I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Our sister site, the Colorado Independent, reports that the county clerk in Adams County, Colo., has removed a voting machine that was flipping votes from one candidate to another.
A voter reported that the machine, a Diebold AccuVote touch-screen system, was flipping her vote from Democrat Mary Hodge to Republican Robert John Hadfield in a state Senate race. When the voter pushed the screen for Hodge during the early voting period in that state, the vote registered for Hadfield instead.
Unlike clerks in other counties around the country who have had such problems, Adams County Clerk Karen Adams decided to immediately remove the machine rather than risk having anyone else’s vote affected in this way.
Brad Friedman, an investigative journalist specializing in voter rights and voter suppression, lauded the clerk’s action on his Web site. Friedman has been reporting on such incidents of vote-flipping in several states over the last few weeks as early voting has begun.
In related news, a federal judge in Pennsylvania on Wednesday ordered the secretary of state there to issue emergency paper ballots to anyone whose touch-screen machine did not work. The secretary of state had issued a directive saying that paper ballots had to be handed out only if all of the touch-screen machines in a precinct broke down. Pennsylvania uses touch-screen machines that do not verify the vote registered with a receipt.
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