Teams of election workers have been toiling around the clock to clean up over 100,000 ballots that were mailed in for the election. According to the County Registrar’s office, a printer toner smudge was confusing the vote counting machines. ProVoteSolutions,which produced the ballots, has announced that it will compensate Santa Clara County for all of the costs involved in manually inspecting and cleaning up the ballots.
Articles by Danny Wool
Californians may have voted no to Prop 19 and the legalization of marijuana, but the people of San Jose voted to tax marijuana anyways—or at least whatever marijuana can be sold legally in the city. The precise amount of the new tax will only be determined after City Council holds a study session on the matter on December 13.
The Coalition for Justice and Accountability is holding a series of public meetings about what to look for in a new police chief. Although the meetings are unofficial, they have attracted several times as many participants as the official meetings organized by the city. Chief among the concerns raised is racial profiling by the SJPD.
Two adjacent buildings—a cafe and a recycling center—were destroyed in a four alarm fire in San Jose Sunday morning. It took firefighters until about 6:00 am to get the blaze under control, and by the time they were finished, both buildings were gutted and railroad tracks running behind the buildings had to be shut down.
Google is suing the federal government, claiming that the Department of the Interior tailored its specs Microsoft products, effectively shutting Google out of the bidding process, and losing it a potential 88,000 government employees as clients.The lawsuit argues that Google’s own products are inherently more secure than Microsoft’s for handling sensitive documents and emails.
It’s election day across the nation, though 70 percent of Santa Clara voters have already voted by mail. We’ll have a new crew in Sacramento, a new insurance commissioner, new City Council members, new legislators, and new senators and congressmen. We’ll also decide if marijuana should be legalized, and if the state should continue pressing forward with its plans to curb greenhouse gases.
San Jose city officials have worked out a way to renovate the McEnery Convention Center without taking money from the RDA or the city. They plan to use the 14 percent hotel surcharge tax collateral for expansion bonds, which will be issued as early as late December. Hotel managers welcome the decision.
William Lynch walked into the Sacred Heart Retirement Home in Los Gatos on Friday and beat up Father Jerold Lindner, a priest that Lynch says says abused him and his brother 35 years earlier. Lynch and his brother pressed charges against Lindner in 1998, but settled out of court for a payment of $625,000 from the Jesuits of California Province.
San Jose is taking a giant leap forward to the next generation of public transportation with the Podcar City Conference. Pod cars are a hybrid form of public and private transportation, also known as personal rapid transit. They are electric vehicles that run on a track, like a train, but each car is for individuals and takes them exactly where they want to go, without stopping to let people on or off along the way.
Senator Barbara Boxer made a campaign stop in San Jose on Tuesday and spoke at a townhall meeting at Cisco. While she repeated her commitment to saving local jobs, Boxer came under fire for Cisco’s own outsourcing of jobs and its keeping of $30 billion offshore to avoid corporate taxes.
