances is, Mr. Starnes said, and maybe more so.
Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, studies how to get Americans - even those who did not care about the environment - to lower energy consumption. And while there are many ways, Dr. Cialdini said, few are as effective as comparing people with their peers.
In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.
"It is fundamental and primitive," said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. "The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful."
Ms. Crawford, of the Sacramento district, said that many customers expressed gratitude for the feedback. For example, Tamara Kaestner, 36, who lives with her husband in nearby Folsom, Calif., said that since receiving her first personalized statement, she had bought a new energy-efficient washer and dryer, put her lights on timers and unplugged her kegerator - a cooler for draft beer. Her monthly electricity consumption is now on a par with that of her neighbors, Ms. Kaestner said.
Colleges have been using rivalry between themselves and even between dormitories to reduce energy use for over a decade, and they are refining their techniques.
At Central College in Pella, Iowa, students in a new green dorm can go to the school's Web site to find out how much power their suite is using and compare it with that of other suites.
"It gets pretty intense," said Michael Lubberden, director of facilities planning and management for the college. "The students even go off campus to charge their cellphones."
Competition among homeowners is still rare, but is becoming more widespread. In Massachusetts, the BrainShift Foundation, a nonprofit that uses games to raise environmental awareness, recruited towns to compete in a reality series, called "Energy Smackdown," which is shown on a local cable station.
At the start of this year's season, 10 families from Cambridge, Medford and Arlington formed teams and competed against one another in conservation categories that included waste, heating fuel, electricity and food. Patty Nolan, 51, who lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, agreed to participate because, she said, although family members thought of themselves as "environmentally conscious," they knew they could be doing more.
But her motives shifted after eight months of trash weigh-ins and comparative meter readings.
"At the beginning, the competition wasn't what interested me," Ms. Nolan said, "but then when we lost a challenge to Arlington by one pound of carbon, I realized I really wanted to win."
Though keeping two cars, Ms. Nolan said, the family is now much more conscious about everyday choices. They use bicycles more often, they have cut down on eating beef (raising cows requires more energy than raising vegetables), and they argue about whether airplane travel is really necessary.
"It really blows your monthly carbon budget," Ms. Nolan explained.
Donald Kelley, executive director of the BrainShift Foundation, said the conservation outcomes of the competition had been far greater than he had predicted, with households reducing consumption up to 66 percent.
"As Americans, we are good at entertainment and competition," Mr. Kelley said. "It's why on 'American Idol' they get 40 million voters. It's the part of this culture that people really understand, and we should be harnessing it."
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Andi Novick's right; also below-- new report from county's Voting Integrity Task Force...
[note-- scroll down a bit for actual text of report delivered last Mon. by Joanne Lukacher, Gary Kenton of county's Voting Integrity Task Force (thanx also-- Helen Grosso: http://www.re-mediaetc.blogspot.com )]
[also: check out must-read Jan. 23 letter < Heidi Marshall/Voting Machine Service Center of Gerry NY:
http://sites.google.com/site/remediaetc/home/documents/VotingMachineServiceCenterletter.pdf !....(letter makes clear that it IS quite possible for parts to be supplied to lever machines in Dutchess!)...Joel (489-5479)]
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From Rhinebeck's Andi Novick (Andinovick@aol.com)...
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:24:05 EST
Subject: What are you willing to do to Save the Last Transparent Voting System in the US?
Dear friends,
The fight to save the Last Transparent Electoral System in America is really heating us now. Various factions across the state are coming together to stand up and say NO to replacing our reliable transparent lever voting system with a concealed software-based system that denies our constitutional right to a secure vote and will cost us millions over and above the money the federal government has allotted. At a time of economic crisis, when the State's finances are frozen, the counties - which means the citizens- should not be told to come up with additional millions to pay for a voting system we don't want and don't need.
As things heat up, the work load increases and we need more of you to help. I heard this quote as part of the Obama festivities and it says what I'm trying to say now:
"A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good. A government is invigorated when each one of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation. … Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us." --Barbara Jordan 1976 Keynote Address
I wrote this article to demonstrate what a transparent, theft-deterring voting system looks like. It's what we've had in New York for centuries and what we're about to lose unless we all band together. We can save New York and lift the rest of the nation. Seehttp://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Last-Transparent-Democ-by-andi-novick-090130-838.html. We can't rely on landslides to win elections (you really think he won by only 53% of the vote? and how would you know if the count was invisible?).
Thanks,
andi
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition,
FOR CITIZENS WILLING TO PARTICIPATE:
1) We need to start raising money. Litigation & organizing a State is expensive. Please go to
2) Get Resolutions Passed by Your County Legislature or City Council. Go to
3) Circulate the Petition more widely than you have before:http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/save_ny_levers
4) Contact Joanne Lukacher atJoanne@re-mediaetc.org to do one the following:
A) Work on creating a list of media contacts (just some time on the computer).
B) Fundraising- there's a variety of tasks one could take on here.
C) Distributing information to media, blogs, press releases.
D) Communicating with press as this heats up & once the litigation gets going.
E) Rapid response team of people who will respond to articles in press and/or blogs.
F) Anytime you can devote to small tasks.
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[recall-- sent below out Weds....(with new/updated list of tons more Dutchess folks on board; join us!)]
New voting integrity resolution below; view report < Joanne Lukacher, Gary Kenton...
Great presentation Monday night from Joanne Lukacher (and Gary Kenton) of our county's Voting Integrity Task Force (thanks much also on this to Andi Novick and Helen Grosso for much hard work!)...
[you can watch Joanne L.'s testimony Monday nite here: http://www.totalwebcasting.com/live/dutchess/ ;
resolution from yours truly created this task force last Feb. ; see http://www.re-mediaetc.blogspot.com ]
Joanne, on behalf of the VITF, made the following three common-sense recommendations:
-- for the Dutchess County Legislature to form a bipartisan committee to consider joining the lawsuit being developed by the Election Transparency Coalition of New York, and urging other counties to join the effort, as is now under consideration in Nassau County...
-- for the Dutchess County Legislature to send a copy of the December 2008 resolution to every state legislator in New York, urging them to amend the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005...
-- for the Dutchess County Legislature to send a copy of the December resolution to every Congressional representative in New York, providing them with background material and asking them to work to make clear that lever machines are allowed under the Help America Vote Act...
So-- a bit earlier this evening I submitted to our County Legislature's offices for those recommendations!
[...thanx to Co. Leg.'s Sandy Goldberg/Marge Horton for interest in co-sponsoring a resolution like this...]
Crucial, folks-- your letters sent to countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us to get on agenda and passed!...
Joanne also shared with us Monday this must-read update Sunday's Binghamton Press/Sun-Bulletin:
"Old Lever Machines May Count Vote Again: Test of New Machines is Behind Schedule" N. Dooling
http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20090125/NEWS01/901250341/1001
Perhaps most importantly, if you haven't yet, please sign on to Andi Novick/EDA petition!...
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/ny_levers_petition [...and pass it along to all you know...]
Among over 1500+ endorsers from across NY, Dutchess supporters locally include the following:
Rhinebeck's Beverly Canin, Patricia Carroll-Mathes, Meg Crawford, Jane Curran, Debi Duke and Steve Rosenberg, Joanne Gelb, Guy and Mary Hathaway, Barbara Hugo, Joel and Kate Kopp, Susan Nagel, Carl Parris, Klara Sauer, Warren Smith, Janeth Thoron, and Barb Whan; Clinton's Bronwyn Bevan, Ann Scibenski, Doug and Elizabeth Smyth, Marian Thompson, and Phillippa Weiland; Hyde Park's Joan Grishman and Doris Kelly; Poughkeepsie's Jim Beretta and Doreen Tignanelli, Fred and Alice Bunnell, Rosemarie Calista, Jim Doxsey, Jacquie Efram, Richard Hathaway, Kurt Hornick, Gary Kenton, Carolann Koehler, Pat Lamanna, Donna Lenhart, Gerald Mahoney, Doug McComb, Carol Miyake, and Karl Volk; Beacon's Tom Baldino; Milan's Jose Reissig; Fishkill's Dori Dangerfield; East Fishkill's Richard Dennison and Lena Smolon; Wappinger's Rich McHugh, and Red Hook's Doris Soroko
Note-- just got this info from Howard Stanislevic (hscomms@verizon.net) of Election Defense Alliance...
"Joel-- here are new names of Dutchess County residents signed on to petition for 2009 so far:
Carolyn Abedor
Jeffrey Antevil
Sybil Baldwin
Svend Beecher
Heather Bergen
Ronny Borrok
Clare Brandt
Mark Burns
Maretta Callahan
Darrah Cloud
Mette Coleman
Bernadette Condesso
Margaret Crawford
Jennifer Dahnert
Carole DeSaram
Joanne Engle
Jeannie Friedman
Karen Froehner
Elizabeth Halpern
John Hausam
Stewart Kahn
Cindy Kirtland
Charles Lachman
Nina Lynch
Linda Manny
Michael Mazzarella
Melissa McNeese
Franc Palaia
Steve Sansola
Klara Sauer
Ellen Silverstein
Linda Souers
Ward Stanley
Jared Suttles
Sarah Sweeny
Peter Sweeny
Trea Sweeny
Edmund Tobin
Barbara Wells"
[of course, Joanne Lukacher & Gary Kenton of county's Voting Integrity Task Force signed on too-- and Andi's legal efforts also have the strong support of Teresa Hommel of http://www.WheresthePaper.org !]
All of those folks agree with Andi Novick, Election Defense Alliance (me too) to endorse this statement:
"The following New York residents are opposed to concealed vote counting on software-driven voting systems and support the litigation to declare this practice unconstitutional, insisting on their right to a secure, transparent voting system, which our lever machines provide."
[click on this link to see all 1500+ names from across NYS on board in support of Andi's lawsuit; see:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/nypetition/signatures.php?pageNum_Recordset_levers=0&totalRows_Recordset_levers=581 ]
Pass it on!...
Joel
489-5479/876-2488
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
[1 last must-read-- http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/2008/07/facts-myths-about-voting-in-new-york.html !]
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[again-- this new resolution just submitted by yours truly to Co. Leg. offices...if you want to make sure that it actually gets on to a meeting agenda and passed, email countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!]
WHEREAS, over and over again year after year electronic voting machines, both touchscreen and optical scan, continue to malfunction; just last year thousands of phantom votes were reported by Sequoia voting machines in the Washington, DC September primaries, and
WHEREAS, in Upshur County, West Virginia, this past Election Day optical scan ballots had to be recounted after it was discovered that machines were double-counting early ballots, and
WHEREAS, in Palm Beach, Florida just this past November, re-scans of 262 rejected ballots revealed different results each time they were scanned; the very same thing also happened in Oakland County, Michigan as well, and
WHEREAS, there are many election commissioners all over New York who continue to strongly support being able to keep using lever voting machines in their counties, and
WHEREAS, the Dutchess County Legislature passed a resolution in December 2008 requesting the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections to enact laws, rules, and regulations that specifically authorize the continued use of lever-style voting machines, and
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature form a bipartisan committee to consider joining the lawsuit being developed by the Election Transparency Coalition of New York, and urging other counties to join the effort, as is now under consideration in Nassau County, and be it further
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature send a copy of the December 2008 resolution to every state legislator in New York, urging them to amend the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, and be if further
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature send a copy of the December resolution to every Congressional representative in New York, providing them with background material and asking them to work to make clear that lever machines are allowed under the Help America Vote Act, and be it further
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution itself be forwarded to Governor David Paterson, New York State Senators Stephen Saland and Vincent Leibell, Members of the Assembly Greg Ball, Thomas Kirwan, Kevin Cahill, Joel Miller, and Marcus Molinaro, and Frank Skartados, Co-Executive Directors of the New York State Board of Elections Todd Valentine and Stanley Zalen, and New York State Board of Elections Commissioners James Walsh, Douglas Kellner, Evelyn Aquila, and Gregory Paterson, and Dutchess County Board of Elections Commissioners David Gamache and Fran Knapp.
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[resolution here below that passed unanimously in December-- referred to in new resolution above]
WHEREAS, for many decades Dutchess County has successfully used mechanical lever-style voting machines, with very few problems, and is desirous of continuing to do so, and
WHEREAS, New York State enacted the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) and other laws that require all lever machines to be replaced and prohibit the use of any lever machines in any future elections in New York State, and
WHEREAS, Dutchess County believes that the continued used of lever-style voting machines is in the best interest of the public and should be permitted to be used in future elections, and
WHEREAS, the Dutchess County Legislature passed resolution #207026, requesting New York State to allow Dutchess County to continue the use of the lever voting machine, and
WHEREAS, the New York State legislation relating to voting machines far exceeds the federal requirements of HAVA (Help America Vote Act), and
WHEREAS, the State's statutorily required elimination of lever-style voting machines is unnecessary, inappropriate, and costly to Dutchess County taxpayers,
therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature hereby requests the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections to enact laws, rules, and regulations that specifically authorize the continued use of lever-style voting machines, and be it further
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to Governor David Paterson, New York State Senators Stephen Saland and Vincent Leibell, Members of the Assembly Greg Ball, Thomas Kirwan, Kevin Cahill, Joel Miller, and Marcus Molinaro, Member-elect of the Assembly Frank Skartados, Co-Executive Directors of the New York State Board of Elections Todd Valentine and Stanley Zalen, and New York State Board of Elections Commissioners James Walsh, Douglas Kellner, Evelyn Aquila, and Gregory Paterson.
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The Dutchess County Voting Integrity Task Force's report last Monday to our County Legislature...
[again-- this brand, spankin' new; pls fwd this widely-- along with new message from Andi N. above!]
Voting Integrity Task Force Statement to the Dutchess County Legislature
26 January 2009
First we would like to commend the legislature for the sensible stand you took last month with the passage of a resolution toward retaining our lever voting machines. From what I understand, your message has resonated with county election boards throughout the state as each county struggles to guarantee a safe and responsible system for casting and counting our votes while acting as good stewards of the taxpayers' money in this difficult economy.
We have come before you several times in the past 6 months in order to make statements on various public issues from the perspective of the Voting Integrity Task Force. Your action in passing this resolution unanimously shows that you have been listening to us and to other members of the public as well as to election officials and professional staff. We will therefore not repeat the information you clearly know. (We are attaching here a copy of our statement in the public budget hearing.)We would, however, like to clarify one or two issues which continue to be either under-reported or misunderstood.
Although we were spared the spectacle of Florida 2000 or Ohio in 2004 with regard to the presidential race, there were many questionable and/or contentious outcomes in 2008 which throw a light on the kinds of voting issues which this task force has examined. These include the reliability of electronic vote counting, the pall of vendor dependence over the autonomy and authority of our election officials as public guarantors of the security of elections, and the reliability of random audits and recounts, including the near impossibility of maintaining and demonstrating an adequate chain of custody with regard to post-election verification.
We submit for your reading a list of examples, but would like to highlight here a few more high profile computer failures from the 2008 elections including thousands of phantom votes reported by Sequoia voting machines in the Washington, DC September primaries, blamed by the company on static discharge and/or, the old stand-by, human error and not defective hardware or software, explanations dismissed by the DC council committee where a special committee is now examining the incident. In Upshur County, WV all Election Day optical scan ballots had to be re-counted after it was discovered that machines were double counting early ballots. In Palm Beach, FL re-scans of 262 rejected ballots revealed different results each time they were scanned. Differing tallies for the same ballots also plagued Oakland County, Michigan where local clerks were prohibited from performing any maintenance or cleaning because it would void the machine warranty, while the saga of the Minnesota senatorial election re-count raises constitutional issues involving chain of custody of the ballots.
We would also like to clarify the question of the maintenance of the lever machines if we are allowed to continue using them since many people are under the impression that the machine parts are unavailable and they will no longer be able to be repaired or replaced. At least one lever machine company in NYS is indeed on the verge of going out of business since the direction of the state has been to make their machines legally obsolete, however, the company does have a warehouse of parts which would enable the lever machines in New York State to be maintained indefinitely, and the company, AVM, stands ready to do business if they foresee a continuing market for their goods and services. We have attached a letter from that company. However, time is of the essence here since effective January 1st of this year they no longer provide employment to their skilled technicians. Unlike with the electronic ballot scanners, basic repair and maintenance of the lever machines can also be performed by local board of elections technicians.
Finally we observe that Dutchess County, through the passage of this resolution has become a beacon for the rest of the state. One thing which has become abundantly clear in the course of our study is that while there is huge support from election commissioners and other officials across the state for retaining out lever machines, a sentiment that has been bolstered by the enormous implications of the national economic crisis, there is also a huge leadership vacuum. (As an example of other counties dealing with this crisis see the newspaper article of 1- 25-09 from Broome County). Dutchess County is in a unique position to fill that leadership role. We can no longer afford to wait and see how politics and the economy will affect how we conduct fair and transparent elections, the most important of our privileges and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy. We urge the Dutchess County legislature both to continue to lead by example but also to take an active role in organizing their fellow county legislators throughout the state, beginning with the following:
1- Forwarding a copy of the Dutchess County resolution to every state legislator, urging them to amend ERMA to allow for the retention of the lever machines.
2- Forwarding a copy of the resolution to each NY State congressional representative, providing them with background material and asking them to work to make clear that lever machines are allowed under HAVA.
3- Forming a bi-partisan legislative committee to consider joining the lawsuit being developed by the Election Transparency Coalition of New York, and urging other counties to join in this effort. Such an alliance is currently under consideration by Nassau County. We have attached a two page synopsis of the litigation for your consideration. If Dutchess were to join, other counties would likely follow suit.
It has been our privilege to contribute to the vital mission of the Voting Integrity Task Force and we are happy to continue to assist the legislature as advisors on any of the recommended actions or other voting related activities.
Respectfully submitted,
Joanne Lukacher
Gary Kenton
Helen Grosso
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What New York Election Commissioners have to look forward to if Computerized Voting Systems are Permitted to Replace our Existing Lever Voting System
Excerpted below are just some of the ways in which New York's County Boards of Election could be prevented from fulfilling their duties through no fault of their own, were NY to abandon our lever voting machines. These are the actual experiences of honest men and women across the nation, thwarted in their ability to do their job due to their dependence on irresponsible voting system vendors with their overly complex and shoddily made computerized voting equipment (be they DREs or Optical Scanners).
In New York, Sequoia is the company that will be servicing and maintaining the Dominion Optical Scanner, chosen as the Ballot Marking Device by the majority of NY counties. About a third of the voters in the State will be using systems provided by ES&S. The problems with software-driven DREs or Optical Scanners are similar regardless of the vendor. All of the voting vendors' performance records have been equally problematic.
The following examples of election officials' experiences conducting elections on computerized voting machines are all documented in mainstream media reports and the citations included herein:
- Texas Director of Elections, Ann McGeehan, referring to ES&S's poor performance, described the preparations for the 2006 elections "completely unacceptable and disturbing ….We regret the unacceptable position that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their contracted vendor."
- Illinois Commissioner of Elections in Cook County, citing tabulation problems by the Sequoia's optical scanners and DREs in the 2006 election said: "The administration of this election was a train wreck." Sequoia officials insisted however that the system "performed very well, overall."
- Texas election programmer William Singer wrote the Secretary of State's office after the 2004 vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected to do in order to 'pull off' an election …was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election industry."
- Elections supervisor Ion Sancho of Leon County Florida, concerned about the security of the Diebold optical scanners, arranged for Finnish computer programmer Harri Hursti to independently examine a Diebold optical scanner. Hursti demonstrated how easy it was to subvert the memory card without detection. Instead of correcting the gaping security hole, Diebold responded by pressuring the election supervisor to not reveal Diebold's flaws.
- In 2007 a Princeton University computer scientist hacked a Sequoia AVC computer (DRE) within a few seconds. Rather than addressing the vulnerability, Sequoia pointed to its own misleading marketing material that claimed: "tamper proof products, including.... the AVC Advantage, are sought after from coast to coast for their accuracy and reliability." However the scientist described:
[H]ow simple it was for me to access the ROM memory chips containing the firmware that controls the vote-counting. Contrary to Sequoia's assertions in their promotional literature, there were no security seals protecting the ROMs.
- Another Princeton professor, Ed Felten, found that the same Sequoia machines had vote count discrepancies in the 2008 Primaries. The public counter failed to match the number of ballots cast, which was inconsistent with Sequoia's explanation for the discrepancies.
- After Union County, NJ clerk Joanne Rajoppi persuaded the Constitutional Officers Association of NJ to have an independent study of the machines done by Felten, a Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and her county. … Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.
- Finally, a Princeton report released just three weeks before the 2008 General Election, per a court order, stated:
"[S]ometimes the AVC Advantage does not properly record the intent of the voter. …. The AVC Advantage's susceptibility to installation of a fraudulent vote-counting program is far more than an imperfection: it is a fatal flaw.
- Optical-scan machines made by Election Systems & Software failed pre-election tests in Oakland County, Michigan, producing different tallies for the same ballots every time,. The top election official in, County Clerk Ruth Johnson wrote a letter to the Election Assistance Commission requesting a federal directive to allow county clerks to conduct random audits to test machine accuracy. Johnson stated that local clerks were prohibited from performing any maintenance or cleaning as it would void the warranty, and that conflicting vote totals had surfaced in other areas of the state.
- California's Secretary of State's 2007 Top to Bottom Review of the voting computers in the state revealed that Sequoia's voting system could be subverted without "leaving any evidence that the security of the system had been compromised.... Sequoia's security hardening consisted in large part of a customer relations campaign to allay fears that tampering would be a problem."
- Arkansas' White County Clerk described the problems in a runoff election in 2006 as "a royal mess." County Election Commissioner Nunnally wrote to the Secretary of State complaining that, "ES&S has now proven in four states that they are unable to meet deadlines for the delivery of programming, regardless of the time period they have to work. .... ES&S is set up to box us into [sic] using their proprietary services for election preparation. They are doing this in every state they sell. They don't have the resources to meet the needs for these services and that is a verifiable fact at this point."
- The state of California sued Diebold for misrepresentations made to the Secretary of State regarding the installation of uncertified software on their machines. A False Claims Act lawsuit filed against Diebold was settled in 2006 by Diebold paying $2.6 million.
- The Indiana Election Commission discovered in March, 2004, that ES&S had installed uncertified firmware in some of their voting machines. When forced to reinstall the certified version, it didn't tabulate the votes correctly. An exasperated member of the election commission said, "I just think I was absolutely lied to by your CEO ... I sat in this room and you all lied to me. You're so derelict in your duties...."
- In 2005 Indiana sued ES&S after it once again installed uncertified software in the voting system of another Indiana county. Indiana claimed ES&S lied about swapping out the uncertified software. The lawsuit was settled by ES&S paying $1.2 million.
- In 2006 Indiana filed a formal complaint against ES&S for failing to provide working equipment and ballots in several counties in time for an election, and providing defective voting equipment, software and services.
- Oregon's Secretary of State sued ES&S in 2006 for breach of contract for failure to deliver voting machines. ES&S had agreed to all of the standard state contract terms, but subsequently informed the SoS that it would not agree to the terms of the contract, and would not deliver the voting machines unless the Secretary changed the terms of the contract. The SoS refused to alter the contract to meet ES&S's demands, which led to the lawsuit. "We will not leave our elections in the hands of companies that do not follow through on their obligations, and we will not be coerced into altering our contracts."
- San Francisco's city attorney sued ES&S for "a panoply of wrongdoing that includes fraud, breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation and multiple violations of California's False Claims Act and Unfair Competition Law." Blaming the vendor for its failure to meet the terms of its contract with the city, SF's attorney said:
San Francisco's experience with ES&S raises extremely troubling questions, not simply about the integrity of this company's technology, but about the integrity of this company itself. ....There can be no more important duty in a representative democracy than to conduct elections, and it is a travesty to see that duty so flagrantly undermined by the fraudulent conduct of an election systems vendor.
The litigation was subsequently settled for $3.5 million dollars.
- Iowa's Pottawattamie County Auditor Mary Jo Drake found a county-wide ballot programming problem in its ES&S optical scanners that went completely undetected until after the 2006 primary election when hand counts revealed that votes had been switched between candidates: the Republican candidate would have lost the election according to the machines.
The faulty programming affected every race on the ballot, and the county ordered a full hand recount of all races. …. [otherwise] the wrong candidates would have taken office. … The gross errors, like Pottawattamie's, are the ones that are caught. But if an error affected only a race for the U.S. Congress, governor or the state senate -- and that race was closely fought -- no one would know.
- Pennsylvania's Cumberland County undertook a 9.5 hour hand recount after a problem involving an ES&S software coding error in a 2005 election. The hand count changed the winner of the election.
- In Arkansas, Clark County, 2006 ES&S failed to print ballots on time requiring local officials to print the ballots on an office printer and count them by hand.
- Washington, Grays Harbor, 2004 ES&S scanners were downloading some disks twice, requiring the county to recount the ballots, changing the outcome of the election. County Auditor Spatz was surprised when told that ES&S scanners had double-counted ballots in other states.
- Upshur County, West Virginia, filed a complaint with its Secretary of State over machine failures in the May 2008 election. During the hand recanvassing of the May election, the Commission "tossed out all Election Day optical scan ballot results and recounted them," when it discovered that the machines double counted the early voting ballots.
- White County, Arkansas experienced machine failures which forced election officials to fully hand count the ballots, changing ALL machine-reported results, and overturned the victory in one race. "No voting machines functioned properly in any of the 32 White County voting sites on Tuesday."
- Wayne County, West Virginia was forced to count paper receipts from DREs that erroneously recorded voter choices in the recent 2008 election. "Though only a small number of paper receipts have been checked thus far, the errors appear to be widespread and affect several races…. The commission will not certify the election results until the Secretary of State's office investigates the matter."
- In the nation's capital, the D.C. Board of Elections and Sequoia were both blamed for a 2008 primary election blunder that caused thousands of phantom votes to appear in initial results. Although a report from a D.C. Council committee dismissed Sequoia's theories that human error or static discharge, and not defective software or hardware, was at fault when a cartridge from Precinct 141 added thousands of votes, it committed the special committee to examine the effectiveness of the elections board and its top staff.
- Miscounts by Sequoia Voting Sytems op-scans were also implicated in a disputed 2008 judicial election in Palm Beach County Florida. Re-scans of 262 rejected ballots revealed differing results every time they were scanned. Attorney Gerald Richman said the findings showed the machines can't be trusted. "We have to get a new election or a hand recount," he said.
- Finally I refer you to a 2007 Electoral Commission Report produced in response to the problems with the Dominion optical scanner used in Britain last year for the first time. Dominion is new to the field, but as the report reveals, the myriad of breakdowns and computer problems experienced by election officials in Britain are not at all new. As the annexed newspaper account describes, the elections "ended in chaos as the electronic votes were chucked out following a catalogue or errors and the whole thing was recounted by hand, delaying results by several days." The article went on to state that, "The list of things that went wrong is far too extensive to repeat here, but if you want an example of how not to manage an IT project, look no further than the link at the end of this story." The link is to the Electoral Commission Report prepared for this pilot project in which certain jurisdictions had experimented with the use of these optical scanners. The Report found:
The pilot scheme did not facilitate the counting of votes. … [In some jurisdictions] no contests were counted electronically. The scanning of ballot papers took a lot longer than expected due to the need to scan certain batches more than once. … [S]ignificant delays in the count process [led] to a reversion to a manual count. … The use of electronic counting significantly increased the total cost of delivering these elections compared with a manual count.
The Dominion Optical Scanners are of course the ones selected as ballot marking devices by most of New York's counties. As BMDs they only have to mark ballots which in the 2008 election, were hand counted. It is as counting devices however, that the history of optical scanner use, Sequoia's deficient performance record and the experience of British election commissioners' should cause a rational State Board of Election to refrain from thrusting these problematic voting machines onto the counties.
In addition to the above examples, there are thousands of additional reports of failed DREs and optical scanners. There is no dispute in the scientific community or in New York that voting software even were it to work well, can only be verified by a partial hand count of the paper produced by the DRE or counted by the optical scanner. The closer the margin of victory reported by the voting system, the larger the hand count would have to be confirm that the outcome was correct. And should the manual count reveal inconsistencies, this could necessitate a full hand count. For an election that spans multiple counties, this means the hand count would have to be expanded, even in counties where no errors were found initially.
Thus the new computerized system planned for New York will produce unknowable results which will then be checked after election night by counting paper. New York has a lever voting system that does not rely on paper ballots to prove the accuracy of its elections and that gets the job done on election night. How can we surrender a functioning time-tested, reliable voting system to one so inferior, unreliable and far costlier?
Footnotes:
Ann McGeehan, Letter to Texas Election Officials, Status of Ballot and Programming Card Orders for the May 13, 2006 Elections, April 24, 2006 available at http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/laws/statusofballot.shtml
Vote snafu: Some blame new equipment. Chicago Sun-Times. Mar 23, 2006. by Steve Patterson. http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws-machine23.html
William Singer letter to Geoffrey S. Connor, Texas Secretary of State, July 29, 2004, available at http://www.bradblog.com/Docs/WilliamSinger_TarrantSosComplaint_072904.doc
Harry Hursti, "Security Alert: July 4, 2005, Critical Security Issues with Diebold Optical Scan Design," Black Box Voting, available at http://blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf
Andrew Appel, How I bought used voting machines on the Internet, February 8, 2007 available at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/avc/
Ed Felten, Freedom to Tinker Blog, Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies, http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/evidence-new-jersey-election-discrepancies
Ibid. NJ Election Discrepancies Worse Than Previously Thought, Contradict Sequoia's Explanation, http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/nj-election-discrepancies-worse-previously-thought-contradict-sequoias-explanation
Newark Star-Ledger, Plan for voting machine probe dropped after lawsuit threat, http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/03/voting_machine_maker_threatens.html
Appel, et al, Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H DRE Voting Machine http://citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/
Kim Zetter, Wired Threat Level Blog, ES&S Voting Machines in Michigan Flunk Tests, Don't Tally Votes Consistently, http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/michigan-electi.html
Scott Fulton, Three e-voting systems susceptible to attack, California Team Finds, BetaNews, July 30, 2007 http://www.betanews.com/article/Three_EVoting_Systems_Susceptible_to_Attack_California_Team_Finds/1185822412
Election 2006: 'a royal mess': White County Election Commissioner claims state advised to break the law. The Daily Citizen. June 5, 2006. http://www.thedailycitizen.com/articles/2006/06/06/news/top_stories/top01.txt
California Attorney General Press Release, Attorney General Lockyer announces $2.6 million settlement with Diebold in electronic voting lawsuit, November 10, 2004, http://ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/release.php?id=843
Brian Burdick March 15, 2004 quote on WishTV web page now removed, referring to meeting in which ES&S management lied; see Indiana Election Commission Minutes, March 10, 2004, Item F, pp 33-38, available at http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/pdfs/IEC_Minutes_March_10_2004.pdf
Jason Thomas, Voting machine company to pay county $1.2 million, The Indianapolis Star (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News) August 15, 2005, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-9538963_ITM
Indiana Secretary of State Press Release, Rokita serves notice of violations to voting machine vendor, April 28, 2006, http://www.in.gov/sos/press/2006/04282006.html
Oregon Secretary of State Press Release: Bradbury sues voting vendor (ES&S), April 20, 2006, http://www.sos.state.or.us/executive/pressreleases/2006/0420.html
Fog City Journal's coverage, http://www.fogcityjournal.com/news_in_brief/pr_herrera_ess_071120.shtml, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/01/23/BA4AUJQ2D.DTL&o=0&type=printable
Sean Flaherty, In An Age Of Computerized Voting, Is It Possible To Maintain Voting Integrity? July 03, 2006, originally in The Iowa City Press-Citizen, http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1460&Itemid=113, Knauss, Leaders, Williams win in GOP supervisors primary. The Daily Nonpareil. June 8, 2006.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16757670&BRD=2703&PAG=461&dept_id=555106&rfi=6
DJ race still up in the air. Sentinel, November 11, 2005. http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2005/11/11/news/news02.txt
Archive: http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=6323
Ballot problem could prolong count tonight The Daily Siftings Herald, May 23, 2006 by Donna Hilton. Story archived at http://www.siftingsherald.com/articles/2006/05/23/news/news1.txt
Gray's Harbor County re-count boosts Gregoire. November 16, 2004. By Rebecca Cook, Associated Press. http://www.kgw.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D86D7FA80.html
Amanda Hayes, County finds major election blunder, May 21, 2008. The Record Delta (Buckhannon, WV) available at http://www.therecorddelta.com/V2_news_articles.php?heading=0&page=&story_id=1490
Warren Watkins, Winner rejoices, then deflated, May 21, 2008. Daily Citizen (Searcy, Arkansas), http://www.thedailycitizen.com/articles/2008/05/22/news/local_news/news01.txt
Bryan Chambers, Complaint filed on Wayne voting machines, May 22, 2008. The Herald-Dispatch (Huntington, WV), http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/x1266665102
Nikita Stewart, Washington Post, Firm, Elections Board Faulted in Voting Mishap
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/08/AR2008100803542.html
Mark Hollis, Miami Sun Sentinal, Lawyer says Palm Beach County voting machines need repair, http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/palm/blog/2008/10/_attorney_gerald_richman_said.html
The Electoral Commission, UK, Stratford and Warwick Pilot Report, Aug, 2007, http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0012/13215/Stratfordstatutoryevaluationreport_27188-20108__E__N__S__W__.pdf
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/08/03/e-voting-comedy-of-errors-in-shakespeares-stratford
McCarthy, Stanislevic, Lindeman, Ash, Addona and Batcher, The American Statistician, Percentage-Based versus Statistical-Power-Based Vote Tabulation Audits, http://verifiedvoting.org/downloads/TAS_paper.pdf
Philip Stark, The Annals of Applied Statistics, Conservative Statistical Post-Election Audits, http://statistics.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/conservativeElectionAudits07.pdf
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From http://sites.google.com/site/remediaetc/home/documents/VotingMachineServiceCenterletter.pdf ...
Voting Machine Service Center, Inc
PO Box 261
Gerry, NY 14740
vote@netsync.net
716-287-2090
January 23, 2009
To Whom It May Concern:
Voting Machine Service Center, Inc (VMSC) has been in business for over 32 years.
During those 32 years, it has serviced the Automatic Lever Voting Machine (AVM)
along with supplying all the parts and technical support necessary for the AVM. At no
time during those years, was it unable to fulfill any order requests from our customers in
New York State or any other states that use the AVM.
In addition, VMSC purchased the mechanical automatic voting machine division from
Sequoia Pacific in February 2001, thus making Voting Machine Service Center, Inc. the
sole authorized mechanical automatic voting machine company.
VMSC also manufactures parts and supplies or subcontracts this to different suppliers
and vendors according to AVM original prints and specifications. Shoup paper rolls are
another supply that VMSC provides.
VMSC has not authorized any other election company to sell, produce, or distribute its
product. This includes but is not limited to Printer packs and paper rolls for the AVM.
Due to lack of sufficient orders over the past two years, VMSC regrets that it will not be
able to fully service its customers as it has in the past. However, going forward in 2009
and beyond, VMSC will be able to sell to you items that are currently in stock on a first
come first served basis. Other parts and supplies may be specially ordered, given a
sufficient deposit, lead time and final payment prior to shipping. Minimum orders may
also be required.
Given the above conditions, VMSC can say with confidence that the AVM lever
machines in the State of New York could be maintained indefinitely.
Sincerely,
Heidi L. Marshall
Cc; file
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[recall this too; Joanne, Gary, Helen ended up effective on this; $$$ taken out of '09 budget for opscans!]
Voting Integrity Task Force Statement to the Dutchess County Legislature Budget Hearing
December 4th 2008
We are here representing the Voting Integrity Task Force, a citizens task for created by unanimous vote of the County Legislature to study and make recommendations on how we cast and count our votes in Dutchess County.
We will be making a formal presentation to the legislature at their regular public meeting on January 26, 2009 at which time we will be making the case for retaining our present lever voting machines based on their overwhelming superiority to software dependent machines, such as the optical scanners, in terms of security & transparency.
Tonight we are here to discuss cost.
Allow me to preface my remarks by saying that with the provision of Ballot Marking Devices at every polling place Dutchess County is now in compliance with the requirements of HAVA, the federal Help America Vote Act.
Looking over the projected budget of the Board of Elections several new items, many of which will become ongoing annual expenses appear to be directly attributable to the conversion to electronic vote counting. These include:
Annual costs of leasing a new, climate controlled storage and work facility $75,000
Electricity for this facility $23,000
Additional staff will be needed to prepare and maintain the machines and the vulnerability of these machines to indetectable tampering will require new full time security measures.
Because staff will be working at the additional storage/office facility on a regular basis, employee mileage reimbursement allowance has doubled.
Additional commercial printing costs for the paper ballots to accommodate these machines will add another $160,000 over last year's budget.
There is a new line item for an additional 119,000 worth of software for 2009.
There will be a need for new equipment, among them privacy booths for the voters and special cases for securing and transporting the paper ballots.
The cost of office supplies for the Board of Election has more than tripled from $46,000 in 2008 to almost $183,000 for next year
The 2009 budget also anticipates an additional $150,000 for professional and other service for this new equipment.
Transportation of the op-scans is more specialized - requiring climate controlled and air-cushioned trucks. It is to be assumed that these additional costs will also affect our towns and villages each time they must set up for a school board election, local budget vote or special referendum.
The Board of Elections budget reflects 1.3 million in income from a new line item called an election service charge. Is it intended that this money will be collected from the local governments, the towns and villages, as recommended by the county executive?
The above items are the known expenses to which can be assigned a budget estimate.
Unknowable expenses include the cost of mandatory audits and re-counts to check the accuracy of the Optical Scanners. What happens when there are missing votes, misplaced ballots and phantom ballot readings as are appearing in the ongoing re-count of the Minnesota senate race? These "glitches" are far from isolated and have been a regular feature of software dependent vote counting around the country.
Remember that these increased annual costs will be permanent and escalating.
The Optical scan machines have a 5 year warranty. Then what? HAVA helped pay the first time. Who pays in 5 years?
We can't put a price on our right to cast our votes and see that they are accurately counted as cast . What we can do is to allocate our resources wisely. The lever machines are not perfect but, in direct contrast with the Optical Scanners, failures are rare and tampering is difficult, easily detectable and does not spread from machine to machine. These wonders of mechanical engineering have lasted in many cases close to a century and can continue to count our votes into the indefinite future. We own these machines and they can do the job with little further expenditure. Let's put our money into making them work better by maintaining, renovating and perhaps improving them and into training a new generation of poll workers in the protocols which accompany them, all designed to assure and protect and accurately count our votes without unpredictable and ever increasing expense.
[also: check out must-read Jan. 23 letter < Heidi Marshall/Voting Machine Service Center of Gerry NY:
http://sites.google.com/site/remediaetc/home/documents/VotingMachineServiceCenterletter.pdf !....(letter makes clear that it IS quite possible for parts to be supplied to lever machines in Dutchess!)...Joel (489-5479)]
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From Rhinebeck's Andi Novick (Andinovick@aol.com)...
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:24:05 EST
Subject: What are you willing to do to Save the Last Transparent Voting System in the US?
Dear friends,
The fight to save the Last Transparent Electoral System in America is really heating us now. Various factions across the state are coming together to stand up and say NO to replacing our reliable transparent lever voting system with a concealed software-based system that denies our constitutional right to a secure vote and will cost us millions over and above the money the federal government has allotted. At a time of economic crisis, when the State's finances are frozen, the counties - which means the citizens- should not be told to come up with additional millions to pay for a voting system we don't want and don't need.
As things heat up, the work load increases and we need more of you to help. I heard this quote as part of the Obama festivities and it says what I'm trying to say now:
"A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good. A government is invigorated when each one of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation. … Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us." --Barbara Jordan 1976 Keynote Address
I wrote this article to demonstrate what a transparent, theft-deterring voting system looks like. It's what we've had in New York for centuries and what we're about to lose unless we all band together. We can save New York and lift the rest of the nation. See
Thanks,
andi
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition,
FOR CITIZENS WILLING TO PARTICIPATE:
1) We need to start raising money. Litigation & organizing a State is expensive. Please go to
2) Get Resolutions Passed by Your County Legislature or City Council. Go to
3) Circulate the Petition more widely than you have before:
4) Contact Joanne Lukacher at
A) Work on creating a list of media contacts (just some time on the computer).
B) Fundraising- there's a variety of tasks one could take on here.
C) Distributing information to media, blogs, press releases.
D) Communicating with press as this heats up & once the litigation gets going.
E) Rapid response team of people who will respond to articles in press and/or blogs.
F) Anytime you can devote to small tasks.
##########################################################
[recall-- sent below out Weds....(with new/updated list of tons more Dutchess folks on board; join us!)]
New voting integrity resolution below; view report < Joanne Lukacher, Gary Kenton...
Great presentation Monday night from Joanne Lukacher (and Gary Kenton) of our county's Voting Integrity Task Force (thanks much also on this to Andi Novick and Helen Grosso for much hard work!)...
[you can watch Joanne L.'s testimony Monday nite here: http://www.totalwebcasting.com/live/dutchess/ ;
resolution from yours truly created this task force last Feb. ; see http://www.re-mediaetc.blogspot.com ]
Joanne, on behalf of the VITF, made the following three common-sense recommendations:
-- for the Dutchess County Legislature to form a bipartisan committee to consider joining the lawsuit being developed by the Election Transparency Coalition of New York, and urging other counties to join the effort, as is now under consideration in Nassau County...
-- for the Dutchess County Legislature to send a copy of the December 2008 resolution to every state legislator in New York, urging them to amend the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005...
-- for the Dutchess County Legislature to send a copy of the December resolution to every Congressional representative in New York, providing them with background material and asking them to work to make clear that lever machines are allowed under the Help America Vote Act...
So-- a bit earlier this evening I submitted to our County Legislature's offices for those recommendations!
[...thanx to Co. Leg.'s Sandy Goldberg/Marge Horton for interest in co-sponsoring a resolution like this...]
Crucial, folks-- your letters sent to countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us to get on agenda and passed!...
Joanne also shared with us Monday this must-read update Sunday's Binghamton Press/Sun-Bulletin:
"Old Lever Machines May Count Vote Again: Test of New Machines is Behind Schedule" N. Dooling
http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20090125/NEWS01/901250341/1001
Perhaps most importantly, if you haven't yet, please sign on to Andi Novick/EDA petition!...
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/ny_levers_petition [...and pass it along to all you know...]
Among over 1500+ endorsers from across NY, Dutchess supporters locally include the following:
Rhinebeck's Beverly Canin, Patricia Carroll-Mathes, Meg Crawford, Jane Curran, Debi Duke and Steve Rosenberg, Joanne Gelb, Guy and Mary Hathaway, Barbara Hugo, Joel and Kate Kopp, Susan Nagel, Carl Parris, Klara Sauer, Warren Smith, Janeth Thoron, and Barb Whan; Clinton's Bronwyn Bevan, Ann Scibenski, Doug and Elizabeth Smyth, Marian Thompson, and Phillippa Weiland; Hyde Park's Joan Grishman and Doris Kelly; Poughkeepsie's Jim Beretta and Doreen Tignanelli, Fred and Alice Bunnell, Rosemarie Calista, Jim Doxsey, Jacquie Efram, Richard Hathaway, Kurt Hornick, Gary Kenton, Carolann Koehler, Pat Lamanna, Donna Lenhart, Gerald Mahoney, Doug McComb, Carol Miyake, and Karl Volk; Beacon's Tom Baldino; Milan's Jose Reissig; Fishkill's Dori Dangerfield; East Fishkill's Richard Dennison and Lena Smolon; Wappinger's Rich McHugh, and Red Hook's Doris Soroko
Note-- just got this info from Howard Stanislevic (hscomms@verizon.net) of Election Defense Alliance...
"Joel-- here are new names of Dutchess County residents signed on to petition for 2009 so far:
Carolyn Abedor
Jeffrey Antevil
Sybil Baldwin
Svend Beecher
Heather Bergen
Ronny Borrok
Clare Brandt
Mark Burns
Maretta Callahan
Darrah Cloud
Mette Coleman
Bernadette Condesso
Margaret Crawford
Jennifer Dahnert
Carole DeSaram
Joanne Engle
Jeannie Friedman
Karen Froehner
Elizabeth Halpern
John Hausam
Stewart Kahn
Cindy Kirtland
Charles Lachman
Nina Lynch
Linda Manny
Michael Mazzarella
Melissa McNeese
Franc Palaia
Steve Sansola
Klara Sauer
Ellen Silverstein
Linda Souers
Ward Stanley
Jared Suttles
Sarah Sweeny
Peter Sweeny
Trea Sweeny
Edmund Tobin
Barbara Wells"
[of course, Joanne Lukacher & Gary Kenton of county's Voting Integrity Task Force signed on too-- and Andi's legal efforts also have the strong support of Teresa Hommel of http://www.WheresthePaper.org !]
All of those folks agree with Andi Novick, Election Defense Alliance (me too) to endorse this statement:
"The following New York residents are opposed to concealed vote counting on software-driven voting systems and support the litigation to declare this practice unconstitutional, insisting on their right to a secure, transparent voting system, which our lever machines provide."
[click on this link to see all 1500+ names from across NYS on board in support of Andi's lawsuit; see:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/nypetition/signatures.php?pageNum_Recordset_levers=0&totalRows_Recordset_levers=581 ]
Pass it on!...
Joel
489-5479/876-2488
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
[1 last must-read-- http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/2008/07/facts-myths-about-voting-in-new-york.html !]
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[again-- this new resolution just submitted by yours truly to Co. Leg. offices...if you want to make sure that it actually gets on to a meeting agenda and passed, email countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!]
WHEREAS, over and over again year after year electronic voting machines, both touchscreen and optical scan, continue to malfunction; just last year thousands of phantom votes were reported by Sequoia voting machines in the Washington, DC September primaries, and
WHEREAS, in Upshur County, West Virginia, this past Election Day optical scan ballots had to be recounted after it was discovered that machines were double-counting early ballots, and
WHEREAS, in Palm Beach, Florida just this past November, re-scans of 262 rejected ballots revealed different results each time they were scanned; the very same thing also happened in Oakland County, Michigan as well, and
WHEREAS, there are many election commissioners all over New York who continue to strongly support being able to keep using lever voting machines in their counties, and
WHEREAS, the Dutchess County Legislature passed a resolution in December 2008 requesting the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections to enact laws, rules, and regulations that specifically authorize the continued use of lever-style voting machines, and
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature form a bipartisan committee to consider joining the lawsuit being developed by the Election Transparency Coalition of New York, and urging other counties to join the effort, as is now under consideration in Nassau County, and be it further
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature send a copy of the December 2008 resolution to every state legislator in New York, urging them to amend the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, and be if further
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature send a copy of the December resolution to every Congressional representative in New York, providing them with background material and asking them to work to make clear that lever machines are allowed under the Help America Vote Act, and be it further
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution itself be forwarded to Governor David Paterson, New York State Senators Stephen Saland and Vincent Leibell, Members of the Assembly Greg Ball, Thomas Kirwan, Kevin Cahill, Joel Miller, and Marcus Molinaro, and Frank Skartados, Co-Executive Directors of the New York State Board of Elections Todd Valentine and Stanley Zalen, and New York State Board of Elections Commissioners James Walsh, Douglas Kellner, Evelyn Aquila, and Gregory Paterson, and Dutchess County Board of Elections Commissioners David Gamache and Fran Knapp.
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[resolution here below that passed unanimously in December-- referred to in new resolution above]
WHEREAS, for many decades Dutchess County has successfully used mechanical lever-style voting machines, with very few problems, and is desirous of continuing to do so, and
WHEREAS, New York State enacted the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) and other laws that require all lever machines to be replaced and prohibit the use of any lever machines in any future elections in New York State, and
WHEREAS, Dutchess County believes that the continued used of lever-style voting machines is in the best interest of the public and should be permitted to be used in future elections, and
WHEREAS, the Dutchess County Legislature passed resolution #207026, requesting New York State to allow Dutchess County to continue the use of the lever voting machine, and
WHEREAS, the New York State legislation relating to voting machines far exceeds the federal requirements of HAVA (Help America Vote Act), and
WHEREAS, the State's statutorily required elimination of lever-style voting machines is unnecessary, inappropriate, and costly to Dutchess County taxpayers,
therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature hereby requests the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections to enact laws, rules, and regulations that specifically authorize the continued use of lever-style voting machines, and be it further
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to Governor David Paterson, New York State Senators Stephen Saland and Vincent Leibell, Members of the Assembly Greg Ball, Thomas Kirwan, Kevin Cahill, Joel Miller, and Marcus Molinaro, Member-elect of the Assembly Frank Skartados, Co-Executive Directors of the New York State Board of Elections Todd Valentine and Stanley Zalen, and New York State Board of Elections Commissioners James Walsh, Douglas Kellner, Evelyn Aquila, and Gregory Paterson.
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The Dutchess County Voting Integrity Task Force's report last Monday to our County Legislature...
[again-- this brand, spankin' new; pls fwd this widely-- along with new message from Andi N. above!]
Voting Integrity Task Force Statement to the Dutchess County Legislature
26 January 2009
First we would like to commend the legislature for the sensible stand you took last month with the passage of a resolution toward retaining our lever voting machines. From what I understand, your message has resonated with county election boards throughout the state as each county struggles to guarantee a safe and responsible system for casting and counting our votes while acting as good stewards of the taxpayers' money in this difficult economy.
We have come before you several times in the past 6 months in order to make statements on various public issues from the perspective of the Voting Integrity Task Force. Your action in passing this resolution unanimously shows that you have been listening to us and to other members of the public as well as to election officials and professional staff. We will therefore not repeat the information you clearly know. (We are attaching here a copy of our statement in the public budget hearing.)We would, however, like to clarify one or two issues which continue to be either under-reported or misunderstood.
Although we were spared the spectacle of Florida 2000 or Ohio in 2004 with regard to the presidential race, there were many questionable and/or contentious outcomes in 2008 which throw a light on the kinds of voting issues which this task force has examined. These include the reliability of electronic vote counting, the pall of vendor dependence over the autonomy and authority of our election officials as public guarantors of the security of elections, and the reliability of random audits and recounts, including the near impossibility of maintaining and demonstrating an adequate chain of custody with regard to post-election verification.
We submit for your reading a list of examples, but would like to highlight here a few more high profile computer failures from the 2008 elections including thousands of phantom votes reported by Sequoia voting machines in the Washington, DC September primaries, blamed by the company on static discharge and/or, the old stand-by, human error and not defective hardware or software, explanations dismissed by the DC council committee where a special committee is now examining the incident. In Upshur County, WV all Election Day optical scan ballots had to be re-counted after it was discovered that machines were double counting early ballots. In Palm Beach, FL re-scans of 262 rejected ballots revealed different results each time they were scanned. Differing tallies for the same ballots also plagued Oakland County, Michigan where local clerks were prohibited from performing any maintenance or cleaning because it would void the machine warranty, while the saga of the Minnesota senatorial election re-count raises constitutional issues involving chain of custody of the ballots.
We would also like to clarify the question of the maintenance of the lever machines if we are allowed to continue using them since many people are under the impression that the machine parts are unavailable and they will no longer be able to be repaired or replaced. At least one lever machine company in NYS is indeed on the verge of going out of business since the direction of the state has been to make their machines legally obsolete, however, the company does have a warehouse of parts which would enable the lever machines in New York State to be maintained indefinitely, and the company, AVM, stands ready to do business if they foresee a continuing market for their goods and services. We have attached a letter from that company. However, time is of the essence here since effective January 1st of this year they no longer provide employment to their skilled technicians. Unlike with the electronic ballot scanners, basic repair and maintenance of the lever machines can also be performed by local board of elections technicians.
Finally we observe that Dutchess County, through the passage of this resolution has become a beacon for the rest of the state. One thing which has become abundantly clear in the course of our study is that while there is huge support from election commissioners and other officials across the state for retaining out lever machines, a sentiment that has been bolstered by the enormous implications of the national economic crisis, there is also a huge leadership vacuum. (As an example of other counties dealing with this crisis see the newspaper article of 1- 25-09 from Broome County). Dutchess County is in a unique position to fill that leadership role. We can no longer afford to wait and see how politics and the economy will affect how we conduct fair and transparent elections, the most important of our privileges and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy. We urge the Dutchess County legislature both to continue to lead by example but also to take an active role in organizing their fellow county legislators throughout the state, beginning with the following:
1- Forwarding a copy of the Dutchess County resolution to every state legislator, urging them to amend ERMA to allow for the retention of the lever machines.
2- Forwarding a copy of the resolution to each NY State congressional representative, providing them with background material and asking them to work to make clear that lever machines are allowed under HAVA.
3- Forming a bi-partisan legislative committee to consider joining the lawsuit being developed by the Election Transparency Coalition of New York, and urging other counties to join in this effort. Such an alliance is currently under consideration by Nassau County. We have attached a two page synopsis of the litigation for your consideration. If Dutchess were to join, other counties would likely follow suit.
It has been our privilege to contribute to the vital mission of the Voting Integrity Task Force and we are happy to continue to assist the legislature as advisors on any of the recommended actions or other voting related activities.
Respectfully submitted,
Joanne Lukacher
Gary Kenton
Helen Grosso
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What New York Election Commissioners have to look forward to if Computerized Voting Systems are Permitted to Replace our Existing Lever Voting System
Excerpted below are just some of the ways in which New York's County Boards of Election could be prevented from fulfilling their duties through no fault of their own, were NY to abandon our lever voting machines. These are the actual experiences of honest men and women across the nation, thwarted in their ability to do their job due to their dependence on irresponsible voting system vendors with their overly complex and shoddily made computerized voting equipment (be they DREs or Optical Scanners).
In New York, Sequoia is the company that will be servicing and maintaining the Dominion Optical Scanner, chosen as the Ballot Marking Device by the majority of NY counties. About a third of the voters in the State will be using systems provided by ES&S. The problems with software-driven DREs or Optical Scanners are similar regardless of the vendor. All of the voting vendors' performance records have been equally problematic.
The following examples of election officials' experiences conducting elections on computerized voting machines are all documented in mainstream media reports and the citations included herein:
- Texas Director of Elections, Ann McGeehan, referring to ES&S's poor performance, described the preparations for the 2006 elections "completely unacceptable and disturbing ….We regret the unacceptable position that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their contracted vendor."
- Illinois Commissioner of Elections in Cook County, citing tabulation problems by the Sequoia's optical scanners and DREs in the 2006 election said: "The administration of this election was a train wreck." Sequoia officials insisted however that the system "performed very well, overall."
- Texas election programmer William Singer wrote the Secretary of State's office after the 2004 vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected to do in order to 'pull off' an election …was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election industry."
- Elections supervisor Ion Sancho of Leon County Florida, concerned about the security of the Diebold optical scanners, arranged for Finnish computer programmer Harri Hursti to independently examine a Diebold optical scanner. Hursti demonstrated how easy it was to subvert the memory card without detection. Instead of correcting the gaping security hole, Diebold responded by pressuring the election supervisor to not reveal Diebold's flaws.
- In 2007 a Princeton University computer scientist hacked a Sequoia AVC computer (DRE) within a few seconds. Rather than addressing the vulnerability, Sequoia pointed to its own misleading marketing material that claimed: "tamper proof products, including.... the AVC Advantage, are sought after from coast to coast for their accuracy and reliability." However the scientist described:
[H]ow simple it was for me to access the ROM memory chips containing the firmware that controls the vote-counting. Contrary to Sequoia's assertions in their promotional literature, there were no security seals protecting the ROMs.
- Another Princeton professor, Ed Felten, found that the same Sequoia machines had vote count discrepancies in the 2008 Primaries. The public counter failed to match the number of ballots cast, which was inconsistent with Sequoia's explanation for the discrepancies.
- After Union County, NJ clerk Joanne Rajoppi persuaded the Constitutional Officers Association of NJ to have an independent study of the machines done by Felten, a Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and her county. … Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.
- Finally, a Princeton report released just three weeks before the 2008 General Election, per a court order, stated:
"[S]ometimes the AVC Advantage does not properly record the intent of the voter. …. The AVC Advantage's susceptibility to installation of a fraudulent vote-counting program is far more than an imperfection: it is a fatal flaw.
- Optical-scan machines made by Election Systems & Software failed pre-election tests in Oakland County, Michigan, producing different tallies for the same ballots every time,. The top election official in, County Clerk Ruth Johnson wrote a letter to the Election Assistance Commission requesting a federal directive to allow county clerks to conduct random audits to test machine accuracy. Johnson stated that local clerks were prohibited from performing any maintenance or cleaning as it would void the warranty, and that conflicting vote totals had surfaced in other areas of the state.
- California's Secretary of State's 2007 Top to Bottom Review of the voting computers in the state revealed that Sequoia's voting system could be subverted without "leaving any evidence that the security of the system had been compromised.... Sequoia's security hardening consisted in large part of a customer relations campaign to allay fears that tampering would be a problem."
- Arkansas' White County Clerk described the problems in a runoff election in 2006 as "a royal mess." County Election Commissioner Nunnally wrote to the Secretary of State complaining that, "ES&S has now proven in four states that they are unable to meet deadlines for the delivery of programming, regardless of the time period they have to work. .... ES&S is set up to box us into [sic] using their proprietary services for election preparation. They are doing this in every state they sell. They don't have the resources to meet the needs for these services and that is a verifiable fact at this point."
- The state of California sued Diebold for misrepresentations made to the Secretary of State regarding the installation of uncertified software on their machines. A False Claims Act lawsuit filed against Diebold was settled in 2006 by Diebold paying $2.6 million.
- The Indiana Election Commission discovered in March, 2004, that ES&S had installed uncertified firmware in some of their voting machines. When forced to reinstall the certified version, it didn't tabulate the votes correctly. An exasperated member of the election commission said, "I just think I was absolutely lied to by your CEO ... I sat in this room and you all lied to me. You're so derelict in your duties...."
- In 2005 Indiana sued ES&S after it once again installed uncertified software in the voting system of another Indiana county. Indiana claimed ES&S lied about swapping out the uncertified software. The lawsuit was settled by ES&S paying $1.2 million.
- In 2006 Indiana filed a formal complaint against ES&S for failing to provide working equipment and ballots in several counties in time for an election, and providing defective voting equipment, software and services.
- Oregon's Secretary of State sued ES&S in 2006 for breach of contract for failure to deliver voting machines. ES&S had agreed to all of the standard state contract terms, but subsequently informed the SoS that it would not agree to the terms of the contract, and would not deliver the voting machines unless the Secretary changed the terms of the contract. The SoS refused to alter the contract to meet ES&S's demands, which led to the lawsuit. "We will not leave our elections in the hands of companies that do not follow through on their obligations, and we will not be coerced into altering our contracts."
- San Francisco's city attorney sued ES&S for "a panoply of wrongdoing that includes fraud, breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation and multiple violations of California's False Claims Act and Unfair Competition Law." Blaming the vendor for its failure to meet the terms of its contract with the city, SF's attorney said:
San Francisco's experience with ES&S raises extremely troubling questions, not simply about the integrity of this company's technology, but about the integrity of this company itself. ....There can be no more important duty in a representative democracy than to conduct elections, and it is a travesty to see that duty so flagrantly undermined by the fraudulent conduct of an election systems vendor.
The litigation was subsequently settled for $3.5 million dollars.
- Iowa's Pottawattamie County Auditor Mary Jo Drake found a county-wide ballot programming problem in its ES&S optical scanners that went completely undetected until after the 2006 primary election when hand counts revealed that votes had been switched between candidates: the Republican candidate would have lost the election according to the machines.
The faulty programming affected every race on the ballot, and the county ordered a full hand recount of all races. …. [otherwise] the wrong candidates would have taken office. … The gross errors, like Pottawattamie's, are the ones that are caught. But if an error affected only a race for the U.S. Congress, governor or the state senate -- and that race was closely fought -- no one would know.
- Pennsylvania's Cumberland County undertook a 9.5 hour hand recount after a problem involving an ES&S software coding error in a 2005 election. The hand count changed the winner of the election.
- In Arkansas, Clark County, 2006 ES&S failed to print ballots on time requiring local officials to print the ballots on an office printer and count them by hand.
- Washington, Grays Harbor, 2004 ES&S scanners were downloading some disks twice, requiring the county to recount the ballots, changing the outcome of the election. County Auditor Spatz was surprised when told that ES&S scanners had double-counted ballots in other states.
- Upshur County, West Virginia, filed a complaint with its Secretary of State over machine failures in the May 2008 election. During the hand recanvassing of the May election, the Commission "tossed out all Election Day optical scan ballot results and recounted them," when it discovered that the machines double counted the early voting ballots.
- White County, Arkansas experienced machine failures which forced election officials to fully hand count the ballots, changing ALL machine-reported results, and overturned the victory in one race. "No voting machines functioned properly in any of the 32 White County voting sites on Tuesday."
- Wayne County, West Virginia was forced to count paper receipts from DREs that erroneously recorded voter choices in the recent 2008 election. "Though only a small number of paper receipts have been checked thus far, the errors appear to be widespread and affect several races…. The commission will not certify the election results until the Secretary of State's office investigates the matter."
- In the nation's capital, the D.C. Board of Elections and Sequoia were both blamed for a 2008 primary election blunder that caused thousands of phantom votes to appear in initial results. Although a report from a D.C. Council committee dismissed Sequoia's theories that human error or static discharge, and not defective software or hardware, was at fault when a cartridge from Precinct 141 added thousands of votes, it committed the special committee to examine the effectiveness of the elections board and its top staff.
- Miscounts by Sequoia Voting Sytems op-scans were also implicated in a disputed 2008 judicial election in Palm Beach County Florida. Re-scans of 262 rejected ballots revealed differing results every time they were scanned. Attorney Gerald Richman said the findings showed the machines can't be trusted. "We have to get a new election or a hand recount," he said.
- Finally I refer you to a 2007 Electoral Commission Report produced in response to the problems with the Dominion optical scanner used in Britain last year for the first time. Dominion is new to the field, but as the report reveals, the myriad of breakdowns and computer problems experienced by election officials in Britain are not at all new. As the annexed newspaper account describes, the elections "ended in chaos as the electronic votes were chucked out following a catalogue or errors and the whole thing was recounted by hand, delaying results by several days." The article went on to state that, "The list of things that went wrong is far too extensive to repeat here, but if you want an example of how not to manage an IT project, look no further than the link at the end of this story." The link is to the Electoral Commission Report prepared for this pilot project in which certain jurisdictions had experimented with the use of these optical scanners. The Report found:
The pilot scheme did not facilitate the counting of votes. … [In some jurisdictions] no contests were counted electronically. The scanning of ballot papers took a lot longer than expected due to the need to scan certain batches more than once. … [S]ignificant delays in the count process [led] to a reversion to a manual count. … The use of electronic counting significantly increased the total cost of delivering these elections compared with a manual count.
The Dominion Optical Scanners are of course the ones selected as ballot marking devices by most of New York's counties. As BMDs they only have to mark ballots which in the 2008 election, were hand counted. It is as counting devices however, that the history of optical scanner use, Sequoia's deficient performance record and the experience of British election commissioners' should cause a rational State Board of Election to refrain from thrusting these problematic voting machines onto the counties.
In addition to the above examples, there are thousands of additional reports of failed DREs and optical scanners. There is no dispute in the scientific community or in New York that voting software even were it to work well, can only be verified by a partial hand count of the paper produced by the DRE or counted by the optical scanner. The closer the margin of victory reported by the voting system, the larger the hand count would have to be confirm that the outcome was correct. And should the manual count reveal inconsistencies, this could necessitate a full hand count. For an election that spans multiple counties, this means the hand count would have to be expanded, even in counties where no errors were found initially.
Thus the new computerized system planned for New York will produce unknowable results which will then be checked after election night by counting paper. New York has a lever voting system that does not rely on paper ballots to prove the accuracy of its elections and that gets the job done on election night. How can we surrender a functioning time-tested, reliable voting system to one so inferior, unreliable and far costlier?
Footnotes:
Ann McGeehan, Letter to Texas Election Officials, Status of Ballot and Programming Card Orders for the May 13, 2006 Elections, April 24, 2006 available at http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/laws/statusofballot.shtml
Vote snafu: Some blame new equipment. Chicago Sun-Times. Mar 23, 2006. by Steve Patterson. http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws-machine23.html
William Singer letter to Geoffrey S. Connor, Texas Secretary of State, July 29, 2004, available at http://www.bradblog.com/Docs/WilliamSinger_TarrantSosComplaint_072904.doc
Harry Hursti, "Security Alert: July 4, 2005, Critical Security Issues with Diebold Optical Scan Design," Black Box Voting, available at http://blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf
Andrew Appel, How I bought used voting machines on the Internet, February 8, 2007 available at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/avc/
Ed Felten, Freedom to Tinker Blog, Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies, http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/evidence-new-jersey-election-discrepancies
Ibid. NJ Election Discrepancies Worse Than Previously Thought, Contradict Sequoia's Explanation, http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/nj-election-discrepancies-worse-previously-thought-contradict-sequoias-explanation
Newark Star-Ledger, Plan for voting machine probe dropped after lawsuit threat, http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/03/voting_machine_maker_threatens.html
Appel, et al, Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H DRE Voting Machine http://citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/
Kim Zetter, Wired Threat Level Blog, ES&S Voting Machines in Michigan Flunk Tests, Don't Tally Votes Consistently, http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/michigan-electi.html
Scott Fulton, Three e-voting systems susceptible to attack, California Team Finds, BetaNews, July 30, 2007 http://www.betanews.com/article/Three_EVoting_Systems_Susceptible_to_Attack_California_Team_Finds/1185822412
Election 2006: 'a royal mess': White County Election Commissioner claims state advised to break the law. The Daily Citizen. June 5, 2006. http://www.thedailycitizen.com/articles/2006/06/06/news/top_stories/top01.txt
California Attorney General Press Release, Attorney General Lockyer announces $2.6 million settlement with Diebold in electronic voting lawsuit, November 10, 2004, http://ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/release.php?id=843
Brian Burdick March 15, 2004 quote on WishTV web page now removed, referring to meeting in which ES&S management lied; see Indiana Election Commission Minutes, March 10, 2004, Item F, pp 33-38, available at http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/pdfs/IEC_Minutes_March_10_2004.pdf
Jason Thomas, Voting machine company to pay county $1.2 million, The Indianapolis Star (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News) August 15, 2005, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-9538963_ITM
Indiana Secretary of State Press Release, Rokita serves notice of violations to voting machine vendor, April 28, 2006, http://www.in.gov/sos/press/2006/04282006.html
Oregon Secretary of State Press Release: Bradbury sues voting vendor (ES&S), April 20, 2006, http://www.sos.state.or.us/executive/pressreleases/2006/0420.html
Fog City Journal's coverage, http://www.fogcityjournal.com/news_in_brief/pr_herrera_ess_071120.shtml, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/01/23/BA4AUJQ2D.DTL&o=0&type=printable
Sean Flaherty, In An Age Of Computerized Voting, Is It Possible To Maintain Voting Integrity? July 03, 2006, originally in The Iowa City Press-Citizen, http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1460&Itemid=113, Knauss, Leaders, Williams win in GOP supervisors primary. The Daily Nonpareil. June 8, 2006.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16757670&BRD=2703&PAG=461&dept_id=555106&rfi=6
DJ race still up in the air. Sentinel, November 11, 2005. http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2005/11/11/news/news02.txt
Archive: http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=6323
Ballot problem could prolong count tonight The Daily Siftings Herald, May 23, 2006 by Donna Hilton. Story archived at http://www.siftingsherald.com/articles/2006/05/23/news/news1.txt
Gray's Harbor County re-count boosts Gregoire. November 16, 2004. By Rebecca Cook, Associated Press. http://www.kgw.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D86D7FA80.html
Amanda Hayes, County finds major election blunder, May 21, 2008. The Record Delta (Buckhannon, WV) available at http://www.therecorddelta.com/V2_news_articles.php?heading=0&page=&story_id=1490
Warren Watkins, Winner rejoices, then deflated, May 21, 2008. Daily Citizen (Searcy, Arkansas), http://www.thedailycitizen.com/articles/2008/05/22/news/local_news/news01.txt
Bryan Chambers, Complaint filed on Wayne voting machines, May 22, 2008. The Herald-Dispatch (Huntington, WV), http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/x1266665102
Nikita Stewart, Washington Post, Firm, Elections Board Faulted in Voting Mishap
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/08/AR2008100803542.html
Mark Hollis, Miami Sun Sentinal, Lawyer says Palm Beach County voting machines need repair, http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/palm/blog/2008/10/_attorney_gerald_richman_said.html
The Electoral Commission, UK, Stratford and Warwick Pilot Report, Aug, 2007, http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0012/13215/Stratfordstatutoryevaluationreport_27188-20108__E__N__S__W__.pdf
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/08/03/e-voting-comedy-of-errors-in-shakespeares-stratford
McCarthy, Stanislevic, Lindeman, Ash, Addona and Batcher, The American Statistician, Percentage-Based versus Statistical-Power-Based Vote Tabulation Audits, http://verifiedvoting.org/downloads/TAS_paper.pdf
Philip Stark, The Annals of Applied Statistics, Conservative Statistical Post-Election Audits, http://statistics.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/conservativeElectionAudits07.pdf
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From http://sites.google.com/site/remediaetc/home/documents/VotingMachineServiceCenterletter.pdf ...
Voting Machine Service Center, Inc
PO Box 261
Gerry, NY 14740
vote@netsync.net
716-287-2090
January 23, 2009
To Whom It May Concern:
Voting Machine Service Center, Inc (VMSC) has been in business for over 32 years.
During those 32 years, it has serviced the Automatic Lever Voting Machine (AVM)
along with supplying all the parts and technical support necessary for the AVM. At no
time during those years, was it unable to fulfill any order requests from our customers in
New York State or any other states that use the AVM.
In addition, VMSC purchased the mechanical automatic voting machine division from
Sequoia Pacific in February 2001, thus making Voting Machine Service Center, Inc. the
sole authorized mechanical automatic voting machine company.
VMSC also manufactures parts and supplies or subcontracts this to different suppliers
and vendors according to AVM original prints and specifications. Shoup paper rolls are
another supply that VMSC provides.
VMSC has not authorized any other election company to sell, produce, or distribute its
product. This includes but is not limited to Printer packs and paper rolls for the AVM.
Due to lack of sufficient orders over the past two years, VMSC regrets that it will not be
able to fully service its customers as it has in the past. However, going forward in 2009
and beyond, VMSC will be able to sell to you items that are currently in stock on a first
come first served basis. Other parts and supplies may be specially ordered, given a
sufficient deposit, lead time and final payment prior to shipping. Minimum orders may
also be required.
Given the above conditions, VMSC can say with confidence that the AVM lever
machines in the State of New York could be maintained indefinitely.
Sincerely,
Heidi L. Marshall
Cc; file
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[recall this too; Joanne, Gary, Helen ended up effective on this; $$$ taken out of '09 budget for opscans!]
Voting Integrity Task Force Statement to the Dutchess County Legislature Budget Hearing
December 4th 2008
We are here representing the Voting Integrity Task Force, a citizens task for created by unanimous vote of the County Legislature to study and make recommendations on how we cast and count our votes in Dutchess County.
We will be making a formal presentation to the legislature at their regular public meeting on January 26, 2009 at which time we will be making the case for retaining our present lever voting machines based on their overwhelming superiority to software dependent machines, such as the optical scanners, in terms of security & transparency.
Tonight we are here to discuss cost.
Allow me to preface my remarks by saying that with the provision of Ballot Marking Devices at every polling place Dutchess County is now in compliance with the requirements of HAVA, the federal Help America Vote Act.
Looking over the projected budget of the Board of Elections several new items, many of which will become ongoing annual expenses appear to be directly attributable to the conversion to electronic vote counting. These include:
Annual costs of leasing a new, climate controlled storage and work facility $75,000
Electricity for this facility $23,000
Additional staff will be needed to prepare and maintain the machines and the vulnerability of these machines to indetectable tampering will require new full time security measures.
Because staff will be working at the additional storage/office facility on a regular basis, employee mileage reimbursement allowance has doubled.
Additional commercial printing costs for the paper ballots to accommodate these machines will add another $160,000 over last year's budget.
There is a new line item for an additional 119,000 worth of software for 2009.
There will be a need for new equipment, among them privacy booths for the voters and special cases for securing and transporting the paper ballots.
The cost of office supplies for the Board of Election has more than tripled from $46,000 in 2008 to almost $183,000 for next year
The 2009 budget also anticipates an additional $150,000 for professional and other service for this new equipment.
Transportation of the op-scans is more specialized - requiring climate controlled and air-cushioned trucks. It is to be assumed that these additional costs will also affect our towns and villages each time they must set up for a school board election, local budget vote or special referendum.
The Board of Elections budget reflects 1.3 million in income from a new line item called an election service charge. Is it intended that this money will be collected from the local governments, the towns and villages, as recommended by the county executive?
The above items are the known expenses to which can be assigned a budget estimate.
Unknowable expenses include the cost of mandatory audits and re-counts to check the accuracy of the Optical Scanners. What happens when there are missing votes, misplaced ballots and phantom ballot readings as are appearing in the ongoing re-count of the Minnesota senate race? These "glitches" are far from isolated and have been a regular feature of software dependent vote counting around the country.
Remember that these increased annual costs will be permanent and escalating.
The Optical scan machines have a 5 year warranty. Then what? HAVA helped pay the first time. Who pays in 5 years?
We can't put a price on our right to cast our votes and see that they are accurately counted as cast . What we can do is to allocate our resources wisely. The lever machines are not perfect but, in direct contrast with the Optical Scanners, failures are rare and tampering is difficult, easily detectable and does not spread from machine to machine. These wonders of mechanical engineering have lasted in many cases close to a century and can continue to count our votes into the indefinite future. We own these machines and they can do the job with little further expenditure. Let's put our money into making them work better by maintaining, renovating and perhaps improving them and into training a new generation of poll workers in the protocols which accompany them, all designed to assure and protect and accurately count our votes without unpredictable and ever increasing expense.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
New re: IBM, local economy-- sign on to new petition below!...
Hi all...
If you agree that our County Legislature should pass the new common-sense and comprehensive resolution a bit below asap to revitalize our local economy without delay, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to get us out of our de-facto Depression-- and send strong message to Washington to greatly increase corporate accountability for corporations like IBM as well-- then sign on to this petition, pass it along to all you know and send a letter to all 25 legislators at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!...
It's all here; brand-spankin' new-- http://www.petitiononline.com/economy !
Click/read/sign/fwd if you agree-- before it's too late...
[we have NO time to lose, amigos!]
Pass it on...
Joel
489-5479/876-2488
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel
(103 on board; join us-- my phone interview tonight w/ten Dem chairs!)
[note-- kudos to Tom Midgley, Bill Costine, Lee Conrad, others @ AllianceIBM.org-- get involved and become a part of CWA Local #1701 at that site!...and thanks as well to Red Hook Co. Leg. Tom Mansfield, noted Red Hook Dem Patrick Kelly interested in local action on this issue too...(finally, a shout-out to the late great Walter Robert Charles (Bob) Malstrom and Paul Tyner-- two former long-time IBM'ers who aren't around to raise hell with me on this issue-- this one's for you two!...(my stepfather and father, respectively)]
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These seven articles below have much more information on this:
"IBM East Fishkill Continues Layoffs Today" by Craig Wolf [yesterday's Poughkeepsie Journal]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090128/BUSINESS01/901280341
"IBM Posts Record Revenue, Profit for 2008" by Julie Moran Alterio
http://www.lohud.com/article/2008901210324 [The Journal News 1/22/09]
"Jobless Rate Highest Since 1993 IBM Downsizing" by Craig Wolf [Poughkeepsie Journal 1/23/09]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090123/BUSINESS/901230325
"IBM Lays Off Hundreds in Dutchess" [Associated Press 1/28/09]
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2009/01/28/news/doc497fe5f144350528209256.txt
"Does Giving Big Green to Big Blue Pay Off? States Throw Money at IBM, But Company Shifts Jobs Around the Globe" by Christine Young [Albany Times-Union 7/27/08]
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=706921&TextPage=2
"De-Escalating the 'Economic War Among the States' & Reforming the Development Subsidy Game"
Presentation by Frank J. Mauro, Executive Director, Fiscal Policy Institute
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/syracuseAug2000speech.htm
"Congress Should End the Economic War Among the States" by Melvin L. Burstein and Arthur J. Rolnick of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/pubs/ar/ar1994.cfm
These ten websites also have provide much more documentation on this issue:
http://www.petitiononline.com/statewar ; http://www.Clawback.org
http://www.ctj.org/html/corp0402.htm ; http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/exportingamerica/
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguide_offshoring
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/corporate_subsidy/overview.cfm
http://www.blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/10/obama-economic-plan-create-made-in-america-jobs/
http://www.GreatAmericanJobsScam.com ; http://www.FiscalPolicy.org/HR1060.htm .
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[this below just submitted to Co. Leg. offices; email countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us to get passed!]
WHEREAS, the Journal News reported January 22nd that Mark Loughridge, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for IBM, stated, "the fourth quarter wrapped up an exceptional year in which we delivered record revenue of over $103 billion, record profit of $16.7 billion, record earnings per share of $8.93 and record free cash flow of $14 billion, up almost $2 billion year to year; that's a lot of records"; in the fourth quarter, IBM beat the consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts of around $3 a share with earnings of $3.28 per share, up 17 percent from the $2.80 a share recorded in the final quarter of 2007; IBM's income was up 12 percent to $4.43 billion from $3.95 billion a year earlier, and
WHEREAS, IBM filed notice in late January that it will cut hundreds of positions at East Fishkill's Hudson Valley Research Park as of April 27, as the state Department of Labor has confirmed; published reports put the layoff number at IBM's East Fishkill plant between 400 and 750, with another 90 to 100 jobs being eliminated at IBM-Poughkeepsie, and
WHEREAS, IBM also cut 265 positions in 2007, while increasing profits by over a billion dollars; one estimate of IBM's recent job cuts put the number at more than 4,000 jobs lost since IBM's fourth-quarter earnings announcement in January; those earnings contained an unexpected surprise: IBM forecast at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009, and
WHEREAS, according to the Associated Press, in 2007, the last full year for which detailed employment numbers are available, 121,000 of IBM's 387,000 workers were in the United States, down slightly from the year before; the company's staffing in India has jumped from just 9,000 workers in 2003 to 74,000 workers in 2007, and
WHEREAS, the fact is also that IBM has literally spent $26 billion since 2007 buying back stock instead of investing in keeping its employees; last year Dutchess County taxpayers spent $286,138.42 on vendor payments for various IBM products; corporations like IBM now pay literally half the state income taxes they did in the early 1970's under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and
WHEREAS, Dutchess County's unemployment rate was 6.1 percent this past December, with 8,900 people out of work and looking, up from 5.5 percent in November and far higher than December 2007 when the rate was 4 percent, and this past December's unemployment rate was also the highest December posting since the 8 percent of 1993, and
WHEREAS, in 2000 Governor George Pataki announced that New York would help IBM with $660 million in state and local incentives; in return, the company would invest $2.5 billion in East Fishkill to create the world's most advanced computer chip plant and 1,000 "permanent" jobs; as of last year, 1,400 people were working at the East Fishkill plant, and
WHEREAS, last July Governor David Paterson called for another $140 million for IBM, together with a $1.5 billion investment by IBM itself, including $75 million from taxpayers for 1,000 new jobs: 325 at UAlbany's NanoCollege and another 675 at an upstate facility that has yet to be sited, with the remaining $65 million to help finance the expansion and upgrade of IBM's East Fishkill plant, in return for IBM's pledge to retain 1,400 semiconductor jobs at the Dutchess County site, and
WHEREAS, the Fiscal Policy Institute and many others have questioned why state taxpayers were asked last July to pay another $65 million, de facto double-billing, to keep IBM employees in East Fishkill, since New York state and local taxpayers already paid an estimated $660 million for those same 1,000 jobs, and
WHEREAS, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, IBM reported $5.7 billion in U.S. profits in 2000, but paid only 3.4 percent of that in federal income taxes; in 1997, IBM reported $3.1 billion in U.S. profits, and instead of paying taxes, got an outright tax rebate; from 1997 to 2002, IBM received $4.7 billion in corporate tax welfare, and
WHEREAS, since 2000, corporations have shipped more than 525,000 white-collar overseas; from 2000 through 2005, U.S. multinational corporations eliminated 2.1 million jobs at home while adding 784,000 to their payrolls abroad, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis; at the end of 2005, U.S. corporations employed almost 9 million people outside the United States, and a study published in Tax Notes last March concluded that multinational companies shifted almost $50 billion in income to low-tax countries in 2004, depriving the government of $17.4 billion in tax revenue, and
WHEREAS, USA Today reported last March that corporate profits earned in the United States are subject to the 35% corporate tax, but multinational corporations can defer paying U.S. taxes on their overseas profits until they return them to this country, transfers that often don't happen for years; General Electric, for example, has $62 billion in "undistributed earnings" offshore, according to recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Pfizer has $60 billion, and ExxonMobil has $56 billion, and
WHEREAS, current federal law law allows companies to defer paying taxes on their overseas income indefinitely while deducting many of the expenses associated with moving offshore; this provides a double subsidy to U.S. companies that ship work overseas, effectively penalizing those companies that keep jobs in the U.S.; ending overseas tax breaks would generate an additional $7 to 12 billion a year in tax revenue and eliminate the perverse incentive to move work abroad to avoid paying taxes, and
WHEREAS, many companies that ship work overseas receive billions of dollars worth of government procurement contracts, subsidies and state and local tax abatements; these taxpayer-financed benefits usually come with very few strings attached, allowing companies to skim additional profits by performing publicly funded work overseas, and
WHEREAS, the U.S. government should collect detailed and comprehensive data on the number of jobs lost overseas due to offshore investments and trade, including by requiring all companies to fully disclose this information; firms should also be required to inform consumers where the services they purchase are produced and provided from, with penalties for disclosing false information and failures to disclose, and
WHEREAS, the federal government has a special obligation to assist workers who lose their jobs to trade and offshore outsourcing; the current WARN (advance notice) and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) programs are intended to help trade-impacted workers make the transition to new jobs, but these displaced worker programs need to be greatly expanded and strengthened, and
WHEREAS, President Barack Obama co-sponsored legislation last year in the Senate that would give "Patriot Employer" corporations a tax credit equal to 1% of their taxable income if they maintain or increase the ratio of their U.S. workforce to the number of workers abroad, keep their headquarters in the U.S. and meet other wage, health care and pension requirements, as the U.S. takes in less annual revenue from corporate taxes, measured as a percentage of economic output, than almost all other major economies, and
WHEREAS, the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle websites have long had information on the Dutchess County Empire Zone and other Empire Zones throughout the state regarding monies, benefits, and assistance received, jobs promised, and jobs created, and therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature embrace and set in motion the following six-point plan to revitalize our local economy with greater corporate accountability for companies like IBM:
-- First, that the Dutchess County Legislature co-host with the County Executive a public forum within a month on the current recession to hear input, ideas, and suggestions from local taxpayers on what steps Dutchess County government should take to put more local residents back to work, and
-- Second, that a new Dutchess County Economic Revitalization Task Force be created, to be composed of twenty economic advisers as Ulster County recently wisely chose to do, ten to be appointed by the County Legislature Chair and ten from the County Legislature Minority Leader, that task force to meet publicly, allow public input at its meetings, and report back to the County Legislature and County Executive monthly as this is the most important issue in Dutchess County, and be it further
-- Third, that the Dutchess County Legislature requests that IBM must make every effort to save jobs; if cost cutting is needed, IBM should suspend its stock buyback program, and if job cuts occur, IBM must divulge the number of job cuts, where they are taking place and whether any of these affected jobs are being shifted offshore; executive positions should be eliminated in divisions where job cuts occur; pay, bonuses and perquisites for executives should be slashed; work should not be shifted from IBM workers in the United States to offshore locations; full disclosure of why individual jobs are being eliminated is essential, and before any new hires are added to the payroll, IBM must recall and rehire employees terminated in past resource actions, and be it further
-- Fourth, that the Dutchess County Legislature requests that the Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation work with the Dutchess County Empire Zone and Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency to greatly increase transparency and accountability for companies like IBM by making it easier for all Dutchess County residents to know about monies, benefits, and assistance received, jobs promised, and jobs created by putting that information online, and
-- Fifth, that the Dutchess County Legislature calls on Congress and President Barack Obama and to pass and sign legislation that protects U.S. jobs by ending tax breaks for companies that shift jobs overseas, and calls for the full disclosure of offshoring and outsourcing of American jobs by IBM and other companies, initiate the Patriot Employer program proposed by President Barack Obama last year, and expand the current WARN and TAA programs for workers who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing, and
-- Sixth, that the Dutchess County Legislature request that Congress and President Barack Obama pass and sign into law the Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act, legislation supported by the Fiscal Policy Institute and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that would enact a 100% tax on any subsidy provided by a state or local government to a corporation to locate into or remain within a government's jurisdiction, effectively rendering such subsidies ineffective and unneeded, thereby saving billions annually for New York taxpayers, for example, and
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be sent to President Barack Obama, Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Representatives John Hall and Maurice Hinchey, County Executive William Steinhaus, Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation, Dutchess County Empire Zone, and Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency.
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"Does Giving Big Green to Big Blue Pay Off? States Throw Money at IBM, But Company Shifts Jobs Around the Globe" by Christine Young [Albany Times-Union 7/27/08]
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=706921&TextPage=2
It was December 2004, and Tulsa, Okla., was abuzz with excitement.
IBM, which already employed more than 1,200 in Tulsa, had made a deal with Oklahoma to add another 1,000 jobs by 2009. In return, Big Blue would get $35.2 million in rebates over 10 years.
Calling it "great news for Tulsa and for all of Oklahoma," Gov. Brad Henry praised IBM as "a vital and valuable corporate citizen." He said the deal "signifies good things for both IBM and Tulsa."
He was only half right.
Since the 2004 agreement, the Oklahoma Tax Commission has sent Big Blue more than $4.4 million in rebates. Yet state figures show the company's job count is the same today as it was before the deal was signed.
This raises questions for the state of New York and Albany, where the ink is still drying on an agreement with IBM that will cost taxpayers $140 million for promises of job creation and economic development.
IBM employs hundreds at the University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering on Fuller Road, site of much of the company's cutting-edge computer chip research. It also has a big office in downtown Albany on State Street, devoted largely to serving state government clients.
And while Big Blue is one of New York's largest employers, with 11,600 workers in Dutchess County and 20,000 across the Hudson Valley, Oklahoma's experience offers a cautionary note and reason to wonder if New York's investment is money well spent.
Economic development packages are great for politicians. Jobs are promised, deals are signed, happy headlines are made.
But what happens after the hoopla?
Since the Oklahoma celebration, there appears to have been no follow-up or oversight by the state.
Last week, the marketing director for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce had no idea if IBM had kept its end of the bargain.
"I would imagine that they had," Beth Schmidt said. "It's performance based -- if they meet the requirements and add those jobs."
Yet a January report from Schmidt's agency shows IBM Tulsa's payroll remains near 1,200, the same as it was before the agreement.
And in May, IBM announced 350 Tulsa accounting and finance positions were going to Argentina...
Exuberance over IBM's presence, be it in Oklahoma or New York, is not unusual.
In Boulder, Colo., the city doled out a $100,000 tax rebate to IBM on top of state incentives worth $632,000 to get Big Blue to put a "green" data center there.
"The city's money was really an indication to IBM corporate that Boulder really cares about having this company here," Frances Draper of the Boulder Economic Council told reporters.
"That was an incredibly important part of their decision."
This year, IBM has slashed 400 jobs in Boulder.
And the dirty secret is no one wants to take on IBM for fear of losing jobs and hurting the local economy, especially in areas such as Dutchess County, where IBM is such a vital player.
"Nobody wants to throw the baby out with the bath water," Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner said.
And so New York went ahead with a pact with IBM, requiring a hefty donation from taxpayers, announcing it one day before Big Blue's second-quarter profit jumped a dizzying 22 percent to $2.77 billion, defying even Wall Street's expectations.
The agreement with the Westchester County-based technology giant, announced by Gov. David Paterson on July 15, calls for a $1.5 billion investment by IBM and $140 million by the state.
It includes $75 million from taxpayers for 1,000 new jobs-- 325 at UAlbany's NanoCollege and another 675 at an upstate facility that has yet to be sited.
The remaining $65 million will help finance the expansion and upgrade of IBM's East Fishkill plant, in return for IBM's pledge to retain 1,400 semiconductor jobs at the Dutchess County site.
Paterson said the arrangement is "what we are going to need to reignite the engine of the state's economy."
But to Frank Mauro of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research and education organization in Latham, it brings a sense of deja vu.
Mauro recalls in 2000, then-Gov. George Pataki announced New York was bankrolling IBM with $660 million in state and local incentives. In return, the company would invest $2.5 billion in East Fishkill to create the world's most advanced computer chip plant and 1,000 "permanent" jobs.
Eight years later, 1,400 people work at the East Fishkill plant. But Mauro wonders why the state suddenly has to pay another $65 million to keep them there.
It "seems like double billing, since New York state and local taxpayers already paid an estimated $660 million for those 1,000 jobs," he said. "It would be good to know ... how long IBM was required to maintain those 1,000 jobs"...
Dutchess County, where IBM has invested more than $5 billion over the past 10 years, recently gave Big Blue a tax break for a possible $36 million upgrade of its Poughkeepsie plant.
The upgrade would give Poughkeepsie a competitive edge against IBM sites elsewhere, such as North Carolina and Colorado, said Michael Tomkovich, chairman of the Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency.
Tyner, the county legislator, called the breaks a "bad deal" for local taxpayers.
"It's time to end this economic battle between the states," he said. "We need to remove the ability of these companies to hold us over a barrel."
In fact, Big Blue scored big in North Carolina by leveraging competition among states.
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"IBM Lays Off Hundreds in Dutchess"
Wednesday, January 28, 2009 3:06 AM EST
By The Associated Press [Daily Freeman]
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2009/01/28/news/doc497fe5f144350528209256.txt
IBM CORP. has eliminated hundreds of jobs in Dutchess County as part of thousands of layoffs extending across at least eight plants run by the computer giant.
Published reports put the layoff number at IBM's East Fishkill plant between 400 and 750, with another 90 to 100 jobs being eliminated at IBM-Poughkeepsie.
There also were IBM layoffs in Tucson, Ariz.; San Jose, Calif.; Rochester, Minn.; Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Austin, Texas; and Burlington, Vt.
IBM said it doesn't have to reveal the number of jobs it is cutting, because the Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to disclose only "material" events and IBM considers its job cuts to be a regular part of the company's business model. The company noted that it eliminates thousands of jobs every year but usually adds some back in other places.
Because of that, IBM contended it doesn't have to break out its layoffs in regulatory filings unless it suddenly changes course and makes substantially more or fewer job cuts.
That's why while IBM's head count keeps growing, topping 400,000 at the end of 2008, laid-off IBM workers have flooded online job boards with complaints about the company's stealth cuts.
One estimate of IBM's recent cuts put the number at more than 4,000 jobs lost since IBM's fourth-quarter earnings announcement last week. Those earnings contained an unexpected surprise: IBM forecast at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009. IBM shares are up more than 10 percent since then.
The Associated Press reviewed one document sent to laid-off workers that identified some of the positions that were cut. Employees weren't identified by name, but positions and the workers' ages were listed. The document listed nearly 3,000 jobs.
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"IBM Is Cutting Jobs; Maybe Some Locally"
BY CRAIG WOLF * POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL * JANUARY 22, 2009
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090122/BUSINESS01/901220332/1003/business
Job cuts that began Wednesday within IBM Corp. will likely be seen in the divisions that have large numbers of employees in Dutchess County next week, according to the head of a workers group.
The company confirmed "resource actions" began Wednesday but refused to comment on specifics or sites involved, or any plans.
Lee Conrad, national coordinator for the Alliance@IBM, said from reports he's getting from people inside the company, "Systems and Technology will get hit Tuesday - East Fishkill, Poughkeepsie and Burlington; Fishkill and Burlington the heavy hitters."
The two Dutchess County sites, plus Burlington, Vt., are in IBM's Systems and Technology Group, which makes computers and microchips.
IBM, the region's largest private employer, has said it employed 11,600 in Dutchess at the end of 2007. It hasn't posted end-of-2008 numbers yet.
Conrad said he's learned IBM's Software Group had cuts of about 1,400 people in the U.S. and Canada and the sales and distribution group also had cuts. Software has a contingent in Dutchess; sales staff are widely spread.
"Other divisions, I think, will probably spread out over a couple days and next week. That seems to be the pattern they've done in the past," Conrad said.
The day after IBM reported rising profits and a year that was its first as a $100 billion company, it began the nationwide series of cuts.
Spokesman Doug Shelton confirmed IBM management had notified some employees about "resource actions," the usual term for large-scale job eliminations.
"We are not going to discuss specific numbers or locations. What I can tell you is that managing resources and skills is an ongoing component of our business model," he said in an e-mail.
Skill, Resources Mix
"IBM continuously evaluates its mix of skills and resources, and makes changes as needed," Shelton said. "The nature of our business is that we must constantly assess employee skills and resources and at any given time, give IBM the flexibility to match the current and future needs of our clients (skills that the client needs).
"Managing talent in this way promotes the continued competitiveness of our operations and matches our skills and capabilities with the evolving needs of our clients. We anticipate some employees will find other positions that match their skills within IBM, and we're enabling them in that effort," he said.
In the past, IBM has been more specific about major staff reductions. Conrad said secrecy has long been management's way, but not to this extent.
"I think it gives them a bad reputation when they cut jobs, and they don't like that," he said.
It may also affect tax favors the company gets from states such as New York, he said.
"IBM's cutting jobs around the country and they're cutting them in states that have handed out tax breaks to the company," Conrad said. "They're being arrogant."
New York is giving IBM $140 million as IBM invests $1.5 billion in three New York state programs.
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From http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/exportingamerica/outsourcing_solutions.cfm ...
Policy Solutions to Shipping Jobs Overseas
Home > Issues > Jobs, Wages & the Global Economy > Exporting America
Many experts have argued that losing jobs overseas is both inevitable and ultimately healthy for the U.S. economy. They claim that policy solutions that would inhibit the movement of jobs within an unfettered global marketplace will be counter-productive and costly. What these arguments ignore, however, is that the destruction of U.S. jobs is not occurring on a level playing field resulting from neutral policies. Rather, a broad range of state and federal policies allow, facilitate and even reward the destruction of U.S. jobs. Government policies lavish tax breaks, government contracts, and easy access to the U.S. market on companies that destroy good jobs and exploit lax workers' rights to produce overseas. These misguided policies hurt America's working families and fail to promote equitable economic development in other countries.
Policymakers must reform policies that encourage and reward job destruction and implement new policies that will create good jobs for the future. While no single policy measure provides a magic bullet for stopping job loss, a dramatic re-orientation of U.S. policy that removes incentives for shipping jobs offshore, while fostering healthy conditions at home for job creation, will go a long way towards building a more balanced global economy that works for working families.
1) Remove Incentives to Ship Jobs Overseas
* Taxes: Current law allows companies to defer paying taxes on their overseas income indefinitely while deducting many of the expenses associated with moving offshore - this provides a double subsidy to U.S. companies that ship work overseas, effectively penalizing those companies that keep jobs in the U.S. Ending overseas tax breaks would generate an additional $7 to 12 billion a year in tax revenue and eliminate the perverse incentive to move work abroad to avoid paying taxes.
* Public Contracts and Subsidies: Many companies that ship work overseas receive billions of dollars worth of government procurement contracts, subsidies and state and local tax abatements. These taxpayer-financed benefits usually come with very few strings attached, allowing companies to skim additional profits by performing publicly funded work overseas. Laws at the local, state and federal level should be reformed to ensure our taxpayer dollars are not subsidizing the destruction of American jobs.
* Currency: A number of U.S. trading partners - China in particular - manipulate the value of their currency relative to the dollar to give their exports to the U.S. an artificial cost advantage, while making American products more expensive. This puts American producers and workers at an impossible cost disadvantage, effectively shutting them out of export markets and undermining their competitiveness at home. The U.S. must take immediate and aggressive action to ensure that the dollar is appropriately valued and withdraw trade benefits from countries that insist on manipulating their currency to unfair advantage, in violation of international trade rules.
* Trade Laws: Domestic trade laws enable the government to redress unfair trade practices that give an illegitimate advantage to overseas production. These laws were intended to provide the first line of defense for American producers and workers, yet they are very poorly enforced. The World Trade Organization has weakened our ability to use these laws, and on-going trade negotiations may undermine these laws even further. We must vigorously enforce our domestic trade laws, defend them from challenge, and work to strengthen them in the future.
* Trade Agreements: Trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) create new rights, but no responsibilities, for companies that ship jobs overseas. NAFTA contains strong legal protections for companies investing abroad and guaranteed access for their products into the U.S. market. But NAFTA provides no comparable protections for the rights of workers and the environment, allowing companies to escape their international obligations by shipping work overseas. We must fundamentally reform flawed trade rules to hold companies accountable for respecting workers' rights no matter where they produce.
2) Reward the Creation of Good Jobs in the United States
* Health Care: Ballooning health care costs are creating a crisis for all American families and companies, with particularly devastating impacts on American manufacturers. The absence of a functional health care policy in the U.S. not only denies millions access to quality, affordable health care - it also impairs our companies' ability to compete with companies in nations that control costs and share them more broadly, rather than imposing the burden on individual employers and employees. A national solution to our health care crisis is needed to reduce cost burdens on American firms and workers and make U.S. production more competitive.
* Public Investment: New technologies and productivity advances require wise investments, and the public sector can play an important role in stimulating such innovation. The U.S. needs a comprehensive policy on education and training, research and development, infrastructure investment, and energy independence to spur innovation and ensure it leads to the creation of more good jobs. State and local economic development policies also have an important role to play in helping American producers remain competitive in the global economy.
3) Improve Transparency and Protect Consumers
* Data Collection: There are no comprehensive, official data on how many U.S. jobs have been lost to trade and offshore outsourcing. Even government statistics on service sector imports are unreliable, since they are self-reported by importing companies. The U.S. government should collect detailed and comprehensive data on the number of jobs lost overseas due to offshore investments and trade, including by requiring all companies to fully disclose this information. Greater coordination among agencies that collect labor market and international economic data is also needed.
* Disclosure: Consumers have a right to know where the goods and services they purchase are produced - country of origin labels on goods sold in the U.S. are required by law, but there is no policy for "labeling" services sold in the U.S. Firms should be required to inform consumers where the services they purchase are produced and provided from, with penalties for disclosing false information and failures to disclose.
* Privacy and Security: Personal financial and medical data is being sent overseas without consumers' knowledge or consent and without the full protection of domestic privacy laws. Projects with sensitive security information, such as infrastructure engineering and design, are also being sent overseas. Information with such serious privacy and security implications must be adequately protected- if it is allowed to be processed abroad at all, it must be governed by the same legal safeguards that apply in the U.S. and subject to prior informed consent from consumers.
4) Assist Displaced Workers
* Program Coverage: While all displaced workers need adequate notice, income support, training and health care, when resources are limited the federal government has a special obligation to assist workers who lose their jobs to trade and offshore outsourcing. The current WARN (advance notice) and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) programs are intended to help trade-impacted workers make the transition to new jobs, but these displaced worker programs need to be expanded and strengthened. The WARN act should be amended to apply to more workers and provide more notice before layoff. TAA needs to be expanded to cover all workers who lose their jobs to import competition or production shifts, regardless of the sector (manufacturing or services) in which they work or the country to which their job has gone.
* Program Administration: Significant additional funding will be needed to finance this expansion, and to support improved outreach, program administration, income support, health care, training, and wage insurance benefits that reach every worker who needs them. The Department of Labor must demonstrate the will to ensure workers receive the benefits to which they are entitled, and assist states in the effective administration of these benefits. Additionally, TAA programs should continue to be administered by state workforce agencies and state merit-staff, not contracted out to non-governmental entities.
5) Support Equitable and Sustainable Development Abroad
* Development: Stimulating robust and stable development around the world not only benefits workers in other countries - it is essential to building a more balanced global economy where workers and countries can engage in high-road competition based on skills and productivity instead of a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. Until workers in other countries are able to earn a decent wage and build a middle class, they will never be able to purchase the goods and services they produce, much less consume those produced in the U.S.
* Workers' Rights: The international community must recognize strong workers' rights as a key foundation for vigorous democracy and equitable economic development, and incorporate obligations to uphold these fundamental rights in international rules and institutions. Research shows observing workers' rights is good for growth and it contributes to development by building democratic institutions, decreasing inequality, and encouraging political participation. Underestimating the role of workers' rights in development ignores the history of the wealthiest countries, where unions proved critical to democratization and the growth of a middle class.
* Debt Relief and Aid: Crippling debt burdens prevent many developing countries from meeting basic human needs and investing in the building blocks of development. Many indebted governments pursue short-term, export-led growth strategies to earn the dollars they need to pay the costs of debt service - strategies that do little to promote sustainable development and put even more competitive pressure on American workers. The U.S. must work with other creditors to relieve unpayable debt burdens and enable governments to invest the resulting savings in development. In addition, the U.S. must increase development aid and ensure its delivery is guided by democratic participation from those most affected.
* International Financial Institutions: Too often, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank pressure countries to "reform" their economies in the wrong direction. They press for deregulation, privatization, liberalization of trade and financial markets, and rolling back labor market regulations, urging that such steps are needed to attract foreign investors and expand exports. These policy prescriptions have failed to create robust growth and reduce poverty, and they speed up the race to the bottom for workers everywhere. The international financial institutions must be fundamentally reformed to work with developing country governments, trade unions, and other citizens' organizations to promote core workers' rights, strengthen the rule of law and democratic institutions, and invest in domestically-oriented development strategies.
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From http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/23/new-report-30-million-service-jobs-may-be-shipped-overseas/ ...
New Report: 30 Million Service Jobs May Be Shipped Overseas
Digg
by James Parks, Jan 23, 2009
Recent telecommunications advances, especially the Internet, could theoretically put more than 30 million U.S. jobs at risk of being exported overseas. Services previously needed to be performed domestically theoretically can be done anywhere in the world through the Internet, four U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) analysts say in an article appearing in the agency's Monthly Labor Review (subscription required).
The 160 occupations considered capable of being performed in other countries account for some 30.3 million workers, one-fifth of total U.S. employment and cover a wide array of job functions, pay rates and educational levels.
More than half of the vulnerable jobs in the BLS study are professional and related occupations, including computer and mathematical science occupations and architecture and engineering jobs, and many office and administrative support occupations also are considered susceptible.
Since 2000, corporations have shipped more than 525,000 white-collar overseas, according to the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE). Some estimates say up to 14 million middle-class jobs could be exported out of our nation in the next 10 years. Accountants, software engineers, X-ray technicians, all are losing their jobs as corporations look for low-wage workers in countries such as India and China.
Meanwhile, the jobs being created in the United States often are low-wage jobs that don't offer health coverage or ensure retirement security. Nearly one-quarter of the nation's workers labor in jobs that generally pay less than the $8.85 hourly wage the U.S. government says it takes to keep a family of four out of poverty. Sixty percent of such workers are women, and many are people of color.
Among the occupations most susceptible to being sent overseas, the BLS analysts say, are those that produce information and do not require "face-to-face" contact. Among the most vulnerable are office and administrative support jobs, with relatively low education or training requirements, including telephone operators, payroll and timekeeping clerks, and word processors and typists.
Another 11 of the highest ranked jobs are professional and related occupations, which generally possess higher educational requirements. They include pharmacists, computer programmers, biochemists and biophysicists, architectural and civil drafters, financial analysts, paralegals and legal assistants.
Among the occupations least likely to be shipped overseas are financial managers, food scientists and technologists, front-line retail sales managers, and training and development specialists.
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More info here below if you want it...
Ulster County Executive Michael Hein's Council of Economic Advisers
http://www.co.ulster.ny.us/downloads/EcoDevTaskForceReport.pdf
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle info on Dutchess County Empire Zone (and all in NYS):
http://php.democratandchronicle.com/RocDocs/taxcredits/
Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin info on Dutchess County Empire Zone (and all in NYS):
http://www.pressconnects.com/assets/pdf/CB81019731.PDF
"Across the Nation, IBM Leaves a Trail of Broken Promises" Times Herald Record C. Young 7/27/08
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080727/BIZ21/80725017
"Does Tax Code Send U.S. Jobs Offshore?" by David J. Lynch [USA Today 3/20/08]
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-03-20-corporate-tax-offshoring_N.htm
"Timeline: IBM East Fishkill Over the Years" by Craig Wolf [1/28/09]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090128/BUSINESS01/901280339
"New Report: 30 Million Service Jobs May Be Shipped Overseas" by James Parks [1/23/09]
http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/23/new-report-30-million-service-jobs-may-be-shipped-overseas/
"Policy Solutions to Shipping Jobs Overseas" [AFL-CIO]
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/exportingamerica/outsourcing_solutions.cfm
"Getting Our Money's Worth: The Case for IDA Reform in New York State"
[New York Jobs With Justice May 2007 ( http://www.nyjwj.org/docs/GO$W.pdf )]
"Little Done To Fix Empire Zone Tax Program" by Mike McAndrew [Syracuse Post-Standard 7/13/08]
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1215939359223980.xml&coll=1
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/EndingTheEcoWarAmongTheStates.pdf
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/publications2008/FPI_EconDevtBrief_Feb2008.pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/Research/studies/econwar/HR1060.cfm
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070329144749-35526.pdf
If you agree that our County Legislature should pass the new common-sense and comprehensive resolution a bit below asap to revitalize our local economy without delay, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to get us out of our de-facto Depression-- and send strong message to Washington to greatly increase corporate accountability for corporations like IBM as well-- then sign on to this petition, pass it along to all you know and send a letter to all 25 legislators at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!...
It's all here; brand-spankin' new-- http://www.petitiononline.com/economy !
Click/read/sign/fwd if you agree-- before it's too late...
[we have NO time to lose, amigos!]
Pass it on...
Joel
489-5479/876-2488
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel
(103 on board; join us-- my phone interview tonight w/ten Dem chairs!)
[note-- kudos to Tom Midgley, Bill Costine, Lee Conrad, others @ AllianceIBM.org-- get involved and become a part of CWA Local #1701 at that site!...and thanks as well to Red Hook Co. Leg. Tom Mansfield, noted Red Hook Dem Patrick Kelly interested in local action on this issue too...(finally, a shout-out to the late great Walter Robert Charles (Bob) Malstrom and Paul Tyner-- two former long-time IBM'ers who aren't around to raise hell with me on this issue-- this one's for you two!...(my stepfather and father, respectively)]
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These seven articles below have much more information on this:
"IBM East Fishkill Continues Layoffs Today" by Craig Wolf [yesterday's Poughkeepsie Journal]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090128/BUSINESS01/901280341
"IBM Posts Record Revenue, Profit for 2008" by Julie Moran Alterio
http://www.lohud.com/article/2008901210324 [The Journal News 1/22/09]
"Jobless Rate Highest Since 1993 IBM Downsizing" by Craig Wolf [Poughkeepsie Journal 1/23/09]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090123/BUSINESS/901230325
"IBM Lays Off Hundreds in Dutchess" [Associated Press 1/28/09]
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2009/01/28/news/doc497fe5f144350528209256.txt
"Does Giving Big Green to Big Blue Pay Off? States Throw Money at IBM, But Company Shifts Jobs Around the Globe" by Christine Young [Albany Times-Union 7/27/08]
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=706921&TextPage=2
"De-Escalating the 'Economic War Among the States' & Reforming the Development Subsidy Game"
Presentation by Frank J. Mauro, Executive Director, Fiscal Policy Institute
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/syracuseAug2000speech.htm
"Congress Should End the Economic War Among the States" by Melvin L. Burstein and Arthur J. Rolnick of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/pubs/ar/ar1994.cfm
These ten websites also have provide much more documentation on this issue:
http://www.petitiononline.com/statewar ; http://www.Clawback.org
http://www.ctj.org/html/corp0402.htm ; http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/exportingamerica/
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguide_offshoring
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/corporate_subsidy/overview.cfm
http://www.blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/10/obama-economic-plan-create-made-in-america-jobs/
http://www.GreatAmericanJobsScam.com ; http://www.FiscalPolicy.org/HR1060.htm .
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[this below just submitted to Co. Leg. offices; email countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us to get passed!]
WHEREAS, the Journal News reported January 22nd that Mark Loughridge, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for IBM, stated, "the fourth quarter wrapped up an exceptional year in which we delivered record revenue of over $103 billion, record profit of $16.7 billion, record earnings per share of $8.93 and record free cash flow of $14 billion, up almost $2 billion year to year; that's a lot of records"; in the fourth quarter, IBM beat the consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts of around $3 a share with earnings of $3.28 per share, up 17 percent from the $2.80 a share recorded in the final quarter of 2007; IBM's income was up 12 percent to $4.43 billion from $3.95 billion a year earlier, and
WHEREAS, IBM filed notice in late January that it will cut hundreds of positions at East Fishkill's Hudson Valley Research Park as of April 27, as the state Department of Labor has confirmed; published reports put the layoff number at IBM's East Fishkill plant between 400 and 750, with another 90 to 100 jobs being eliminated at IBM-Poughkeepsie, and
WHEREAS, IBM also cut 265 positions in 2007, while increasing profits by over a billion dollars; one estimate of IBM's recent job cuts put the number at more than 4,000 jobs lost since IBM's fourth-quarter earnings announcement in January; those earnings contained an unexpected surprise: IBM forecast at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009, and
WHEREAS, according to the Associated Press, in 2007, the last full year for which detailed employment numbers are available, 121,000 of IBM's 387,000 workers were in the United States, down slightly from the year before; the company's staffing in India has jumped from just 9,000 workers in 2003 to 74,000 workers in 2007, and
WHEREAS, the fact is also that IBM has literally spent $26 billion since 2007 buying back stock instead of investing in keeping its employees; last year Dutchess County taxpayers spent $286,138.42 on vendor payments for various IBM products; corporations like IBM now pay literally half the state income taxes they did in the early 1970's under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and
WHEREAS, Dutchess County's unemployment rate was 6.1 percent this past December, with 8,900 people out of work and looking, up from 5.5 percent in November and far higher than December 2007 when the rate was 4 percent, and this past December's unemployment rate was also the highest December posting since the 8 percent of 1993, and
WHEREAS, in 2000 Governor George Pataki announced that New York would help IBM with $660 million in state and local incentives; in return, the company would invest $2.5 billion in East Fishkill to create the world's most advanced computer chip plant and 1,000 "permanent" jobs; as of last year, 1,400 people were working at the East Fishkill plant, and
WHEREAS, last July Governor David Paterson called for another $140 million for IBM, together with a $1.5 billion investment by IBM itself, including $75 million from taxpayers for 1,000 new jobs: 325 at UAlbany's NanoCollege and another 675 at an upstate facility that has yet to be sited, with the remaining $65 million to help finance the expansion and upgrade of IBM's East Fishkill plant, in return for IBM's pledge to retain 1,400 semiconductor jobs at the Dutchess County site, and
WHEREAS, the Fiscal Policy Institute and many others have questioned why state taxpayers were asked last July to pay another $65 million, de facto double-billing, to keep IBM employees in East Fishkill, since New York state and local taxpayers already paid an estimated $660 million for those same 1,000 jobs, and
WHEREAS, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, IBM reported $5.7 billion in U.S. profits in 2000, but paid only 3.4 percent of that in federal income taxes; in 1997, IBM reported $3.1 billion in U.S. profits, and instead of paying taxes, got an outright tax rebate; from 1997 to 2002, IBM received $4.7 billion in corporate tax welfare, and
WHEREAS, since 2000, corporations have shipped more than 525,000 white-collar overseas; from 2000 through 2005, U.S. multinational corporations eliminated 2.1 million jobs at home while adding 784,000 to their payrolls abroad, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis; at the end of 2005, U.S. corporations employed almost 9 million people outside the United States, and a study published in Tax Notes last March concluded that multinational companies shifted almost $50 billion in income to low-tax countries in 2004, depriving the government of $17.4 billion in tax revenue, and
WHEREAS, USA Today reported last March that corporate profits earned in the United States are subject to the 35% corporate tax, but multinational corporations can defer paying U.S. taxes on their overseas profits until they return them to this country, transfers that often don't happen for years; General Electric, for example, has $62 billion in "undistributed earnings" offshore, according to recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Pfizer has $60 billion, and ExxonMobil has $56 billion, and
WHEREAS, current federal law law allows companies to defer paying taxes on their overseas income indefinitely while deducting many of the expenses associated with moving offshore; this provides a double subsidy to U.S. companies that ship work overseas, effectively penalizing those companies that keep jobs in the U.S.; ending overseas tax breaks would generate an additional $7 to 12 billion a year in tax revenue and eliminate the perverse incentive to move work abroad to avoid paying taxes, and
WHEREAS, many companies that ship work overseas receive billions of dollars worth of government procurement contracts, subsidies and state and local tax abatements; these taxpayer-financed benefits usually come with very few strings attached, allowing companies to skim additional profits by performing publicly funded work overseas, and
WHEREAS, the U.S. government should collect detailed and comprehensive data on the number of jobs lost overseas due to offshore investments and trade, including by requiring all companies to fully disclose this information; firms should also be required to inform consumers where the services they purchase are produced and provided from, with penalties for disclosing false information and failures to disclose, and
WHEREAS, the federal government has a special obligation to assist workers who lose their jobs to trade and offshore outsourcing; the current WARN (advance notice) and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) programs are intended to help trade-impacted workers make the transition to new jobs, but these displaced worker programs need to be greatly expanded and strengthened, and
WHEREAS, President Barack Obama co-sponsored legislation last year in the Senate that would give "Patriot Employer" corporations a tax credit equal to 1% of their taxable income if they maintain or increase the ratio of their U.S. workforce to the number of workers abroad, keep their headquarters in the U.S. and meet other wage, health care and pension requirements, as the U.S. takes in less annual revenue from corporate taxes, measured as a percentage of economic output, than almost all other major economies, and
WHEREAS, the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle websites have long had information on the Dutchess County Empire Zone and other Empire Zones throughout the state regarding monies, benefits, and assistance received, jobs promised, and jobs created, and therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature embrace and set in motion the following six-point plan to revitalize our local economy with greater corporate accountability for companies like IBM:
-- First, that the Dutchess County Legislature co-host with the County Executive a public forum within a month on the current recession to hear input, ideas, and suggestions from local taxpayers on what steps Dutchess County government should take to put more local residents back to work, and
-- Second, that a new Dutchess County Economic Revitalization Task Force be created, to be composed of twenty economic advisers as Ulster County recently wisely chose to do, ten to be appointed by the County Legislature Chair and ten from the County Legislature Minority Leader, that task force to meet publicly, allow public input at its meetings, and report back to the County Legislature and County Executive monthly as this is the most important issue in Dutchess County, and be it further
-- Third, that the Dutchess County Legislature requests that IBM must make every effort to save jobs; if cost cutting is needed, IBM should suspend its stock buyback program, and if job cuts occur, IBM must divulge the number of job cuts, where they are taking place and whether any of these affected jobs are being shifted offshore; executive positions should be eliminated in divisions where job cuts occur; pay, bonuses and perquisites for executives should be slashed; work should not be shifted from IBM workers in the United States to offshore locations; full disclosure of why individual jobs are being eliminated is essential, and before any new hires are added to the payroll, IBM must recall and rehire employees terminated in past resource actions, and be it further
-- Fourth, that the Dutchess County Legislature requests that the Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation work with the Dutchess County Empire Zone and Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency to greatly increase transparency and accountability for companies like IBM by making it easier for all Dutchess County residents to know about monies, benefits, and assistance received, jobs promised, and jobs created by putting that information online, and
-- Fifth, that the Dutchess County Legislature calls on Congress and President Barack Obama and to pass and sign legislation that protects U.S. jobs by ending tax breaks for companies that shift jobs overseas, and calls for the full disclosure of offshoring and outsourcing of American jobs by IBM and other companies, initiate the Patriot Employer program proposed by President Barack Obama last year, and expand the current WARN and TAA programs for workers who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing, and
-- Sixth, that the Dutchess County Legislature request that Congress and President Barack Obama pass and sign into law the Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act, legislation supported by the Fiscal Policy Institute and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that would enact a 100% tax on any subsidy provided by a state or local government to a corporation to locate into or remain within a government's jurisdiction, effectively rendering such subsidies ineffective and unneeded, thereby saving billions annually for New York taxpayers, for example, and
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be sent to President Barack Obama, Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Representatives John Hall and Maurice Hinchey, County Executive William Steinhaus, Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation, Dutchess County Empire Zone, and Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency.
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"Does Giving Big Green to Big Blue Pay Off? States Throw Money at IBM, But Company Shifts Jobs Around the Globe" by Christine Young [Albany Times-Union 7/27/08]
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=706921&TextPage=2
It was December 2004, and Tulsa, Okla., was abuzz with excitement.
IBM, which already employed more than 1,200 in Tulsa, had made a deal with Oklahoma to add another 1,000 jobs by 2009. In return, Big Blue would get $35.2 million in rebates over 10 years.
Calling it "great news for Tulsa and for all of Oklahoma," Gov. Brad Henry praised IBM as "a vital and valuable corporate citizen." He said the deal "signifies good things for both IBM and Tulsa."
He was only half right.
Since the 2004 agreement, the Oklahoma Tax Commission has sent Big Blue more than $4.4 million in rebates. Yet state figures show the company's job count is the same today as it was before the deal was signed.
This raises questions for the state of New York and Albany, where the ink is still drying on an agreement with IBM that will cost taxpayers $140 million for promises of job creation and economic development.
IBM employs hundreds at the University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering on Fuller Road, site of much of the company's cutting-edge computer chip research. It also has a big office in downtown Albany on State Street, devoted largely to serving state government clients.
And while Big Blue is one of New York's largest employers, with 11,600 workers in Dutchess County and 20,000 across the Hudson Valley, Oklahoma's experience offers a cautionary note and reason to wonder if New York's investment is money well spent.
Economic development packages are great for politicians. Jobs are promised, deals are signed, happy headlines are made.
But what happens after the hoopla?
Since the Oklahoma celebration, there appears to have been no follow-up or oversight by the state.
Last week, the marketing director for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce had no idea if IBM had kept its end of the bargain.
"I would imagine that they had," Beth Schmidt said. "It's performance based -- if they meet the requirements and add those jobs."
Yet a January report from Schmidt's agency shows IBM Tulsa's payroll remains near 1,200, the same as it was before the agreement.
And in May, IBM announced 350 Tulsa accounting and finance positions were going to Argentina...
Exuberance over IBM's presence, be it in Oklahoma or New York, is not unusual.
In Boulder, Colo., the city doled out a $100,000 tax rebate to IBM on top of state incentives worth $632,000 to get Big Blue to put a "green" data center there.
"The city's money was really an indication to IBM corporate that Boulder really cares about having this company here," Frances Draper of the Boulder Economic Council told reporters.
"That was an incredibly important part of their decision."
This year, IBM has slashed 400 jobs in Boulder.
And the dirty secret is no one wants to take on IBM for fear of losing jobs and hurting the local economy, especially in areas such as Dutchess County, where IBM is such a vital player.
"Nobody wants to throw the baby out with the bath water," Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner said.
And so New York went ahead with a pact with IBM, requiring a hefty donation from taxpayers, announcing it one day before Big Blue's second-quarter profit jumped a dizzying 22 percent to $2.77 billion, defying even Wall Street's expectations.
The agreement with the Westchester County-based technology giant, announced by Gov. David Paterson on July 15, calls for a $1.5 billion investment by IBM and $140 million by the state.
It includes $75 million from taxpayers for 1,000 new jobs-- 325 at UAlbany's NanoCollege and another 675 at an upstate facility that has yet to be sited.
The remaining $65 million will help finance the expansion and upgrade of IBM's East Fishkill plant, in return for IBM's pledge to retain 1,400 semiconductor jobs at the Dutchess County site.
Paterson said the arrangement is "what we are going to need to reignite the engine of the state's economy."
But to Frank Mauro of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research and education organization in Latham, it brings a sense of deja vu.
Mauro recalls in 2000, then-Gov. George Pataki announced New York was bankrolling IBM with $660 million in state and local incentives. In return, the company would invest $2.5 billion in East Fishkill to create the world's most advanced computer chip plant and 1,000 "permanent" jobs.
Eight years later, 1,400 people work at the East Fishkill plant. But Mauro wonders why the state suddenly has to pay another $65 million to keep them there.
It "seems like double billing, since New York state and local taxpayers already paid an estimated $660 million for those 1,000 jobs," he said. "It would be good to know ... how long IBM was required to maintain those 1,000 jobs"...
Dutchess County, where IBM has invested more than $5 billion over the past 10 years, recently gave Big Blue a tax break for a possible $36 million upgrade of its Poughkeepsie plant.
The upgrade would give Poughkeepsie a competitive edge against IBM sites elsewhere, such as North Carolina and Colorado, said Michael Tomkovich, chairman of the Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency.
Tyner, the county legislator, called the breaks a "bad deal" for local taxpayers.
"It's time to end this economic battle between the states," he said. "We need to remove the ability of these companies to hold us over a barrel."
In fact, Big Blue scored big in North Carolina by leveraging competition among states.
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"IBM Lays Off Hundreds in Dutchess"
Wednesday, January 28, 2009 3:06 AM EST
By The Associated Press [Daily Freeman]
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2009/01/28/news/doc497fe5f144350528209256.txt
IBM CORP. has eliminated hundreds of jobs in Dutchess County as part of thousands of layoffs extending across at least eight plants run by the computer giant.
Published reports put the layoff number at IBM's East Fishkill plant between 400 and 750, with another 90 to 100 jobs being eliminated at IBM-Poughkeepsie.
There also were IBM layoffs in Tucson, Ariz.; San Jose, Calif.; Rochester, Minn.; Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Austin, Texas; and Burlington, Vt.
IBM said it doesn't have to reveal the number of jobs it is cutting, because the Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to disclose only "material" events and IBM considers its job cuts to be a regular part of the company's business model. The company noted that it eliminates thousands of jobs every year but usually adds some back in other places.
Because of that, IBM contended it doesn't have to break out its layoffs in regulatory filings unless it suddenly changes course and makes substantially more or fewer job cuts.
That's why while IBM's head count keeps growing, topping 400,000 at the end of 2008, laid-off IBM workers have flooded online job boards with complaints about the company's stealth cuts.
One estimate of IBM's recent cuts put the number at more than 4,000 jobs lost since IBM's fourth-quarter earnings announcement last week. Those earnings contained an unexpected surprise: IBM forecast at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009. IBM shares are up more than 10 percent since then.
The Associated Press reviewed one document sent to laid-off workers that identified some of the positions that were cut. Employees weren't identified by name, but positions and the workers' ages were listed. The document listed nearly 3,000 jobs.
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"IBM Is Cutting Jobs; Maybe Some Locally"
BY CRAIG WOLF * POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL * JANUARY 22, 2009
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090122/BUSINESS01/901220332/1003/business
Job cuts that began Wednesday within IBM Corp. will likely be seen in the divisions that have large numbers of employees in Dutchess County next week, according to the head of a workers group.
The company confirmed "resource actions" began Wednesday but refused to comment on specifics or sites involved, or any plans.
Lee Conrad, national coordinator for the Alliance@IBM, said from reports he's getting from people inside the company, "Systems and Technology will get hit Tuesday - East Fishkill, Poughkeepsie and Burlington; Fishkill and Burlington the heavy hitters."
The two Dutchess County sites, plus Burlington, Vt., are in IBM's Systems and Technology Group, which makes computers and microchips.
IBM, the region's largest private employer, has said it employed 11,600 in Dutchess at the end of 2007. It hasn't posted end-of-2008 numbers yet.
Conrad said he's learned IBM's Software Group had cuts of about 1,400 people in the U.S. and Canada and the sales and distribution group also had cuts. Software has a contingent in Dutchess; sales staff are widely spread.
"Other divisions, I think, will probably spread out over a couple days and next week. That seems to be the pattern they've done in the past," Conrad said.
The day after IBM reported rising profits and a year that was its first as a $100 billion company, it began the nationwide series of cuts.
Spokesman Doug Shelton confirmed IBM management had notified some employees about "resource actions," the usual term for large-scale job eliminations.
"We are not going to discuss specific numbers or locations. What I can tell you is that managing resources and skills is an ongoing component of our business model," he said in an e-mail.
Skill, Resources Mix
"IBM continuously evaluates its mix of skills and resources, and makes changes as needed," Shelton said. "The nature of our business is that we must constantly assess employee skills and resources and at any given time, give IBM the flexibility to match the current and future needs of our clients (skills that the client needs).
"Managing talent in this way promotes the continued competitiveness of our operations and matches our skills and capabilities with the evolving needs of our clients. We anticipate some employees will find other positions that match their skills within IBM, and we're enabling them in that effort," he said.
In the past, IBM has been more specific about major staff reductions. Conrad said secrecy has long been management's way, but not to this extent.
"I think it gives them a bad reputation when they cut jobs, and they don't like that," he said.
It may also affect tax favors the company gets from states such as New York, he said.
"IBM's cutting jobs around the country and they're cutting them in states that have handed out tax breaks to the company," Conrad said. "They're being arrogant."
New York is giving IBM $140 million as IBM invests $1.5 billion in three New York state programs.
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From http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/exportingamerica/outsourcing_solutions.cfm ...
Policy Solutions to Shipping Jobs Overseas
Home > Issues > Jobs, Wages & the Global Economy > Exporting America
Many experts have argued that losing jobs overseas is both inevitable and ultimately healthy for the U.S. economy. They claim that policy solutions that would inhibit the movement of jobs within an unfettered global marketplace will be counter-productive and costly. What these arguments ignore, however, is that the destruction of U.S. jobs is not occurring on a level playing field resulting from neutral policies. Rather, a broad range of state and federal policies allow, facilitate and even reward the destruction of U.S. jobs. Government policies lavish tax breaks, government contracts, and easy access to the U.S. market on companies that destroy good jobs and exploit lax workers' rights to produce overseas. These misguided policies hurt America's working families and fail to promote equitable economic development in other countries.
Policymakers must reform policies that encourage and reward job destruction and implement new policies that will create good jobs for the future. While no single policy measure provides a magic bullet for stopping job loss, a dramatic re-orientation of U.S. policy that removes incentives for shipping jobs offshore, while fostering healthy conditions at home for job creation, will go a long way towards building a more balanced global economy that works for working families.
1) Remove Incentives to Ship Jobs Overseas
* Taxes: Current law allows companies to defer paying taxes on their overseas income indefinitely while deducting many of the expenses associated with moving offshore - this provides a double subsidy to U.S. companies that ship work overseas, effectively penalizing those companies that keep jobs in the U.S. Ending overseas tax breaks would generate an additional $7 to 12 billion a year in tax revenue and eliminate the perverse incentive to move work abroad to avoid paying taxes.
* Public Contracts and Subsidies: Many companies that ship work overseas receive billions of dollars worth of government procurement contracts, subsidies and state and local tax abatements. These taxpayer-financed benefits usually come with very few strings attached, allowing companies to skim additional profits by performing publicly funded work overseas. Laws at the local, state and federal level should be reformed to ensure our taxpayer dollars are not subsidizing the destruction of American jobs.
* Currency: A number of U.S. trading partners - China in particular - manipulate the value of their currency relative to the dollar to give their exports to the U.S. an artificial cost advantage, while making American products more expensive. This puts American producers and workers at an impossible cost disadvantage, effectively shutting them out of export markets and undermining their competitiveness at home. The U.S. must take immediate and aggressive action to ensure that the dollar is appropriately valued and withdraw trade benefits from countries that insist on manipulating their currency to unfair advantage, in violation of international trade rules.
* Trade Laws: Domestic trade laws enable the government to redress unfair trade practices that give an illegitimate advantage to overseas production. These laws were intended to provide the first line of defense for American producers and workers, yet they are very poorly enforced. The World Trade Organization has weakened our ability to use these laws, and on-going trade negotiations may undermine these laws even further. We must vigorously enforce our domestic trade laws, defend them from challenge, and work to strengthen them in the future.
* Trade Agreements: Trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) create new rights, but no responsibilities, for companies that ship jobs overseas. NAFTA contains strong legal protections for companies investing abroad and guaranteed access for their products into the U.S. market. But NAFTA provides no comparable protections for the rights of workers and the environment, allowing companies to escape their international obligations by shipping work overseas. We must fundamentally reform flawed trade rules to hold companies accountable for respecting workers' rights no matter where they produce.
2) Reward the Creation of Good Jobs in the United States
* Health Care: Ballooning health care costs are creating a crisis for all American families and companies, with particularly devastating impacts on American manufacturers. The absence of a functional health care policy in the U.S. not only denies millions access to quality, affordable health care - it also impairs our companies' ability to compete with companies in nations that control costs and share them more broadly, rather than imposing the burden on individual employers and employees. A national solution to our health care crisis is needed to reduce cost burdens on American firms and workers and make U.S. production more competitive.
* Public Investment: New technologies and productivity advances require wise investments, and the public sector can play an important role in stimulating such innovation. The U.S. needs a comprehensive policy on education and training, research and development, infrastructure investment, and energy independence to spur innovation and ensure it leads to the creation of more good jobs. State and local economic development policies also have an important role to play in helping American producers remain competitive in the global economy.
3) Improve Transparency and Protect Consumers
* Data Collection: There are no comprehensive, official data on how many U.S. jobs have been lost to trade and offshore outsourcing. Even government statistics on service sector imports are unreliable, since they are self-reported by importing companies. The U.S. government should collect detailed and comprehensive data on the number of jobs lost overseas due to offshore investments and trade, including by requiring all companies to fully disclose this information. Greater coordination among agencies that collect labor market and international economic data is also needed.
* Disclosure: Consumers have a right to know where the goods and services they purchase are produced - country of origin labels on goods sold in the U.S. are required by law, but there is no policy for "labeling" services sold in the U.S. Firms should be required to inform consumers where the services they purchase are produced and provided from, with penalties for disclosing false information and failures to disclose.
* Privacy and Security: Personal financial and medical data is being sent overseas without consumers' knowledge or consent and without the full protection of domestic privacy laws. Projects with sensitive security information, such as infrastructure engineering and design, are also being sent overseas. Information with such serious privacy and security implications must be adequately protected- if it is allowed to be processed abroad at all, it must be governed by the same legal safeguards that apply in the U.S. and subject to prior informed consent from consumers.
4) Assist Displaced Workers
* Program Coverage: While all displaced workers need adequate notice, income support, training and health care, when resources are limited the federal government has a special obligation to assist workers who lose their jobs to trade and offshore outsourcing. The current WARN (advance notice) and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) programs are intended to help trade-impacted workers make the transition to new jobs, but these displaced worker programs need to be expanded and strengthened. The WARN act should be amended to apply to more workers and provide more notice before layoff. TAA needs to be expanded to cover all workers who lose their jobs to import competition or production shifts, regardless of the sector (manufacturing or services) in which they work or the country to which their job has gone.
* Program Administration: Significant additional funding will be needed to finance this expansion, and to support improved outreach, program administration, income support, health care, training, and wage insurance benefits that reach every worker who needs them. The Department of Labor must demonstrate the will to ensure workers receive the benefits to which they are entitled, and assist states in the effective administration of these benefits. Additionally, TAA programs should continue to be administered by state workforce agencies and state merit-staff, not contracted out to non-governmental entities.
5) Support Equitable and Sustainable Development Abroad
* Development: Stimulating robust and stable development around the world not only benefits workers in other countries - it is essential to building a more balanced global economy where workers and countries can engage in high-road competition based on skills and productivity instead of a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. Until workers in other countries are able to earn a decent wage and build a middle class, they will never be able to purchase the goods and services they produce, much less consume those produced in the U.S.
* Workers' Rights: The international community must recognize strong workers' rights as a key foundation for vigorous democracy and equitable economic development, and incorporate obligations to uphold these fundamental rights in international rules and institutions. Research shows observing workers' rights is good for growth and it contributes to development by building democratic institutions, decreasing inequality, and encouraging political participation. Underestimating the role of workers' rights in development ignores the history of the wealthiest countries, where unions proved critical to democratization and the growth of a middle class.
* Debt Relief and Aid: Crippling debt burdens prevent many developing countries from meeting basic human needs and investing in the building blocks of development. Many indebted governments pursue short-term, export-led growth strategies to earn the dollars they need to pay the costs of debt service - strategies that do little to promote sustainable development and put even more competitive pressure on American workers. The U.S. must work with other creditors to relieve unpayable debt burdens and enable governments to invest the resulting savings in development. In addition, the U.S. must increase development aid and ensure its delivery is guided by democratic participation from those most affected.
* International Financial Institutions: Too often, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank pressure countries to "reform" their economies in the wrong direction. They press for deregulation, privatization, liberalization of trade and financial markets, and rolling back labor market regulations, urging that such steps are needed to attract foreign investors and expand exports. These policy prescriptions have failed to create robust growth and reduce poverty, and they speed up the race to the bottom for workers everywhere. The international financial institutions must be fundamentally reformed to work with developing country governments, trade unions, and other citizens' organizations to promote core workers' rights, strengthen the rule of law and democratic institutions, and invest in domestically-oriented development strategies.
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From http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/23/new-report-30-million-service-jobs-may-be-shipped-overseas/ ...
New Report: 30 Million Service Jobs May Be Shipped Overseas
Digg
by James Parks, Jan 23, 2009
Recent telecommunications advances, especially the Internet, could theoretically put more than 30 million U.S. jobs at risk of being exported overseas. Services previously needed to be performed domestically theoretically can be done anywhere in the world through the Internet, four U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) analysts say in an article appearing in the agency's Monthly Labor Review (subscription required).
The 160 occupations considered capable of being performed in other countries account for some 30.3 million workers, one-fifth of total U.S. employment and cover a wide array of job functions, pay rates and educational levels.
More than half of the vulnerable jobs in the BLS study are professional and related occupations, including computer and mathematical science occupations and architecture and engineering jobs, and many office and administrative support occupations also are considered susceptible.
Since 2000, corporations have shipped more than 525,000 white-collar overseas, according to the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE). Some estimates say up to 14 million middle-class jobs could be exported out of our nation in the next 10 years. Accountants, software engineers, X-ray technicians, all are losing their jobs as corporations look for low-wage workers in countries such as India and China.
Meanwhile, the jobs being created in the United States often are low-wage jobs that don't offer health coverage or ensure retirement security. Nearly one-quarter of the nation's workers labor in jobs that generally pay less than the $8.85 hourly wage the U.S. government says it takes to keep a family of four out of poverty. Sixty percent of such workers are women, and many are people of color.
Among the occupations most susceptible to being sent overseas, the BLS analysts say, are those that produce information and do not require "face-to-face" contact. Among the most vulnerable are office and administrative support jobs, with relatively low education or training requirements, including telephone operators, payroll and timekeeping clerks, and word processors and typists.
Another 11 of the highest ranked jobs are professional and related occupations, which generally possess higher educational requirements. They include pharmacists, computer programmers, biochemists and biophysicists, architectural and civil drafters, financial analysts, paralegals and legal assistants.
Among the occupations least likely to be shipped overseas are financial managers, food scientists and technologists, front-line retail sales managers, and training and development specialists.
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More info here below if you want it...
Ulster County Executive Michael Hein's Council of Economic Advisers
http://www.co.ulster.ny.us/downloads/EcoDevTaskForceReport.pdf
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle info on Dutchess County Empire Zone (and all in NYS):
http://php.democratandchronicle.com/RocDocs/taxcredits/
Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin info on Dutchess County Empire Zone (and all in NYS):
http://www.pressconnects.com/assets/pdf/CB81019731.PDF
"Across the Nation, IBM Leaves a Trail of Broken Promises" Times Herald Record C. Young 7/27/08
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080727/BIZ21/80725017
"Does Tax Code Send U.S. Jobs Offshore?" by David J. Lynch [USA Today 3/20/08]
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-03-20-corporate-tax-offshoring_N.htm
"Timeline: IBM East Fishkill Over the Years" by Craig Wolf [1/28/09]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090128/BUSINESS01/901280339
"New Report: 30 Million Service Jobs May Be Shipped Overseas" by James Parks [1/23/09]
http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/23/new-report-30-million-service-jobs-may-be-shipped-overseas/
"Policy Solutions to Shipping Jobs Overseas" [AFL-CIO]
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/exportingamerica/outsourcing_solutions.cfm
"Getting Our Money's Worth: The Case for IDA Reform in New York State"
[New York Jobs With Justice May 2007 ( http://www.nyjwj.org/docs/GO$W.pdf )]
"Little Done To Fix Empire Zone Tax Program" by Mike McAndrew [Syracuse Post-Standard 7/13/08]
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1215939359223980.xml&coll=1
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/EndingTheEcoWarAmongTheStates.pdf
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/publications2008/FPI_EconDevtBrief_Feb2008.pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/Research/studies/econwar/HR1060.cfm
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070329144749-35526.pdf
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