It's election day, of course, and with that comes some amount of civic pride among a number of voters. That's a good thing, for the most part, and in this era of social media and people sharing photos and videos about their lives, plenty of people are sharing imagery of their own ballot. Perfectly reasonable, right? Well, yes, except when that runs into laws designed to keep your ballots secret. There are, of course, good intentions behind such laws. But mixed in with all those local laws concerning camera usage inside a polling place are some that could cause trouble for people doing something quite ordinary. For example, it appears that people in Wisconsin who decide to Instagram/Tweet/Facebook an image of their ballots, have committed a class I felony, election fraud. And this doesn't appear to just be a law that the state is going to ignore either. It's been issuing warnings to people that they could face felony charges if they do post those photos. Undoubtedly, many will be unaware that they're committing election fraud when they thought they were just showing civic pride. One hopes that officials in Wisconsin, and other states, take the context into account before moving forward with any legal responses.

For people who are trying to watch their waistline, cake is generally off-limits. Sure, there are ways to make cake "healthier" -- for example, by using less sugar and substituting oil and butter with things like pureed fruit and vegetables or yogurt -- but that cake just won't be as satisfying as a rich and decadent piece of cake made the traditional way. Here's some good news and a few examples of decadence taken to the next level.

• According to researchers from Tel Aviv University, you can lose weight by topping off a 600-calorie balanced breakfast with a piece of cake. Apparently, the key is to have sweets in the morning when the body's metabolism is at its peak, then work off the extra calories during the rest of the day. Over 32 weeks, people who followed this diet actually lost 40 pounds more (and kept the weight off longer) than those who avoided eating sweets altogether. [url]
• A pastry chef in Wisconsin made a dessert version of a turducken and called it a "cherpumple." The cherpumple consisted of a cherry pie, an apple pie, and a pumpkin pie -- each baked within a cake. Then the cakes were stacked together and covered with frosting to form a giant 21-pound monster of a cake. [url]
• Mr. Kipling, a British baked-goods brand, is promoting its snap-pack "on-the-go" cake products with cake-dispensing posters. Specially converted poster sites will dispense free cake to the public, and some posters will also be sprayed with a special scent to emit the smell of cake. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Two years ago we wrote about a troubling case coming out of Wisconsin, in which the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) claimed that it could allow a single exclusive broadcaster for high school sporting events in the state. The Gannett newspapers challenged this by streaming four different events online, eventually leading to this lawsuit. There were other highly questionable limitations on news media, including a claim that they could not even report play-by-play data. That part is the most ridiculous, as that seems like a clear violation on free speech rights, and also goes against previous caselaw that has allowed the reporting of factual game information. But, stunningly, last year, a district court judge ruled that commerce trumps the First Amendment, and since the WIAA needs to make money, such deals are just fine. This didn't make much sense to us, and we hoped that it would be overturned on appeal.

No such luck.

Ima Fish alerts us to the appeals court ruling which upheld the lower court and seems to endorse the creation of a wholly made up new form of intellectual property right that has no basis in the law. The court clearly says that this is not a copyright case, so copyright law doesn't apply. So what right exactly is WIAA granting to its broadcasting partner? That's not clear at all from the ruling. If it's not copyright, it appears to be something entirely made up by the appeals court, which might be loosely defined as "the right to make up restrictions if it makes money." I'm not joking. The court repeatedly focuses in on the idea that the WIAA needs to make money, and that somehow makes it okay to grant a single company an exclusive license.

I don't see how this makes much sense. I could see that they should be allowed to grant a license to an "official" broadcaster, and even give them additional access, but I don't see how they can stop someone else from recording the material and broadcasting it as well -- especially when they admit that it's not a copyright issue.

And since this new exclusive made up imaginary right has no basis in law, we don't know what any exceptions are. Is there a fair use exception like in copyright? The contract says other agencies can show two minutes of streaming video from events, but it doesn't need to say that, and fair use shouldn't be determined by a contract anyway. The whole thing seems bizarre and troubling, in that it seems to suggest that public entities can create a special kind of exclusive broadcast intellectual property right if they use it to make money.

Separately, one small part of the case struck me as interesting in relation to a different case we talked about recently. In the Zediva case, we thought it was ridiculous that the court declared a paid video broadcast to your home as a public performance because the Zediva service was offered to "the public." Yet, in this case, the court insists that sporting events at public schools (which are open to the public) are, in fact, "nonpublic forums." I don't think either description makes sense. A private home is a private place. A public sporting event is a public event.

Finally, the court seems to totally overstate the situation in the ruling here and suggests a clear misunderstanding of the public domain:

The logical implications of Gannett’s argument are breathtaking. Suppose a high-school orchestra were to perform one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos or the drama club put together a rendition of Othello (both of which are in the public domain). Gannett’s argument would require the conclusion that the students have no right to engage in the common practice of packaging their performance and selling it to raise money for school trips.

While some of Gannett's arguments may have risen to that level (it did suggest that public institutions shouldn't be able to make money this way), the court also seems to suggest that just because you can't have exclusivity, you can't make money. That's silly, and wrong.

Gannett is still considering its options, but it can ask for an en banc (full court) review or it can appeal to the Supreme Court. I'm hoping it will fight this, because the ruling seems totally nonsensical.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has presented himself as a very "business-friendly" governor in his first year in office and has specifically claimed that he's a supporter of small businesses as the "backbone" of the state's economy. But reports are suggesting that he's happy to support legislation that helps big companies at the expense of small companies. We've already covered the attempt, via AT&T, to kill Wiscnet (which only a very last minute reprieve saved). And now DoggyDork points us to the news of a new law that requires all beer makers, including tiny craft shops, to only sell beer through big middle men. That is, a small craft beer maker can't go to the restaurant down the street and sell its beer. Instead, it has to find a big distributor to sell for it. The article notes that the big beer companies, like MillerCoors, love this bill. But the small guys hate it, because it'll effectively kill off whatever sales they had. The cynical suggest that this is an attempt by the likes of MillerCoors to limit competition from these upstart competitors. Update: There's an informative, if incredibly insult-filled, comment, claiming that the story at ThinkProgress, our original link, is misreporting the details of this bill. That comment suggests that this bill is not quite as bad as they made it sound (and, of course, accuses us of being all sorts of evil for claiming otherwise). Update 2: And... a separate response suggests the explanation in that comment in the first update might not be accurate at all. Good debate going on in the comments.

Support for the "free market" is a phrase that is often abused by companies to really mean "support for this particular company." It seems that's what's happening in Wisconsin with AT&T. The University of Wisconsin has been pretty instrumental in its role in developing key internet infrastructure technologies, which it uses in various ways. The current WiscNet helps supply high speed internet to Wisconsin schools and libraries, and also acts as an important testbed for new technologies. And AT&T hates it. So it was able to kill it off by suggesting it was somehow anti-free market:

The move was accomplished via an eleventh hour provision AT&T managed to get inserted into the budget, in a state ranked 43rd in broadband access nationwide. Christopher Mitchell at Community Broadband Networks directs our attention to the fact that Internet 2 President H. David Lambert tried to help prevent WiscNet's defunding, writing a letter to Wisconsin's Governor Walker regarding his since-successful effort to help AT&T kill WiscNet:

Yet, just when other states in the country are scrambling to invest in network infrastructure to help their universities rise to meet the international research and education challenge, this legislation could essentially disconnect Wisconsin from the global research it now leads. The result would be devastating. As the only intensive research institution in the United States that would be barred from participating in its own networks, Wiscnet and Internet2, the University, with respect to the ability to participate in global research, would become an immediate equivalent of a third-world University.

AT&T's ability to crush any and all public Wisconsin broadband benefit projects would be slightly-less obxnoxious if AT&T was providing the kind of infrastructure that made all of these projects unnecessary, but they're simply not. AT&T connectivity in many parts of Wisconsin consists of over-priced T1s, and lawmakers there are more than happy to write laws protecting AT&T ability to not only over charge for outdated infrastructure, but ensuring that connectivity-strained communities have no alternatives. Wisconsin's AT&T-run government is the future for all states without serious U.S. political reform, and the result will inevitably be disastrous for the future of cutting-edge connectivity.

We see this all too often in the telco world. If there were real competition, this probably wouldn't be an issue. But so many telcos seem to focus on making sure that they're the only game in town, creating a monopoly -- which is a real "free market" problem. Contrary to what people are saying, this isn't a "free market" issue, this is an issue of regulatory capture, leading to diminished infrastructure.

You may recall a little over a week ago we wrote about the Wisconsin county that magically found 14,000 votes in a recent (highly contested) election, after the very partisan County Clerk -- who had just been questioned for questionable methods of collecting election data -- said that she had "failed to save the results" in her original report. While this followup story is now about a week old, someone just sent it over to us. Apparently that particular county, Waukesha County, has a rather stunning history of voting irregularities, including having an astounding and totally unprecedented 97.63% voter turnout rate in 2004:

Apparently in 2004 the polls in Waukesha were teeming with voters as the Waukesha County Clerk's office showed a 97.63% turn out. No, that's not a typo. 97.63%

http://www.waukeshacounty.gov/...

Of the 236,642 registered voters in Waukesha on Nov 2, 2004 apparently 231,031 of them came out in a hint of rain and drizzle and did their civic duty.

Just to put this in perspective, Australia has compulsory (mandatory) voting and their turnout is 95%.

And it's not just voter turnout that's suspiciously high. Voter registrations are unprecedented as well:

In the 8 months leading into the 2004 Presidential Election there was a marginal 1.3% increase in the rolls netting about 3000 additional new voters. However in the 3 months after the election, which showed an anomalous 97.63% turn out, suddenly the rolls surged to the tune of almost 50,000 new voters and upped the rolls 20%. I suppose that's one way to even out a suspiciously high turn out.

Furthermore, remember that first number I told you to hang on to? The 283,820 eligible voters in the county of Waukesha in July of 2004? This new surge in the voter rolls has now pushed total voter registration in Waukesha County to 99.5% of elegible voters being registered to vote by February of 2005.

99.5% of eligible voters registered? Wow.

But, let's not stop there. The blogger who did this research also dug up the official election results data from the 2006 election in Waukesha County, and noticed that some of the elections appeared to have more votes than ballots were cast by a fairly large number:

In the race for Governor/Lieutenant Governor there were a total of 176,112 votes cast. For Attorney General there were a total of 174,047 votes cast. And for Secretary of State there were a total 170,440 votes cast.

So, look at the 3rd line of the top of that report...Total Ballots Cast: 156,804. So based on those numbers 20,000 extra votes were cast in the election that weren't actually accounted for in the ballots cast.

To say the least, these numbers are pretty troubling if you believe in the integrity of democratic elections.

Ah, it's been a while since we've had e-voting controversies, but it looks like a big one may be coming out of Wisconsin. As you may have heard, there's been a bit of a political dogfight going on in Wisconsin over the last few months, involving some questions about the power of the governor and the rights of government employees to collectively bargain. Given that I actually have a background in labor relations (what? yes, really), I've found the whole thing fascinating, but given my general distaste for politics that become purely partisan, I've generally found the whole thing and actions on all sides to be pretty ridiculous. Anyway, that fight brought extra attention on an election fight for a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice position between incumbent David Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg.

The original results showed a very slight victory for Kloppenburg. Now, I generally avoid mentioning political parties of politicians entirely, because I find that it leads to partisan debates, which are effectively religious debates, rather than debates on the actual issues. But, here, the parties become a bit more important. Because of the highly partisan battle in Wisconsin involving a Republican Governor and Democratic elected officials, many people viewed this election as something of a proxy, with Prosser representing the "Republican" viewpoint and Kloppenburg being the hope of the "Democrats." That's a bit of a simplification, but to get to the point we're talking about here, it's enough.

With the voting results being incredibly close -- the original count had Kloppenburg with a 204 vote margin of victory, out of over 1.4 million votes cast -- it's no surprise that a "recount" has been underway, with small numbers of votes turning up here or there. However, what's turning some heads is the fact that the County Clerk in Waukesha County, Kathy Nickolaus, suddenly found 14,315 votes, with the vast majority (by a margin of 7,582) that didn't make the initial count. She claims that they weren't counted because she "failed to save the results" in the computer system. She also said that this kind of "human error" is "common in this process."

Assuming this is actually true, it seems like a pretty clear case that Nickolaus should not be in the job any more, as that's a pretty clear case of incompetence in a rather important job. Assuming it's not true... well... that's a whole different story. Of course, complicating matters is the fact that Nickolaus is apparently an active Republican and was at the center of a few former controversies, including one about election data and how Nickolaus would collect election results -- with people raising concerns months ago about "the integrity of the system." It seems that she decided "to take the election data collection and storage system off the county's computer network - and keep it on stand-alone personal computers accessible only in her office." Now, her argument, which is not entirely unreasonable, is that it's better to keep such data off the network, but given the specific concerns raised, the story is raising eyebrows.

Obviously, for folks who are die-hard supporters of either party, they can spin the story in either direction. But, if we just take a step back, and look at it from the standpoint of wanting to believe in the concepts of basic democracy, shouldn't we all be pretty concerned that any voting system, no matter how it's set up or maintained, could lead to this sort of situation where 14,000 potentially crucial votes could go completely missing without notice... and then magically turn up just as they're needed?

Even if everything is legit, and there's no compelling reason not to assume that's the case at this point, it certainly hurts the basic integrity of the election system. And that's pretty important if you want people to actually believe in the basic principles of democracy. And, honestly, why do we let any single person, especially one with a clear party affiliation, control such data? At the very least, it should be in the hands of either neutral parties, or multiple people who can see each other's actions.

We've seen tons of lawsuits from companies upset that their competitors were buying ads on their trademarked brand names. Obviously, these tend to be trademark disputes, and the suing companies rarely prevails, since most courts seem to realize that buying ads on competitor trademark keywords is perfectly legal, so long as the ad isn't confusing. But, sometimes the arguments get quite bizarre. JJ sent over an article about two personal injury law firms in a legal fight over Google advertising -- but the (initial) twist here is that the one firm is claiming that it's a violation of Wisconsin state privacy laws to buy keywords based on the names of the partners in the firm. It's difficult to see who's privacy is being violated here. And, of course, to make the case a bit more exciting, the defendants surprised everyone in court by doing a search on YellowPages.com for their own law firm -- and having an ad for the plaintiff show up. So, now the defendants are claiming that the plaintiffs have "unclean hands," since they appear to be doing the exact same thing they've accused the defendants of doing. It sounds like quite a trial...

A reader named Frosty840 points out that, if you thought the idea of a good old fashioned "book burning" had gone out of style in the US, a group of offended individuals in Wisconsin are petitioning the local library for permission to burn its only copy of a book called Baby Be-Bop. A book burning? Apparently it hasn't occurred to these offended folks that (beyond the disgrace of wanting to burn books they dislike), this entire action has only served to call a lot more attention to that book. The folks asking for the right to burn the book, are also demanding $120,000 for "being exposed to the book in a library display," which seems likely to (again) only drive much more interest in the book. A book that can cause that much damage? Where can I get my copy?

We've talked in the past about how one of the causes of the financial crisis was that many banks on Wall Street stopped acting like banks and started acting like hedge funds -- despite not really knowing how to do that. That is, they took on much greater risks and higher leverage, without having much of an understanding of how to really hedge that risk. That was fine when all was going well, but when the bubble burst, it started impacting everyone.

Now, in a combined effort between NPR's Planet Money (I know I've said this, but I'll say it again: if you're not listening to this every day, you're missing out, big time) and the NY Times, reports are coming out about how it went well beyond banks turning into hedge funds, to all sorts of other organizations as well. The scary example being described in the first article in this series is how a Wisconsin school board and the NYC subway system, both effectively became hedge funds, lending money out to various banks in exchange for CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). What a CDO is, effectively, is the mashing together of a variety of different debt instruments (loans) that pay out some sort of return. So, you could basically buy some of the return on a whole mess of loans, packaged in all different ways (some amazingly creatively).

If all of those debt instruments that you're buying into keep on paying, you're in good shape. If, however, there are defaults, you can be in an awful lot of trouble. However, while everything was going great, defaults weren't an issue and the folks sold on these CDOs often had no idea how risky they really were. In the article above, for example, the guy who sold the Wisconsin school district on investing $200 million of its pension money in CDOs had only taken a two hour course on them, and greatly downplayed the risks.

And, of course, to make matters even worse, in many cases, the actual risks of such CDOs were hidden through some games, and made worse by either clueless or complicit ratings agencies which rated seriously high risk CDOs as being extremely safe bets. To see a rather graphic (and easily understandable) example of this, I recommend the following Paddy Hirsch video comparing CDOs to pyramids of champagne glasses: The really scary part was that, effectively, you had numerous less than fully sophisticated investors, dumping hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars into incredibly complex investment vehicles that they were being falsely told were extremely safe, when the facts are that they were highly risky. Many pension funds and the like allocate a certain small percentage of their investments into high risk vehicles -- but the financial crisis is being caused in part by the realization that a much, much, much larger percentage of their investments actually turned out to be in seriously high risk vehicles, many of which have now defaulted.