Statement from the Board of Elections on the 23rd Congressional District

The New York State Board of Elections Director of Public Information has issued the following statement on behalf of the Board in reaction to an article from a newspaper in the state’s North Country:

An article in the Gouverneur Times as to the, as of yet uncertified results in the 23rd Congressional District contains numerous false assertions and allegations.

There was no virus in the voting machines on Election Day in the 23rd District or anywhere else. The article is full of inaccurate information and unfortunately quoted a single word from a commissioner who mischaracterized the issue in question.

The State Board has already acknowledged there was a software problem identified during our mandatory pre-election testing regimen prior to Election Day. The problem centered on races which were composed of multi-candidate formats which allow voters to vote for more than one candidate in a given race. For example, in judicial races the voter is often allowed to vote for 3 out of 5 candidates or 2 out of 4, etc., or in a town where there are “at large” districts. The source code did not allow for enough memory in these contests and caused the scanners to freeze during operation. The Counties experiencing the problem were notified prior to Election Day and the voting systems were corrected and re-tested and the corrective action was applied successfully in those areas.

However, the human review of the software problem did not adequately identify every machine that had the problem and, as a result, there were some scanners which did freeze on Election Day. When these scanners froze, the local boards implemented procedures according to state law and Board of Elections regulations. These procedures do not allow for new changes on Election Day, so inoperative scanners were taken out of operation and emergency ballots were cast and counted in those areas according to existing procedures.

This problem was discussed in numerous press reports around the state and was openly discussed at the November 10th State Board of Elections meeting by the Commissioners and the Director of Election Operations.

With regard to the use of USB ports, there is a single USB port on the ImageCast scanner. Pursuant to state Election Law 7-202(t) the port does not permit any “functionality potentially capable of externally transmitting or receiving data via the internet, via radio waves or via other wireless means.” The port is sealed, is not accessible and has no capability for any exchange of information. The scanners do not operate like personal computers. Any device, such as a flash drive, placed in the port will not be recognized.

In addition, from the time the pre-election testing is completed until Election Day morning the machines are in the care, custody and control of the local board of elections. The machines as a group are under lock and key. Individually, the critical areas of the machine are covered in tamper-evident seals which are numbered and logged. Any broken seal will be investigated and the machine re-tested prior to any further use. Any broken seal discovered on Election Day will cause the scanner to be taken out of service immediately. The inspectors then follow long-established procedures to go to emergency ballots, until an alternate scanner can be deployed.

Lastly, any reference to a slot that is accessible to voters and poll workers for stuffing the ballot box is inaccurate information. A gap between the scanning device and the ballot box was discovered during functional testing of the ballot marking devices more than a year ago. Every machine in use on Election Day was retrofitted to completely block access to that gap. Prior to completion of the retrofit last year the gap was blocked by a tamper-evident numbered security seal. As stated earlier, any broken seal would cause the removal of a scanner from use immediately.

In addition, from the time they are created up to and including final storage, all election materials paper and machines are secured and tracked in a chain of custody by the local board of elections. All ballots voted, unvoted and spoiled must be accounted for throughout the election process.

Despite the numerous misstatements of fact in the above mentioned article, the results in the 23rd Congressional District, and all other contests in counties which utilized optical scan voting machines, will have been canvassed and audited pursuant to state Election Law, and will be certified in due course. In the end, the new optical scan voting systems guarantee we have ballots as marked by voters ensuring that every vote is counted.

Question of the Day…..Jim Kelly for Coach???

So a friend of mine suggested to me that Jim Kelly would make a great coach for the Buffalo Bills because he is a winner and he knows how to motivate players.

So whaddya think?

Calls for Parks Usage Input from Community Groups

The Brown Administration today announced its interest in hearing from all community groups, not-for-profit organizations, athletic teams and any other groups that may from time to time use city parks facilities for organized events, meetings or other activities.

“With the anticipated transition of the operation and maintenance of the city’s parks taking place on December 31^st, we want to make sure that we have complete information on any group that periodically uses a city parks facility for any type of function,” said Mayor Byron W. Brown. “We have information from Erie County on the usage of parks facilities, but we just want to be certain that everyone is accounted for prior to the transfer of the parks back to the city.”

To provide this information, it is requested that these groups coordinate with their appropriate designated point of contact to relay necessary information to Mayor Brown’s Call & Resolution Center at 311. Operators will be available to process your information from Monday, November 23 through Friday, December 4, 2009.

Friday YouTube Nugget

Happy Birthday, Skydog

For this inaugural Friday, I’d like to wish Duane Allman a Happy 63rd birthday. I say I’d like to, but unfortunately, the poor man has been dead for 38 years. He was 24 years old with a bright future ahead of him when he collided with the back of a construction truck (not a trailer carrying peaches, as per urban legend) on his motorcycle in Macon Georgia.

While most are familiar with his work with the legendary Southern blues-rock outfit The Allman Brothers Band, Duane first captured the attention of rock fans (and his fellow musicians) as a seminal session guitarist in the late 1960’s. Supporting the likes of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann and many others, he forged a reputation as a gifted improvisational musician and the greatest slide guitarist of his era.

His lead break on Wilson Pickett’s cover of Hey Jude was explosive enough to capture the attention of Eric Clapton, who played it for Duane note-for-note the first time he met him. This led to an invitation to play on the Derek and The Dominoes album Layla. Here is that fantastic Beatles cover and Duane’s amazing solo.

Live on Location: BuffaloStyle with Christina Abt

BuffaloStyle with Christina Abt, live on location at Kitchen Creations
in Hamburg this Saturday, 11/21 at 9:00 a.m.

Toilet Tuna

I took this picture at UB last week.  There’s something disturbing about the idea of someone eating a can of tuna in a bathroom stall.

Economic Development 2.0

“If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.” – Paul Graham in his essay “How To Be Silicon Valley”

In many ways, the notion of “imported innovation” is the core tenet of our local economic development strategy.  We strive to identify companies who will move here or we struggle to keep existing companies here, but we do little to help generate innovation and entrepreneurship.

This is odd as Buffalo has a rich history of innovative entrepreneurs who powered the growth of Buffalo and WNY at the turn of the last century.  At some point, we seem to have lost our way, we lost our network effect.

The reason Buffalo struggles to innovate is related to the lack of innovators, a self-perpetuating problem.  We lack a thriving community of innovative and energetic entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks.  There is no center of the city which fosters shared ideas and creative entrepreneurial energy.  Sure, we have a couple of areas in the city chasing the Richard Florida model of huddling hipsters and creatives into small alcoves to create an economic impact, but there is no effort to create an Artspace-like environment for business.

In cities where innovation thrives, you’ll find strong academic universities surrounded by an urban area populated by entrepreneurs with access to capital investors who are willing to fund risky ideas. You need a confluence of wealth and energy to create a network effect.

Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology, Irving Wladawsky-Berger had this to say about innovation and network effects:

Throughout history, certain cities and the regions around them have been the major centers of innovation in a variety of different fields as a result of their unique accumulation of talent and wealth. Innovation is very susceptible to network effects – that is, the more talented people you have in close proximity, the more their ideas and their work influence each other and stimulate them to innovate. While talent is necessary to becoming an innovation hub, it is not sufficient. You need wealth, in order to support the talented people and bring their work to market. You also need an open culture that values a diversity of ideas and experiences.

So, we lack a thriving urban area which creates shared energy.  We lack access to innovation capital as most of our local wealth is inherited and descended from the casino capitalism tree (those interested in collecting wealth for the sake of collecting it).  Our talent base is drained each year as they migrate to greener pastures.  Most importantly, we lack people willing to invest in what Keynes called the “real economy”, the economy of production capital, long-term investment and job creation.

So, how do we overcome all of these factors?  The answer from the likes of BNE/BNP and most IDA’s is to keep paying a vig to companies like Geico and Yahoo! to set up shop in our fair region and bless us with midlevel jobs.  Those jobs are designed to create wealth for plutocrats in other regions of the country.  While this strategy has merit as a force multiplier for the local economy, it’s shouldn’t be the primary driver of economic development, it should be a tactic in a wider strategy.

I’d posit that we need to build our own network effect.  No longer should we look to the local “business leaders” for handouts and capital.  We rebuild our culture of innovation from the ashes of closed steel mills and shuttered auto factories.  Looking to ourselves to fund a new wave of innovation, a rising tide of locals who want to build a better future for themselves and their neighbors.  To give this city back the entrepreneurial roar that was heard around the world at the turn of the last century.

We start with a community wide venture capital investment fund.  One in which we all pay what we can to fund the next wave of companies that will employ our friends, neighbors and our children.  Let’s stop looking for someone else to save us when the answer is right in our own wallets.

What follows is a skeleton idea that emerged from discussions with a dozen or so young emerging entrepreneurs over the last couple of weeks (our own pocket network effect).  We figured if we want to empower entrepreneurship, we should start by asking others to help us create the vision.  Which is why we need your help.

Not every idea needs a $500,000-$10,000,000 initial investment.  Most need seed funding for basic salaries, access to technology and office space, time, mentorship and community.  A good example of what this would look like is a community funded version of Y-Combinator.

Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started.

Some companies may need no more than seed funding. Others will go through several rounds. There is no right answer; how much funding you need depends on the kind of company you start.

At Y Combinator, our goal is to get you through the first phase. This usually means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale.  We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).

Y Combinator has a novel approach to seed funding: we fund startups in batches. There are two each year, one from January through March and one from June through August. During each cycle we fund multiple startups.

We estimate that we’ll need live/work space and an initial funding stream of $2,000,000 to fund 8-10 companies at a maximum of $20,000 in the first year.  Ideally, we want to raise money from the community, in small denominations.  We want everyone invested in the idea of creating innovation and the companies which will employ the people of our region.  Let’s stop thinking of economic development as a top-down planning mechanism and treat it like a grassroots campaign.  When people are invested in the business community, even at a small scale, they become active participants in the local business environment.  Not pawns in a multi-national corporate game of pleasing distant shareholders.  We begin to think locally, we begin to empower entrepreneurs, we begin to see what’s possible.

Is it possible to raise $2,000,000 in Western New York through small donations from Joe Six-Pack in Lancaster and Tom Twelve-Pack in Hamburg?  Maybe.  However, we’d need to identify some larger investors who are not part of the existing power structure to provide our own seed funding and provide the mentorship for these budding entrepreneurs.

Each investor, no matter how small, get a weighted vote on which businesses get funded.  There will be a fund manager and a CEO hired who will report to a board of directors elected by the wider membership.  The board will manage the program, provide leadership and advise the membership.  Everyone is eligible for a leadership position as half of the board would rotate each year.  This would be a corporation, not a non-profit.

During the startup phase, we group the entreprenuers together and they hack away at their projects with legal oversight and receive guidance from guest speakers, advisers, and business planners.  We set them up for success by letting them focus on their business idea while giving them the tools to grow the idea.

So, I’ll leave it to you to tell me what you think.  Add to the idea, tell me what we’re missing or what we have right.  We’re walking the idea around town to people we’ve identified as potential partners and seed investors and I’ll post updates as the idea either blossoms or stalls.

It’s time we took control of our economic future, help make it happen.

The Internet News Business

Frozen Assets Book Launch and Reception

On Saturday, November 21, 2009 from 6:00 to 8:00PM at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo Heritage Unlimited will officially launch its latest release, Frozen Assets: The Beautiful Truth About Western New York’s Fourth Season. It’s the newest book by author Dr. Mark Donnelly.

Mark Donnelly, PhD, award-winning photographer and one of Buffalo’s most enthusiastic civic cheerleaders, has once again put down his pom-poms and picked up his camera to promote this city. In his first book, The Fine Art of Capturing Buffalo, he visually showcased our vast wealth of arts, heritage, and everything that makes Western New York an amazing place to live in.

In Frozen Assets: The Beautiful Truth About Western New York’s Fourth Season, he views the city through the lens of perhaps our most misunderstood three months – our spectacular winters. Click here to page through the book.

Frozen Assets is a whimsical look at the weather we all weather together. Utilizing little more than his camera, his typewriter, and historical data from the National Weather Service, Donnelly sets out to prove his thesis that Buffalo’s winters are spectacular. His besautiful photographs of Buffalo in winter are accompanied by a playful narrative that debunks the negative exaggerations about our weather. Combined with highlights of our many winter assets, historical insights, and poetry by local wordsmiths, this book is meant to transform its readers into full-throated Buffalo weather evangelists.

“It’s time to stop the mythology that has evolved about our winter weather in Western New York from blocking our progress as a region,” said Dr. Donnelly. “Sure it gets cold and snows here in the winter. It also gets cold and snows in every other city in the Northeast.”

“As any local major employer will tell you, exaggerations about our weather have long been a substantial barrier to attracting and retaining the best and the brightest here,” he said. “Frozen Assets is my humble attempt at dispelling these myths and showcasing our winter as part of the splendor of having four distinct seasons. My goal is to arm Buffalonians with enough information to be able to draw a line in the slush and fight back.”

To aid in this endeavor, Buffalo Heritage has also published A Year To Celebrate Buffalo 2010 calendar, a glorious, oversized (14” x 10”), 13-month, full color celebration of Buffalo year round featuring a selection of seasonally appropriate photographs from both Frozen Assets and The Fine Art of Capturing Buffalo. Interesting facts about the region highlight each month and some of the many wonderful festivals are listed.

All these Buffalo-centric publications are available online at www.BuffaloHeritage.com and at area book stores and gift shops.

Click here for a peek at this delightful new 120-page coffee table book!

Hoffman Calls Givesies-Backsies in NY-23

A few weeks ago, way up in northern New York, Democrat Bill Owens defeated Doug Hoffman, a Conservative Party candidate who drew support from the tea-steepage-pouch crowd all around the country to defeat the evil Dede Scozzafava.

The result hasn’t been finalized, and the final corrected counts are coming in, and absentee ballots are being counted as well.  Every county board of elections in New York State is run with one Republican and one Democratic commissioner.  If there were any anti-Hoffman shenanigans going on, the Republican commissioners would be screaming bloody murder.

Hoffman has been going on the Glenn Beck program recently to, among other things, retroactively attempt to retract his election-night concession.  Gosh, I remember it was just 9 years ago when Al Gore refused to concede in the first place, and the Republicans accused him of everything short of infanticide.

Not one to just milquetoastedly play givesies-backsies, Hoffman went full wingnut with this insane, rambling letter to supporters accusing ACORN of attempting to steal the election in NY-23. The body of the letter is what one might typically expect from a disingenuous nutter, but my favorite part is this postscript:

I ran a different kind of campaign, one where Conservatives, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Party and 9/12 activists rallied around. ACORN, the unions and Democratic Party were scared, and that’s why they tampered with the ballots of voters in NY-23. Will you please contribute today so we can show them that fair elections are the Will of the People? Thank you.

Yeah, the Democrats were so scared that they won the election.  The unions were so scared, they helped Owens win the election.

But the kicker is this:  ACORN didn’t send anyone to NY-23.  ACORN wasn’t there.  Even a handful of Republican BOE commissioners up there take issue with Hoffman’s outburst.

Jerry O. Eaton, Jefferson County Republican elections commissioner, called Mr. Hoffman’s assertion “absolutely false.”

“No one has touched those ballots or has access to those ballots except Board of Elections staff — and in a bipartisan manner,” he said…

…George J. Williams, Oswego County Republican chairman, said Mr. Hoffman’s assertion “is not accurate.” He said he roamed the county on Election Day and saw no evidence of tampering.

“We’re not going to take the blame because he didn’t hold his concession speech,” Mr. Williams said. “If there’s any doubt, I would never concede. I know things could happen. Did illegal things happen? No, I do not believe that.”

Mathematically, Hoffman cannot win.  It’s over.

And it’s not over because ACORN stole an election or SEIU intimidated people.  It’s over because the voters were given a stark choice between a candidate who was acutely aware – and concerned – about local issues, and a candidate who was acutely aware of what Glenn Beck’s listeners and viewers were concerned about.

In just a few days, the word ACORN has gone from being something that struck fear in the hearts of conservatives and Fox News commentators everywhere, to being the punchline of a joke.