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Treasurer James Rokakis Named County Leader of the Year
Cuyahoga County Treasurer James Rokakis has been named County Leader of the Year by American City and County Magazine for his “extraordinary effort in 2006 to battle the blight of neighborhood decline.”
“It's an honor,” says Rokakis. “And it just isn't an honor for me, it's an honor for the people who work in my office who have worked so hard on these problems that we're tackling. And it's an honor for the county government here, that I think is often maligned for the work that we do.”
Rokakis has long spoken out on the need to tighten regulations on predatory lenders in Cuyahoga County, who he says are at the root of the ongoing mortgage crisis. “[For 16 years] Ohio was the wild west of financial lending, and there was no sheriff in town,” says Rokakis. “And we finally have a sheriff in Marc Dann, and we finally have a sheriff in Ted Strickland.”
From his 20 years as a Cleveland City Councilman to his decade as County Treasurer, Rokakis has time and again proven himself to be a tireless advocate and public servant. “I've lived here all my life, I love this community,” he said. “And I know that technically, my job is viewed just as a job of collecting property taxes, but I think we need everybody speaking out on all these problems.”
The Cuyahoga County Democratic Party thanks Jim for his years of dedication and award- winning service.
Labor Leader Harriet Applegate Hits the North Shore
The North Shore Federation of Labor and Cuyahoga County are proud to have labor leader Harriet Applegate at the helm this year.
Formerly the Cleveland AFL-CIO, The North Shore Federation of Labor's executive committee named Applegate their Executive Secretary back in April, the first time a woman has held that post since the organization's inception.
Applegate brings years of political and labor-related experience to the position, and is excited about working with Cleveland's labor force.
"I look forward to working with our affiliated unions to continue to strengthen our labor movement, work with coalition partners to make our community better and to help workers organize," Applegate recently told The Plain Dealer. "It's a great honor to be given an opportunity to lead the Cleveland labor movement.”
The Cuyahoga County Democratic Party is always on the lookout for volunteers. If you're interested in
making a difference, give us a call at 216-621-9750, or stop by our headquarters at 1466 St. Clair Ave
in Cleveland.
TODAY! - Electronic Voting Forum Hosted by BOE
There will be an open discussion on Sept. 20, 2007 from 2:30-6pm at the BOE about the security of Diebold TSX voting machines. See this flyer for info on the meeting. A Princeton report & video revealed serious security flaws in an earlier generation Diebold machine called the TS ( click here to watch the video in our Media Center). In response, Diebold issued this statement maintaining that the TSX is a later generation machine than the system tested by Princeton, and is secure. This statement, however, has been proven inaccurate by the State of California, which decertified the TSX and issued this report, making clear that the TSX is in fact susceptible to many of the same security vulnerabilities as TS voting machines. When asked about the accuracy of Diebold's response to the Princeton study, Edward W. Felten, one of the computer scientists at Princeton who was able to hack and steal votes from a Diebold TS system in under a minute, had this to say:
"The document you referred to (Diebold's response) makes several false claims regarding our study. Nearly everything this document says about our paper is false.
For example: the document claims that we did not perform logic and accuracy testing. That is false. Our paper describes, and our video shows, how logic and accuracy testing fails to detect the attacks we discovered.
The document claims we did not submit our paper for peer review. That is false. Our paper was peer reviewed and has been published in the scientific literature.
To our knowledge, Diebold has never submitted any claims about its voting system to scientific peer review. Every peer-reviewed paper that has examined Diebold's systems has found many serious security problems.
The document makes additional claims about our paper, for example relating to EPROMs, that are contrary to the contents of our paper.
The TSx, with the software improvements that Diebold says it has made since our research, was studied thoroughly in California's Top to Bottom Review, and was found to have the same sorts of problems we discovered in the TS."
If you want to make enemies, try to change something. ~ Woodrow Wilson
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