Fears of e-voting glitches in the November election are still not over. The outcome of the Minnesota Senate race--which could give the Democrats a firmer grasp on power in Washington--may depend on whether scanning machines made mistakes two weeks ago when tabulating ballots.
Republican Sen. Norm Coleman holds a lead of only about 200 votes over his main opponent, Democrat Al Franken, but a hand recount that begins Wednesday could show that a few thousand votes were mistakenly rejected.
With Coleman's lead under a margin of 0.5 percent of the more than 2.9 million votes cast in the Minnesota senate race on November 4, the state automatically begins a hand recount of every ballot.
Minnesota used optical scanning machines to read paper ballots, and enough ballots could have been mistakenly rejected by the machines to alter the outcome of the race, said Beth Fraser, director of governmental affairs for the Minnesota secretary of state's office. The office estimates that as many as two votes for every 1,000 cast--or as many as 6,000--may have been mistakenly rejected.
The optical scanners would have rejected ballots that were not filled out correctly--for instance, if a voter circled a candidate's name rather than filling in the bubble next to the name, Fraser said. However, Minnesota law mandates that any vote in which the voter's intention is clear must be counted. In other words, the law is more liberal than the machines, and a manual recount could permit votes to be counted that a machine would reject.
"We have a pretty clear statute of what counts as a vote," Fraser said.
Starting Wednesday, election officials in 106 locations throughout the state will start sorting through ballots, paying particular attention to those that were rejected to decide whether they should be counted.
"It's kind of a consensus process," Fraser said.
Representatives for both of the two major candidates will be at every table, she said, and they are free to challenge the election officials' judgment. If anyone is left unsatisfied about the status of a vote, it will be put aside for the state canvassing board to review.
Officials aim to finish the hand recount by December 5. The state canvassing board--which is chaired by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and includes Minnesota Chief Justice Eric Magnuson, Associate Justice G. Barry Anderson, and District Judges Kathleen Gearin and Edward Cleary--will reconvene on December 16 with the goal of getting in the final results by December 19.
While the optical scanning machines may have rejected some crucial votes, Fraser said the machines are the best option for counting votes.
"It speeds up the counting but gives us the paper ballots to count on, so the results are fully auditable," she said.
Tallying mistakenly rejected votes is unlikely to clear the controversy surrounding the recount, however. Franken's campaign filed a lawsuit on November 13 requesting that the names of voters who cast invalidated absentee ballots be made public, so those ballots can be reviewed by the canvassing board as well. A hearing on the case is set for Wednesday morning, after the recount starts.
Other incidents have called into question some of the results, such as an allegation the Minneapolis director of elections accidentally left 32 absentee ballots in her car. Additionally, Coleman has called into question the neutrality of Secretary of State Ritchie, who is a Democrat.
More members of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team were named Wednesday, including some veterans of the technology and communications sectors.
The transition team announced its agency review teams Wednesday, groups of advisers who will review key federal departments, agencies, and commissions, as well as the White House, to aide Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, and key advisers in their policy, personnel, and budget decisions.
"The Teams will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in," according to Change.gov.
Michael Warren, currently on partial leave from his role as chief operating officer of Stonebridge International, is a leader of the Treasury Department agency review team. He is also part of the working group overseeing international trade and economics agencies. Warren previously served as president of Appfluent Technologies, a data usage and query performance software provider. He is also chairman of Ironbridge Systems, which provides analytics and technical support services. Warren also worked for McKinsey & Company as a tech industry consultant, and consulted on the U.S. and Asian semiconductor industries for the McKinsey Global Institute.
Louisa Terrell, who is on leave from her position as a senior director at Yahoo's Washington public policy office, is a working group member of the transition group's agency review team. Terrell was previously deputy chief of staff for Biden and served as counsel for Biden on his Senate Judiciary Committee staff.
Tom Wheeler--in a leave of absence from Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm working with early stage technology companies--is a member of the agency review working group responsible for the science, technology, space, and arts agencies. Wheeler was previously CEO of the National Cable Television Association, as well as the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association.
Donald Gips, on leave from his position as group vice president of global corporate development at Level 3 Communications, is a co-chair of the agency review working group. Gips had been named as an original member of Obama's transition team. He previously served as chief domestic policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore and was chief of the international bureau at the Federal Communications Commission.
Reed Hundt, who served as an adviser to Obama during the campaign, is a member of the agency review working group responsible for the international trade and economics agencies. He served as the chairman of the FCC from 1993 to 1997.
John Wilkins, who is on partial leave from McKinsey & Company, is a member of the agency review working group and worked for the FCC from 1998 to 1999.
Caption: An excerpt from President-Elect Barack Obama's now-deleted technology agenda on Change.gov.
Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.
Now they're gone.
The "agenda" Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a "comprehensive and detailed agenda" that will "bring about the kind of change America needs," with the individual pages deleted entirely.
A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft's Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet "a strategic asset," and establish a $2 billion fund to "counter al-Qaeda propaganda." Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site.
I've posted mirror images of the vanished homeland security section, the technology section, and the newsroom section listing the different topics on the right side of the page.
Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: "That section of the Web site is being retooled."
This isn't the first time that vanishing or altered documents on a presidential Web site have been noticed: President Bush got some unwelcome attention for this last year. The White House's Web team also rewrote the May 2003 caption showing Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier after the Iraq occupation proved more problematic than expected (see before and after).
The ephemeral nature of Web publishing does raise some serious issues: if a president-elect circulates a physical press release promising to do something, and then changes his mind, there's a paper trail. That doesn't exist when files are added to a Web site and then quietly removed over a weekend.
The Library of Congress and other institutions, including the California Digital Library and the Government Printing Office, are trying to remedy this by doing an "end of term" crawl. That means they're regularly crawling and archiving all .gov domains that are considered "government sites," including Change.gov. The crawl started in September and will continue through February 2009.
The project has a varying crawl schedule, so it may not have collected the agenda pages on Change.gov, Abbie Grotke, a digital media project coordinator on the Web capture team in the Library of Congress' office of strategic initiatives, said on Monday.
The Change.gov site has been added to the list of sites to be crawled as part of the Library's Election Archives project--a separate effort. Gina Jones, also part of the Library's office of strategic initiatives, said that since it's a new site, it hasn't been collected yet.
CNET News' Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.
(Credit:
Change.gov)
Change.gov, Obama's official transition site, features a blog, a section with Obama's agenda, and a section that profiles the Obama administration. It also includes a jobs page for those interested in working in the Obama administration, a page titled "America Serves" that emphasizes the need for community service, and a section called "American Moment," where visitors are encouraged to share their stories or their vision for the country.
The front page on Wednesday linked to a YouTube video, found in the first entry of the site's blog, of Obama's final campaign speech given in Chicago after his victory.
The Government Accountability Office launched its own 2009 Congressional and Presidential Transition site as well on Wednesday. The nonpartisan GAO makes recommendations on the site of ways the new government can address the nation's biggest challenges.
On the new site, the GAO lists 13 issues that "demand urgent attention and continuing oversight to ensure the nation's security and well-being." Along with "financial institutions and markets" and "Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan," the list includes the transition to digital television and the retirement of the space shuttle.
The site also features a closed-captioned introductory video from Gene Dodaro, the acting comptroller general.
By naming some technology executives to his transition team--especially former IAC executive Julius Genachowski--President-elect Barack Obama is signaling that he's likely to follow through with his proposal to appoint a chief technology officer to the White House.
The person in this new position--and possibly a new White House technology office staff--could be given the directive to create new levels of transparency and access to government agencies, or to guide policies that spur innovation and growth. Technology experts within the Beltway warn, however, that a CTO would have to avoid potential pitfalls such as creating new spending for ineffectual projects, running into conflict with other agencies, or simply becoming nothing more than a symbolic office.
Still, creating the position would generally be seen as a positive step.
"The fact that this is difficult is, in some ways, an example of why we might need a CTO," said Alan Davidson, head of Google's Washington office. "There is no one place for unified technology leadership in our executive branch right now."
A tech-friendly transition team
The overall composition of Obama's transition team indicates he may be serious about implementing new uses of technology in the executive branch and directing more cohesive policy making. Genachowski was an adviser to two Federal Communications Commission chairmen during the Clinton administration--Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard--and is the founder of start-up incubator LaunchBox Digital. Genachowski chaired the group that helped shape Obama's Tech and Innovation Plan, in which Obama calls for a CTO.
Genachowski is considered to be a strong contender for the CTO position.
Former IAC executive Julius Genachowski is part of Barack Obama's transition team and may be under consideration to fill the role of CTO.
(Credit: LaunchBoxDigital)"Julius is an example of the kind of person who has both real-world technology and business experience and would be effective in Washington," Davidson said. "He's a good model of the type of person one might look for as a CTO or as another technology leader within the administration."
The transition team also includes Sonal Shah of Google.org and Donald Gips, vice president of corporate strategy and development for Level 3 Communications. Many Obama advisers come out of the Clinton administration, and Gips, among others, specifically served Vice President Al Gore. Given Gore's emphasis on the development of information technology, those advisers are well poised to integrate technology into the way the government functions and creates policy, some have said.
Gips served as Gore's chief domestic policy adviser in the late 1990s. William Daley, another member of the Obama transition team, served as secretary of commerce from 1997 to 2000 and was chairman of Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.
Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff, considered in Washington to be a competent figure who is comfortable with technology issues in his own right.
The team has already shown its commitment to embracing technology by launching the site Change.gov.
"Because of the impact the Internet had in the election, we're expecting to see the incoming administration embrace a lot of those tools, and that will be important for laying the groundwork once the administration takes office," Davidson said.
Beyond this transition team, Obama may look for advice on technology policy--or for a CTO--from the cadre of technology advisers he maintained during his campaign. Obama's technology advisers, both formal and informal, included government types, academics, and people from the high tech industry.
Former FCC chairs Hundt and Kennard serve as advisers, as do Michael Nelson, the former director of Internet technology and strategy at IBM; Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist and a policy director for the World Wide Web Consortium; Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and a number of others.
Will a new cabinet position change anything?
Some inside Washington have said the Obama administration will be a vast improvement from the Bush administration, which has been criticized for neglecting technology as an issue and a tool. President Bush has not completely ignored the issue, however. As part of its cybersecurity efforts encouraged by the administration, the Homeland Security Department is conducting a complete overhaul of government networks to make them more secure. The Office of Management and Budget has also emphasized funding to keep information technology secure and up to date.
The OMB, through the Presidential E-Government Initiatives, has also served the public through sites like Grants.gov, which allows people to more easily find and apply for federal grants, and USAJobs.gov, the federal online recruitment service.
Moreover, the appointment of a CTO in an Obama administration does not ensure any improvements.
"The idea of a chief technology officer is a fine one, but I think it's more complex than that," said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association. "It's not enough to make an office--the use and understanding of technology needs to permeate every agency."
Yet someone with the right credentials and reputation could make that happen, Black said.
"It's going to take a person with a liberal background, with skills across the field," he said. "Somebody close to Obama certainly helps."
Looking to industry for help
Speculation has circulated that Obama could consider a well-known executive like Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos or Google's Schmidt for the role of CTO; however, at least one Washington insider said it is highly unlikely Schmidt would leave his position at Google for the job.
Some have speculated Google CEO Eric Schmidt may be up for the job of CTO, but others--including Schmidt himself--say that's unlikely.
Davidson noted that Schmidt has said he has no interest in the role. Davidson did not rule out the possibility of another Washington outsider taking the job, though.
"There's a balance that will need to be struck in looking for people who have real world technology experience and can be effective in Washington," he said. "There are people in Washington who fit that role and people outside of Washington who fit that role."
Others such as James Lewis, director and senior fellow in the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cautioned against the idea.
"We've seen lots of times where people have brought in gurus from the high-tech community, and they give up after a year because they're frustrated," Lewis said. "Knowing how the government works is important."
Even so, Lewis said, implementing technology policy cannot be left to policy wonks from Washington without industry advice, Lewis said.
"Innovation's the secret sauce of the year, but we need to figure out what exactly that means," he said. "Giving the Commerce Department more money will not do anything for innovation, yet that's one of the things we hear."
Defining the CTO's mission
The executive branch will likely have an onslaught of technology policy proposals to consider, Lewis said, which could range from a national broadband commitment to the establishment of a central office for research and development funds. Some may be good, but others could be a waste of time and money.
"The transition team needs to take a really hard look at the ideas that are going to be put forward because most of them aren't going to work," Lewis said.
Those familiar with the transition process have said it will work "quickly, but not hastily." Before a CTO is chosen, Obama and his team will have to decide how to structure the White House.
The jurisdiction of a CTO could overlap with other agencies or executive positions in areas such as innovation policy, cybersecurity, or intellectual property enforcement. To avoid those overlaps, the Obama team will have to decide, for instance, whether the CTO would focus on goals like making agencies more efficient or take on a broader agenda such as dictating policy.
Innovation policy could intrude on turf covered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, many noted, and policy covering digital copyright law might conflict with another cabinet position Obama will have to fill--the position of intellectual property enforcement coordinator, which was established by the recently-signed Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act
Foreseeing a battle in the copyright world between Hollywood and the tech industry, Black said it would be ideal for the Obama administration to include "somebody who can recognize there is significant collateral damage to other legitimate interests and industries" by some copyright positions taken by the entertainment industry.
"They don't have to be anti-Hollywood, they just have to be not blinded by an extreme position," he said. "I'd actually be very happy if we just had somebody who was very balanced and open."
President-elect Obama may also consider appointing a completely separate cybersecurity chief, as is likely to be recommended by the CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency.
"The commission said (cybersecurity) was a national security issue, and that's kind of out of the orbit of the CTO," said Lewis, who chairs the commission. "There's some overlap, but I think the CTO's role is kind of orthogonal to the cyber mission."
President-elect Barack Obama has named tech executives from Google.org and InterActiveCorp to his transition team, according to reports.
Google.org's Sonal Shah, and Julius Genachowski, a former IAC executive who also served as chief counsel to former Democratic FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, have both been named to the team, according to news reports.
Genachowski is a co-founder and managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, and is a founding partner of LaunchBox Digital, an early-stage investment firm based in Washington, D.C.
He attended law school with Obama, and helped stress the importance of high-tech issues in the campaign, The Washington Post reported.
Shah, who works for Google's philanthropy division Google.org, formerly served as a vice president at Goldman Sachs.
Obama's team is also reported to be readying a new Web site for the transition, www.change.gov, which, according to news reports will launch today.
See also:
• Obama presidency: Good, bad news for tech
• What Obama presidency means for clean tech
On election night, Akamai showed record traffic to news sites.
(Credit: Akamai Technologies)Intense interest in the outcome of the U.S. presidential election helped drive record traffic to news sites, according to Akamai Technologies.
At 8 p.m. PST, just as word was coming that Barack Obama had won the election, Akamai's Net Usage Index showed more than 8.5 million worldwide visitors per minute to the company's aggregate set of news sites. Not all of the traffic, of course, may have been specifically to election coverage, but the relative audience size in the index does correlate strongly to particular events.
Tuesday night's total was a big jump from the previous record of 7.3 million, set in June 2006, when Ghana eliminated the United States in a World Cup soccer event. Sporting events--most notably the U.S. March Madness basketball tournament--dominate Akamai's top 15 results for visitors per minute.
The next highest election-related event now is No. 15, from November 8, 2006, for that year's voting results. That nonpresidential election accounted at its peak for 4 million visitors per minute.
Peak traffic to the events has generally come during the middle of the U.S. workday, when people presumably have been at work computers that are plugged into high-speed networks. On Tuesday night, 7.5 million of the 8.5 million visitors to the news sites were from North America, Akamai said.
"This was an evening peak, which shows how pervasive the Internet is to our lives now," said Jeff Young, director of corporate communications for Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai, which handles Web traffic for a wide variety of companies.
On Wednesday morning, traffic to the news sites remains well above normal, according to the 3-year-old Net Usage Index. Akamai's customers in the news business include the BBC, Reuters, NBC, NPR, and CNET Networks (publisher of CNET News).
Beet.TV, meanwhile, said it heard from CNN that the traffic to CNN.com also set a record Tuesday--more than 27 million unique visitors and 4.9 million live streams. Andy Plesser, executive director of Beet.TV, offers this brief interview from Tuesday afternoon with an exultant Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services (on right).
When Barack Obama becomes president in January with a strongly Democratic Congress, he'll have the chance to push a technology policy that relies more on government subsidy and regulation than that of his immediate predecessor.
In Washington and Silicon Valley circles, betting has already begun on who will be the nation's first "chief technology officer." Could it be Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who conveniently endorsed Obama? Or Vint Cerf? If there's an opening for a Beltway type, perhaps ex-regulator Reed Hundt, who's been a proxy for the president-elect?
Obama wants the CTO to "ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century," plus protecting the security of .gov computer networks. That's a pretty tall task for one person, although there's some precedent; President Clinton handed much authority for Internet regulation to Ira Magaziner after his administration's health care debacle.
Any administration will find health care to be a massive project, especially one that likely will be distracted by the Iraq occupation and a recession. Enacting new government regulations aimed at health care records and their electronic storage is an obvious first step that's already been kicking around Congress for a while.
On copyright, the conventional thinking is that Democrats are more likely to align themselves with the recording and movie industries' wishes. That may not be the case here: it was John McCain who talked up more aggressive enforcement of copyright law domestically, while Obama said "we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation, and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated."
That is, of course, intentionally vague. Obama was also vague when we asked him whether he wants to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to let Americans make a single backup copy of a DVD or computer game they legally purchase. He said only that he'd support it "in concept."
Internationally, though, Obama would not take an obviously different approach than the policies that the Bush administration has followed and that a McCain administration would have. His Web site says that "China fails to enforce U.S. copyrights and trademarks" and that additional international enforcement and standards are needed.
Congress and free trade
For technology firms, a substantial downside--and one that's difficult to overstate--is how hostile a solidly Democratic Congress and White House could be toward free trade.
Obama doesn't have the ideological bias toward free trade that Clinton had and is certain to face strong protectionist pressure from within his own party. After a handful of Democrats joined Republicans to approve the Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2005, the 15 dissidents were hounded by their own party and by labor activists. Only a rare politician would take that risk again.
Democrats' populist streak could hurt technology companies in other ways as well. Obama has promoted more aggressive antitrust actions, which could hurt Silicon Valley companies like Yahoo and Google that are already reeling from the scrutiny of a supposedly free-market Republican administration. Additionally, Obama has only promised to expand the H1-B visa program temporarily.
President-elect Barack Obama's Web site, post-election.
(Credit: BarackObama.com)More tax dollars diverted to universal broadband is a goal often promoted by the Democratic party, and Obama's CTO would at the very least influence how such a goal is met. The Obama campaign has enthusiastically called broadband access the way to a more perfect democracy, and Democratic members of Congress like Rep. Anna Eshoo of California have promoted the idea.
Eshoo's resolution, however, does little beyond call for more work to be done. Finding the funds to create wider broadband access could be a challenge; it would have to be paid for by higher taxes, reduced spending elsewhere, or running up the federal deficit.
Michael Powell, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said at a forum in September that it is unrealistic to entertain the "idea that there's money to get people to dig up streets and put in fiber. National broadband policy is probably going to have to be a lot more subtle."
Net neutrality is another open question. It was a striking difference between the two major party presidential candidates: Obama wanted new government regulation of the Internet, and McCain was skeptical. Some prominent technologists including Cisco Systems' Robert Pepper, Carnegie Mellon University's Dave Farber, and Internet founding father Bob Kahn are skeptical too.
Because politicians tend not to like to seek out trouble, a resolution will probably wait until a federal appeals court deals with Comcast's appeal of a related order by the FCC. Comcast claims the FCC does not have the authority to impose Net neutrality regulations and didn't even follow its own rules when levying them in the first place.
If the court sides with the FCC, it will sap energy from a push for extensive new Net neutrality laws; if the decision goes the other way, look for Congress to get involved. Net neutrality is, after all, the very first issue addressed in Obama's technology policy platform. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has talked up the idea, and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) introduced related legislation last year.
CNET's Stephanie Condon co-authored this article.
While Election Day involves a good deal of waiting for results, bloggers won't be kept silent until the polls close.
Partisan Web sites on the left and the right kept busy on Tuesday documenting and rebuffing allegations of intimidation tactics, saying one last goodbye to President Bush, and throwing mud at each other.
Stories of supposed Black Panthers watching over precincts in Philadelphia at Democrat Barack Obama's behest flooded right-leaning Web sites and blogs on Tuesday. Pundit Michelle Malkin has footage on her Web site from a University of Pennsylvania student approaching a precinct where two men are standing in front of the door holding clubs. They tell the filmer they are security. Malking refers to the men as a "Obama civilian security force."
HotAir.com, another rightwing site, notes that the incident was reported on Fox News.
"Bear in mind that Philadelphia is where 'street money' comes into play for Democratic GOTV efforts; this may not be a 'Black Panther' at all, but just an ordinary thug hired to look menacing enough to frighten off the weak-kneed," Ed Morrissey wrote on Hot Air.
The left-leaning site Talking Points Memo tried to subdue the story by checking in with the Obama campaign. A spokesperson for the campaign told Greg Sargent the men were not affiliated with Obama, and an Obama volunteer on site said the two men were not intimidating anyone.
Meanwhile, Sargent's colleague at TPM, Josh Marshall, showed a little more passion on the subject.
He called the story "another desperate Republican attempt to whip up racial hysteria to give them hope of winning the election."
With what's at stake in this election, it's easy to blow things out of proportion, seems to be the message from Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 liveblog, where Dennis DiClaudio takes his shot at the story about "that incident in Philadelphia in which black people were spotted allegedly being black at a polling place."
"We might need to call this a mis-election and go all the way back to the beginning and start all over again," DiClaudio says.
While the tension built around who the next president will be, Matthew Yglesias of the progressive group Think Progress took one last shot at President Bush.
"By any kind of absolute standard the man is an appalling moral leper," he wrote.
Other liberal bloggers took the opportunity to consider the state of the Republican party as a whole.
E.A. Hanks, in a piece titled, G.O.P. R.I.P.? on the Huffington Post, said the party risks finding itself in a "tar pit of irrevelency...somewhere between Neve Cambell's career and stacks of leftover 'Cool Runnings' VHS tapes."
With Tuesday afternoon upon us and what could be record numbers of voters lining up to cast their ballots, it won't be long now before the Election 2008 campaigns are history, and the United States has a new president-elect.
Our colleagues at CBS News will be providing full-bore coverage, updated every 60 seconds, throughout the evening as the Electoral College results start adding up. In addition, Katie Couric and the CBS News Political Team will deliver live, exclusive Web coverage, including a Web-only show after the network reporting ends.
As during the presidential debates, you're encouraged to submit questions and comments about the contest between John McCain and Barack Obama that could become part of the CBS Webcast.
