The $1.3 trillion spending bill that Congress passed in late March includes $380 million in federal funding for states to spend on verifiable paper balloting, post-election audits, and cyberdefense under the 2002 Help America vote Act. The appropriation was made at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Congress supported this funding over concern about Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, specifically attempts uncovered to target voting-related digital systems in 21 states, and the desire to prevent Russian meddling in the 2018 mid-term and 2020 elections. 

But they're catching up to what we already know: years of evidence point to the ease with which electronic voting machines are easy targets for hackers. (), in particular direct recording electronic machines (DREs) and machines that scan to record hand-marked paper ballots. Whether these machines are maliciously or accidently mis-programmed, the errors mount up and elections stolen.

In his article “So Your State Has Come Into Some Election Security Money. Now What?” Dave Nyczepir concludes that some states will have to tread water until the 2020 election as far as purchasing secure voting machines, but where there are voter-marked paper ballots there’s hope.

You can also read “Securing Threats to Election Systems” by Duncan Buell who researches electronic voting systems and AfD Council Member Ethan Scarl's article, “Impossible-Secure Computer Voting.” The “People's Vote Must Count” issue of Justice Rising features a wide range of articles on voting rights, electronic voting, and what we must do to ensure counts are accurate.

Monday, April 30 is the deadline to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's human health and environmental risk assessments for the herbicide glyphosate—most commonly marketed as Roundup™ and Rodeo™. There is growing evidence that glyphosate products are carcinogenic, and cause other health problems, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, genetic damage, liver and kidney damage, and endocrine disruption. Glyphosate is in nursing mother’s milk, contaminates drinking water sources, and impacts amphibians. Its use on a wide variety of GMO crops resistant to it has contributed to the spread of resistant weeds, and thus the use of even more herbicide. Some of the additional ingredients in commercial formulations are even more toxic than glyphosate itself.

You can comment directly at Regulations.gov or use the form on the BeyondPesticides.org site. 

Glyphosate, invented and still largely made and sold by Monsanto, is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world.  You can read more about it here, along with reporting on Germany's proposed restrictions on glyphosate, and Monsanto's attempt to sue California to keep glyphosate off a state list of probable carcinogens. 

NOTE:  Monsanto at UC Davis
The University of California, Davis receives millions to fund  agricultural research from Monsanto and Bayer. Just recently, US Right to Know donated a huge collection of agrichemical industry documents to the University of California, San Francisco, a pre-eminent research institution and medical center, to be part of their free on-line Industry Documents Library. 

These documents shine a light on the public relations, scientific, legislative and regulatory tactics the industry has used to defend their products and profits. “They offer an inside view of the agrichemical industry communications about the health and environmental risks of its products,” said Gary Ruskin, co-director of US Right to Know. “We hope they will prove to be a valuable resource for policymakers, investigative journalists and the public at large.” According to Right To Know, many of the documents known as the “Monsanto Papers” will also be made available which are surfacing in litigation over whether Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Many happy returns to Ronnie Dugger, whose 1995 essay, "A Call to Citizens: Will Real Populists Please Stand up," led to the founding of the Alliance for Democracy the next year. Ronnie was also one of the first journalists to highlight the potential hazards of electronic voting machines, and continues to write on policy issues, including peace and nuclear disarmament, from Austin, Texas. Read more here. 

Weed, CA water rights, Mount Shasta and the topic of water bottling and water privatization will be the focus of the fourth episode of an upcoming series on food and water, produced by UK's Fusion/LightBox Productions. Here's a one minute trailer advertising the 8-part series. While the Weed area water protectors are only on screen for 5 seconds, starting at 0:34, they make their point, and the whole series looks like it will be worth checking out. 

Episodes will be posted online shortly after the airtime, and the water program is scheduled for Tuesday, April 17. The first three in the series are available here. 

Town meeting season in Maine got off to a great start for Local Food RULES! Four towns passed the ordinance in just one week--Starks, Jonesport, Westmanland, and Parkman. Montville soon followed, raising the number of towns voting to protect local food to 29, with great potential for many more.

These latest five towns are in five different counties, so this is not a case of near-by towns playing follow the leader. Campaign organizers are hoping to pass ordinances in clusters of towns, however, by adding a section to the model Local Food and Community Self-Governance ordinance language titled “Mutual Recognition and Inter-Municipal Government Collaboration,” allowing food producers in one ordinance town to operate in others as well. Supporters hope to see some creative ideas coming out of this.

These town-level victories are especially sweet after last year's fight to retain most provisions of the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, a state bill that was passed and signed into law but then came under criticism by the USDA. “Getting to this place took a great deal of work with our allies to write an amendment to the Maine Food Sovereignty Act that would satisfy the USDA’s objections and still give us most of what we wanted,” said Bonnie Preston, Local Food RULES! Organizer and Alliance co-Vice Chair. “We succeeded! The Dept. of Agriculture and their lobbyist friends were shocked when the legislature voted for our amendment and not theirs, which had managed to remove all food from the Food Sovereignty Act. Once that was done, we had to work even harder to revise the LFCSGO to incorporate the changes in the law, but we got that done, too.”

News about the ordinance is also spreading thanks to Richard King, who homesteads with his wife Maria and who introduced the ordinance to his town in 2016. He has updated the website with a map of all the towns that have passed the ordinance, color-coded for dates, and more helpful material is on the way.

The campaign also has an ally in Maine's Granges. “The first one we visited was in Madison, a town that passed the ordinance in 2016,” Bonnie noted. “We learned that they had a farmers’ market that does not require venders to be licensed, and they were happy with the fact that they therefore had 'poor people buying from poor farmers,' a local economy that works well in very rural areas. No $6.00 lattes at that market!

“One person who attended the meeting was a selectman from a near-by town who is a lawyer, and he came in very skeptical about the ordinance, and left eager to pass it in his town, and happy to have us refer towns with questions about legal issues to him. He is truly one of our most valuable supporters.”

The Local Food RULES! Campaign is making great progress in Maine, but to change the way we do agriculture in this country, more towns and states must be involved. They are beginning to reach out to inform more people about this work; the more places that pass the ordinance, the more successful we will all be. What is now being called regenerative agriculture must take over from the industrial model. It will have huge benefits for the health of people, animals, and the environment.

The Alliance's three sponsored campaigns for public banks—the DC Public Banking Center, the Portland Public Banking Alliance, and Hub Public Banking—made progress this winter on democratizing finance in their cities and state.

In Washington, the DC Public Banking Center is keeping an eye on the request for proposals process for the city's public bank feasibility study, as well as continuing to reach out to constituents through a recent forum on “Banking for the Public Good, Not Private Profit.” The forum participants, including Alliance co-Vice chair Ruth Caplan, looked at what a public bank could do for Washington, the ethical concerns around the business practices of large banks, especially Wells Fargo, and the potential impact of a proposed revolving loan fund for environmental projects.

In Portland, public banking advocates have met with city council candidates and expect to have a majority on the five-person council who are friendly to the idea of a public municipal bank.

In Massachusetts, a bill to create a state infrastructure bank has been moved from the legislature's joint committee on Small Businesses to the committee on Financial Services, and advocates are mustering support for it from mayors, town managers, advocacy groups and citizens. Since the Finance committee's deadline for either moving bills to Ways and Means or asking for an extension on a decision is this week, proponents should know soon whether their bill has a chance of passage this term. 

The Alliance's campaigns were also part of the discussion at a recent strategy meeting on public banking, organized by the Public Banking Institute, which brought advocates from across the country together in Colorado. The vitality of many of these new campaigns is inspiring, especially those that have drawn a connection between municipal divestment from Wall Street banks and fossil fuels, and reinvestment in local economies and environment via a public bank.

Check out our public banking campaign page for more resources and links to individuals projects online and on social media.

The Weed Area Water Alliance (WAWA) is a newly-formed California non-profit  consisting of local citizens and supporters who have come together to protect their source of clean water and other related conditions in their town of Weed, located northeast of Mt. Shasta city and Mt. Shasta.

WAWA is trying to protect the town’s water supply, originating at nearby Beaughan Springs, which has supplied water to the city for over a century. But a local timber company, Roseburg Forest Products, claims ownership of the spring. Roseburg's plan is to cut off water to the town of Weed, while selling it to Crystal Geyser LLC, owned by a French investor and Japanese pharmaceutical company. This New York Times article looks at the corporate actors claiming water rights and the community response, and this Sierra Club article goes into competing legal claims for ownership. It's a sadly too-classic tale of water rights, water privatization and environmental review that pits the corporate "right" to profit against the community rights of 2,700 Weed citizens. 

Most recently, residents have focused on expansion plans for the Crystal Geyser bottling plant, which is located just adjacent to the city, but is hooked into the city sewer system from discharging toxic waste water. Citizens lost on a 3-2 vote that an environmental impact report was needed and that Crystal Geyser failed to disclose the harmful chemicals because this would have triggered the need for this environmental review. You can read more about this latest battle here and here. And to get a sense of the community and how determined they are to protect their water, watch the trailer for the short documentary "Water Town."

California's recent severe drought convinced many in the state of the importance of securing water for human needs, and there have been protests around expanded bottling operations as well as renewed scrutiny of water rights claimed by bottlers and exporters. The Alliance is proud to support WAWA's fight for water for people, not for profit.

Call your state and federal legislators and demand funding for an accurate, comprehensive 2020 census and the removal of the citizenship question.

Last December, the Department of Justice requested addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Census. They claimed this data was needed to make sure all voting-age citizens are counted under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this question hasn’t been asked since 1950—five years before the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s announcement that the citizenship question would be included lead to a storm of protests and lawsuits by states, cities, and citizen groups. Despite reassurances that people who don't answer the citizenship question will still be counted, the question's inclusion, plus the threat of fines for returning false or incomplete forms, will doubtlessly discourage migrants from responding. In turn this undermines the government’s constitutional responsibility to count every person every 10 years.

In a recent two-hour hearing, legislators emphasized migrants' legitimate fears of deportation could lead to a serious undercount. Other problems with the census include lack of permanent leadership at the Census Bureau and of funding shortfalls, which could also impact a reliable census.

Why do we need an accurate count? Redistricting, based on total resident population, occurs after every census, so it’s important to have accurate numbers of citizens and non-citizens alike. Combine an inaccurate count with gerrymandering and you can deliver a district to one or another major party. Plus, the census determines state government share of federal dollars for vital programs including healthcare, housing, and emergency planning and relief.

Please call your Representatives and Senators to ask that the 2020 Census be fully funded and that the citizenship question be dropped. You can find contact information for the House here and the Senate here.