Wikipedia has been moving quite a bit of effort into developing the non-English language wiki projects, and has been getting some professional staff time to helping those efforts. I'm not saying that I agree with the growing professional bureaucracy of the Wikimedia Foundation, but it is something that has been happening.
Also, even with bandwidth and disk space costs dropping, the growth of bandwidth and disk space has been increasing faster than the economic costs have been dropping. There has also been many more higher resolution images added to articles and features such as video being added to articles that are chewing up these resources as well.
There are some effort to help reduce the cost of maintenance in terms of identifying stable versions and formalizing the article review process so a random vandal can't make wild changes without going through the review process. Some of this is perhaps due to article bloat, some of it is due to pressures by people like Larry Sanger (who still has at least some supporters at Wikipedia), and an attitude of generally improving the overall quality of the project.
Writing a high quality article is hard work, and that is perhaps the largest barrier to getting more improvement as it takes somebody willing to put that sort of effort into the process.
OK, let's just assume for the moment that you are in the accounting department for a medium-sized business wanting to do business with a government agency. For some reason, you have moved to a different bank and you want to have a new routing number for all invoice payments for your business. How do you make that happen?
You get the vendor number of your business, together with "sufficient" information to prove that you are who you claim your are, and somebody in the accounting office makes the change to their records and the routing number is updated.
How hard do you really want to make this process and what extra checks could you put into there before a change is made?
BTW, assuming that somehow this was partly an "inside job" where somehow somebody with access to the vendor database (and write privileges to that database) was able to make changes to the routing number of the vendor's bank account, what other kinds of reviews should happen before the change is enacted? Again, how hard do you want to make updating these kind of records?
I really don't think these "hackers" had direct access to the database as they would have gone after much larger targets if they could have and perhaps would have done this to multiple accounts instead. This is mainly social hacking and getting thing through a system by somebody who knew how the system worked in the first place.
BTW, the main article is factually wrong on a number of points, so don't read too much into it than it is. It was a vendor payment error. Putting restrictions on purchases over $1000 as you are suggesting is unreasonable, as much, much larger amounts of money do have to be transferred all of the time, and the invoices appeared to have the proper approval as far as the accountants were concerned. It was an electronic bank transfer of funds from a state charge code to what appeared to be a vendor's bank account.
The problem here was that the routing number for the vendor was wrong and had been misdirected to somebody else.
BTW, there still is a paper trail on all of this, as the bank account still had to be set up (with all necessary paperwork for that to happen, including picture IDs and SSN numbers the bank should have obtained when the account was opened) as well as documenting who asked for the change to the vendor's bank routing number (what actually happened here.... it wasn't a change in the university's bank account). Perhaps some stronger controls on documenting the identity of the person who made the changes should be made, but that is the only thing I can possibly see to keep this situation from being repeated. Changes like this happen all of the time as simply a part of routine business transactions.
Mis-representing yourself and making changes like this when you are not authorized is a felony.... and that is usually enough to keep most people honest when they can be identified for messing around with government funds. The much harder part here was getting away with taking the funds and not getting fingered in the process, or laundering the money in such a way that the money could leave the country. $700k wouldn't be worth the effort to give up my citizenship in the USA and live in permanent exile even assuming that I was successful in moving the money.
Actually, I've heard of worse. In an attempt to help reduce sound in the engine, I've heard of wooden gears being used as a timing gear. I kid you not!
In a drive to maximize profits to the manufacturer, cheapened parts made of plastic can and often do get made. You can have some plastic parts that are able to withstand a significant amount of stress... at least to have a mean time to failure rate that is outside of a typical warranty period of the automobile. The more hidden that you find the parts (like inside a transmission in this case), the more likely you'll find such shortcuts being taken.
Even metal parts can be made with an alloy that is of inferior grades of metal that won't withstand too much punishment, so there are games that can be played even if it is all metal parts of one type or another in terms of engineering compromises to the engine design.
All I'm saying is that this rings at least something plausible and not to be dismissed out of hand. Also, with an automatic transmission, not all gears have direct physical contact with each other, but instead depend on hydraulic forces to change the gears. Still, the forces on the gears would be rather high as well and your skepticism is justified.
Where on earth did you get that figure? What possible reason do you think this would have come from "general funds" of the state in the first place and not something "earmarked"?
Tax revenue earned by the state of Utah in 2008 for "general fund allocations" was $778 million, and a total overall budget of $5.5 billion dollars overall for fiscal year 2009 (admittedly including education and construction allocations here too).
$700 thousand (all that was really lost) out of $5.5 billion dollars that went through the state treasurer's office is 0.013% of the total, not the 1.86% you are quoting.
Don't get me wrong, 700k is a lot of money and it still shouldn't have happened, but don't blow this up to more than it is.
I agree. The IT guys here are the last people who should get the blame here.
Utah was one of the first government to allow an "electronic identity" for commerce, and that may have been one of the sources of problem here in terms of somebody forging an identity to switch bank accounts of a vendor. But the blame is not with the guys running the servers but rather the lame procedures requiring only an SSN and mother's maiden name to have your identity "confirmed" electronically.... if even that much information was used to change the vendor routing number.
Verification of the direct deposit stuff is to confirm that the account is valid and has a proper routing numbers. That is not a control in terms of verifying that the purchases were legitimate or that the correct person is receiving the money. They could ask the bank where the money is being deposited for verification of the name on the account, but how hard is that?
The only control on this is to have somebody review each invoice and confirm that the good or service was actually provided. Some accountant sitting in the basement of the administration building of a university campus does not have the ability to make this declaration. All they can do is to verify there is money in the charge code and that the vendor is one on the list of "approved vendors" for the school. It is up to the department chair/research project leader to decide if the allocation is appropriate.
What is sad here is that the trigger that something may have been wrong here came from an out-of-state bank wondering why so much money was going into their bank from a government on an account that was apparently rather new. It is appropriate to question the department controls on this.
Otherwise, this is just a typical bank fraud case, and not even all that big of a bank fraud situation either. Hardly even newsworthy.
I'm curious about what business it was that had the purchase orders go through and not get money deposited into their account. It may have been somebody who created a new vendor number and simply submitted bogus purchase orders with the project administrator's signature (or department chair's sig), but it seems like that would have drawn a whole bunch of attention. Vendors themselves get reviewed at least to find if they are a legitimate business, although getting a vendor number isn't all that hard of a process (I've done it in Utah).
The failure here is with the department fiscal controls when all of the invoices for the department or research project (research projects get their own charge code) should have been reviewed by the department chair or the project admin (usually a tenured professor). That is the person with the ultimate responsibility here, and likely to be the one to land in the hot seat when all of this falls through. Other accounting safeguards should have also been in place, but that is where the ultimate blame lies to keep this from normally happening.
It certainly isn't any kid that could do this, and most attempts to do this to other departments or project charge codes would get caught very quickly.
It wasn't even changing the bank accounts. This was a situation where somebody got some purchase orders for a university department and the state paid what appeared to be legitimate purchase orders drawn on department funds. The "vendor number" is to speedily process and simplify the task of allocating funds to people who are providing services or products to the university.
Where this scam became a scam was with the process of submitting the purchase orders to the state, and submitting new bank account information for the vendor. Indeed, some of the purchases that were made may have even been legitimate, in terms of having a vendor like a computer supplier deliver a dozen or more computers to the department and then submitting the purchase order to the university accounting office. (I don't know what exactly was purchased here, but this seems to be something on the order of what was done.) The goods were delivered, payment was expected, and a check was cut and sent to what state records said was the legitimate vendor.
The "vendor number" wouldn't be the department's code number, although it is possible that the director's signature was forged and several purchase orders were sent through asking payment for items that have never even been delivered in the first place. The reporters on this incident certainly got the details screwed up in terms of typical purchase order procedures.
Having used Utah state purchase orders myself as a state employee, I can see how this would get missed for some time until the paperwork gets through. Accounting for all of this takes months and quite a bit of good faith is depended upon through out the whole process... although there are a number of points where purchase orders are questioned eventually and have to be reviewed. Smaller businesses would scream quickly if they didn't get their money right away, so it would have to be a larger vendor like Wal-Mart or Circuit City (again, I don't know the specifics here, but this is typical) where the accounting chain is much longer and wouldn't get caught right away.
What is the scary thing here is that this department had so much money to throw around that missing a couple millions dollars wouldn't be missed. It wasn't the "department's bank account number" as all state funds are deposited together in one place, including tax funds and research grants. This is about how money was disbursed once authorization from the project administrators/department chair has occurred and was intended to pay what appeared to be legitimate debts.
The University of Utah does have billions of dollars floating around from various research grants and project of various types, so even though the amount of money here seems staggering, it is a drop in the bucket compared to how much money flows through that campus. It isn't even the first inappropriate allocation of funds, although this one should have had flags come up quite some time earlier from a whole bunch of different sources.... not the least of which was the project lead who should have been reviewing invoices charged to his project (where this design department comes into play) and questioning things that seemed out of place. The state won't allocate money if the project has insufficient funds on the charge code.
Having just served on jury duty, I have wondered if a lottery to select leaders might not be such a terrible thing. In a process similar to jury selection (more or less) where potential candidates for office are screened for felonies and show-stopping problems, and then simply have a random sample thrown up to become selected leaders of government for a short term?
It would sure make picking leaders a much cheaper and simplified process, and it would be debatable if a citizen who has been randomly selected would do any better or be more corrupt than one who has gone through the meat grinder of an election seeking popular votes. It would certainly get people into government who are not lawyers and are more in touch with the lives of ordinary citizens.
This would probably never happen, as it would step on too many political toes.
I love instant run-off, and I think it gets an undeserved bad reputation by voting reformists that would rather fight among themselves than to get genuine reforms to the plurality winner rules that exists in most U.S. States.
Of course, that would imply that 3rd party candidate votes would be worth casting.... something the major two parties don't want to see happening as that devalues their political parties.
I can only hope that this "movement" is able to succeed.
I happen to live in a city that is "out of attainment" with EPA air-quality regulations. Every time I got to local legislative meetings (aka a city council or county supervisors board meeting) the political leaders hear the bad news. State legislators even attend these meetings, and they all say the same thing more or less (roughly paraphrasing):
"We know the air quality is bad. We would like to do something about it. We can't pass any legislation until the EPA officially says the air is bad, and once they say it is bad we have to do what they say and nothing else."
I rip my hair out as a citizen in this situation. Even something so simple as a locally endorsed vehicle inspection program to get the worst polluters off the road is apparently something that can't be done until the EPA officially gets into the act.
Here is the real kicker: The #1 source of contaminates is cow farts (well, officially listed as bovine flatulence). While I live in what is officially a Census "Metropolitan Statistical Area" it still is largely rural and the agri-business firms with huge cattle herds dominate the region. Yet the ideal solution claimed is to use the same tried and true methods of eliminating all passenger vehicle traffic in the community. Go figure. And we can't even start the regulatory process until the EPA gets through with their "studies".
Why do a bunch of unelected and self-appointed (they aren't even appointed by the President at that level) bureaucrats get to decide critical economic decisions that impact the lives of my family and that of my fellow citizens who have never even stepped foot in my town? Don't even get me started on the "scientific methodology" being used to obtain the environmental data in the first place.
On a nation-wide scale when the voting methods were admittedly only valid to +/- 5%?
If the 2000 election were held on a strictly popular vote, we would still (I guess still are) be arguing over who actually won eight years later. You just don't know who would have shown up to the polls if people in "safe" states would have actually been encouraged to come and vote. It certainly would have been more than the supposed margin of victory by Gore, nor does that margin account for differences between smaller vs. larger states that have been discussed in the organization of the electoral college.
What would you have happen, that your "candidate" always win so you can prove that your vote made a difference?
This is a democracy and the way the system works. If you think a candidate deserves to govern, spend time on get out the vote drives, organize fellow citizens that agree with your viewpoint and try to get the message out about what is so special about your candidate. Expecting democracy to be something that simply comes and serves you a buffet when you have missed all of the chances to get involved means that you are capitulating your responsibilities to others. By the time it gets to the ballot box, often the election is decided... you need to get involved much, much earlier in the process.
It doesn't take that much time or money, but it does take getting out of your comfort zone and getting off your behind to try and get something accomplished. Obama would not be president if it weren't for people blogging about him, discussing his ideas, and most importantly, talking to neighbors about him. He really did have a good grass-roots campaign.... which is why he is president and not John McCain. I know for a fact that Dennis Kucinich had an abysmal grass roots campaign organization and hardly anybody even mentioning why the man deserved the job. Money helps, but that is to get the message spread farther and to build name recognition.... which is the whole name of the game.
I got off my hind end and actually ran for (local) office and brought up some issues in my campaign. What did you do?
The California primaries in the 2008 election were huge this last year, and had an incredible amount of attention. That it was Clinton v. Obama instead of Obama v. McCain is besides the point.
That you may not have payed attention to the primary or choose to not be involved is your problem.
As I pointed out, complain to your state assemblymen and not to your congressmen. This is something that can and IMHO should be dealt with on a state level and not on a federal level.
If you can't afford the $1000 plate, run as a delegate in the state or national convention level. I've done that myself, for far less than $1000. It can be done and you can have a significant input into the political process if you care to put forward that kind of effort.
Instead of just seeing Air Force One or a presidential candidate, they'll be calling your house and personally asking for your endorsement. I've had that happen to me too!
Education for elections is 100% based on communication. When it takes 6 months for a message to get from one side of the country to another you can't expect people to really know what is going on.
That still doesn't explain why after the deployment of the trans-continental telegraph (1850's) the electoral college has continued. That is nearly 150 years of nearly instantaneous communication of broad national issues to the people as a whole.
The lag between finding out about a nationally significant event (like the bombing of Fort Sumter in South Carolina) in the 1860's to how quickly people find out about things of that nature today is a matter of just a few hours faster... at most. Maybe a couple of days longer, but certainly not weeks and weeks later.
It certainly didn't take six months for the people in California to find out that South Carolina stated the U.S. Civil War in April of 1860.
The EU president is also largely a ceremonial position as opposed to the U.S. President that has real authority to make things happen.
I'm not exactly sure which is better: a strong central executive who wields considerable authority or a diffused body of leaders each with significantly limited authority.
Also, the EU government analogy is flawed because it doesn't assert nearly as much authority over things like foreign diplomacy, military control (there is no "EU Army"), or citizenship requirements. Not all EU countries even use the Euro.
The EU is sort of between what the USA had with the articles of confederation and the current USA constitution. Not quite completely independent, but the individual EU nations still assert considerable national sovereignty. I don't think a major secession movement in the EU would result in something like what happened with the U.S. Civil War.
This is also precisely why it will never work out, and certainly what Iowa is doing here will never happen for the complete 270 votes that the act will require.
Colorado attempted to do electoral college reform and it was the entrenched political parties that played short-term politics on the issue trying to decide what the electoral votes for that election (2004) would go instead of thinking for the long term implications of their action. Colorado's electoral reform also wasn't a feel-good "we've done something about it" but not really doing anything solution, but rather a real example of reform that would have had national implication and would have had immediate results and impacts.
I could only wish that Iowa would have had the "balls" to have tried that sort of bold approach at electoral college reform, but instead came up with a lame excuse of a solution. Just like in Colorado, the major party leaders didn't want to give up some perceived future political power.
Why do you think that rural Californian voters or New York voters should get no meaningful vote at all at the expense of favoring rural Midwestern voters?
Ask the state legislators of those respective states why they are ignoring the wishes of the rural communities of both states at the expense of the major population centers.
Go ahead, ask New York voters what they think of the dominance of the city at the tip of their state, and you might get an earful. Most upstate New Yorkers that I know are less than thrilled about the political dominance that happens.
BTW, electoral votes don't have to be decided in a winner-take-all situation. Indeed, such a system encourages political machines to develop like Tammany Hall.
Changes to allow more disbursed political control (the point of the electoral college) perhaps ought to be incorporated on the state level as well... particularly for the larger states.
Is tradition worth that much?
Yes. If you are clueless as to why the tradition was started in the first place and are ignoring other more pressing reasons for the situation, then abandoning tradition is a foolish thing to do. That doesn't matter what the tradition you are talking about.
The solution to the issue you've raised here of the proportionality of the various states could be solved with one rather interesting solution:
Increase the number of representatives in the House!
There is no reason why the number of congressmen is restricted to just 335 people, and by increasing the number of congressmen you would also have much more direct voter interaction with each congressman as well. Doubling or tripling the number of representatives would also even out the number of electoral votes between Wyoming and California in terms of this proportionality.
The only alternative way of selecting electors besides the winner-take-all approach is the system used in Nebraska and Maine:
The "votes" for the "senatorial" seats are decided by the "at-large" vote winner, and then each congressional district is treated independently for purposes of deciding who would get the electoral vote for that district's population. In the 2008 election, there was one congressional district in Nebraska that voted for an elector to the other party that was different from the ones selected state-wide.
I do think such a system, if implemented nation-wide, would much more closely reflect the national vote totals in terms of proportionality of the electoral votes.
Colorado did flirt with a purely proportional representation of the electoral votes, but the proposal was shot down in a referendum in the 1984 general election by the voters themselves. If this proposal had succeeded, it would have divided the electoral votes based on the proportions of the state-wide vote totals for each candidate.... giving the potential for even 3rd party candidates (like Ralph Nader) the opportunity to pick up electoral votes. Ralph Nader would have had one an electoral vote in that election too, BTW, if the referendum had succeeded.
Can you imagine what it would have been like in 2000 with the Bush v. Gore contest taken to a national level and having to recount the ballots of every county and voting precinct in every state?
My gosh, this alone ought to be reason enough to think the abolition of the electoral college is a horrible and destabilizing thing. In that election, the electoral college saved the union and the integrity of the election process, even if the "right" candidate wasn't selected in the eyes of some people.
A democracy is a method to allow people of different political philosophies to trade control over the government without having to result in bloodshed and open warfare.
If you aren't willing to relinquish political control via democracy, the only alternative is the point of a gun or a sword. Given the alternative, I prefer genuine democracies in their various flavors.
A "popularity contest" is something more akin to a high school prom queen or something like American Idol. It is cute and resembles democracy, but it has nothing to do with political control over a government or anything do with with real authority and power. I guess like how most student councils work in most schools as well, I should note.
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Wikipedia has been moving quite a bit of effort into developing the non-English language wiki projects, and has been getting some professional staff time to helping those efforts. I'm not saying that I agree with the growing professional bureaucracy of the Wikimedia Foundation, but it is something that has been happening.
Also, even with bandwidth and disk space costs dropping, the growth of bandwidth and disk space has been increasing faster than the economic costs have been dropping. There has also been many more higher resolution images added to articles and features such as video being added to articles that are chewing up these resources as well.
There are some effort to help reduce the cost of maintenance in terms of identifying stable versions and formalizing the article review process so a random vandal can't make wild changes without going through the review process. Some of this is perhaps due to article bloat, some of it is due to pressures by people like Larry Sanger (who still has at least some supporters at Wikipedia), and an attitude of generally improving the overall quality of the project.
Writing a high quality article is hard work, and that is perhaps the largest barrier to getting more improvement as it takes somebody willing to put that sort of effort into the process.
OK, let's just assume for the moment that you are in the accounting department for a medium-sized business wanting to do business with a government agency. For some reason, you have moved to a different bank and you want to have a new routing number for all invoice payments for your business. How do you make that happen?
You get the vendor number of your business, together with "sufficient" information to prove that you are who you claim your are, and somebody in the accounting office makes the change to their records and the routing number is updated.
How hard do you really want to make this process and what extra checks could you put into there before a change is made?
BTW, assuming that somehow this was partly an "inside job" where somehow somebody with access to the vendor database (and write privileges to that database) was able to make changes to the routing number of the vendor's bank account, what other kinds of reviews should happen before the change is enacted? Again, how hard do you want to make updating these kind of records?
I really don't think these "hackers" had direct access to the database as they would have gone after much larger targets if they could have and perhaps would have done this to multiple accounts instead. This is mainly social hacking and getting thing through a system by somebody who knew how the system worked in the first place.
BTW, the main article is factually wrong on a number of points, so don't read too much into it than it is. It was a vendor payment error. Putting restrictions on purchases over $1000 as you are suggesting is unreasonable, as much, much larger amounts of money do have to be transferred all of the time, and the invoices appeared to have the proper approval as far as the accountants were concerned. It was an electronic bank transfer of funds from a state charge code to what appeared to be a vendor's bank account.
The problem here was that the routing number for the vendor was wrong and had been misdirected to somebody else.
BTW, there still is a paper trail on all of this, as the bank account still had to be set up (with all necessary paperwork for that to happen, including picture IDs and SSN numbers the bank should have obtained when the account was opened) as well as documenting who asked for the change to the vendor's bank routing number (what actually happened here.... it wasn't a change in the university's bank account). Perhaps some stronger controls on documenting the identity of the person who made the changes should be made, but that is the only thing I can possibly see to keep this situation from being repeated. Changes like this happen all of the time as simply a part of routine business transactions.
Mis-representing yourself and making changes like this when you are not authorized is a felony.... and that is usually enough to keep most people honest when they can be identified for messing around with government funds. The much harder part here was getting away with taking the funds and not getting fingered in the process, or laundering the money in such a way that the money could leave the country. $700k wouldn't be worth the effort to give up my citizenship in the USA and live in permanent exile even assuming that I was successful in moving the money.
Actually, I've heard of worse. In an attempt to help reduce sound in the engine, I've heard of wooden gears being used as a timing gear. I kid you not!
In a drive to maximize profits to the manufacturer, cheapened parts made of plastic can and often do get made. You can have some plastic parts that are able to withstand a significant amount of stress... at least to have a mean time to failure rate that is outside of a typical warranty period of the automobile. The more hidden that you find the parts (like inside a transmission in this case), the more likely you'll find such shortcuts being taken.
Even metal parts can be made with an alloy that is of inferior grades of metal that won't withstand too much punishment, so there are games that can be played even if it is all metal parts of one type or another in terms of engineering compromises to the engine design.
All I'm saying is that this rings at least something plausible and not to be dismissed out of hand. Also, with an automatic transmission, not all gears have direct physical contact with each other, but instead depend on hydraulic forces to change the gears. Still, the forces on the gears would be rather high as well and your skepticism is justified.
Utah's General Fund holds about $150 million?
Where on earth did you get that figure? What possible reason do you think this would have come from "general funds" of the state in the first place and not something "earmarked"?
Tax revenue earned by the state of Utah in 2008 for "general fund allocations" was $778 million, and a total overall budget of $5.5 billion dollars overall for fiscal year 2009 (admittedly including education and construction allocations here too).
$700 thousand (all that was really lost) out of $5.5 billion dollars that went through the state treasurer's office is 0.013% of the total, not the 1.86% you are quoting.
Don't get me wrong, 700k is a lot of money and it still shouldn't have happened, but don't blow this up to more than it is.
BTW, where did I get MY figures?
http://governor.utah.gov/budget/Budget/Agency%20Summaries/FY2009/Budget%20Summary%20Book%20FY%202009.pdf
If the problem was the IT people, what should the IT people have done here?
Sent all requests for updating records to dev/null?
I agree. The IT guys here are the last people who should get the blame here.
Utah was one of the first government to allow an "electronic identity" for commerce, and that may have been one of the sources of problem here in terms of somebody forging an identity to switch bank accounts of a vendor. But the blame is not with the guys running the servers but rather the lame procedures requiring only an SSN and mother's maiden name to have your identity "confirmed" electronically.... if even that much information was used to change the vendor routing number.
Verification of the direct deposit stuff is to confirm that the account is valid and has a proper routing numbers. That is not a control in terms of verifying that the purchases were legitimate or that the correct person is receiving the money. They could ask the bank where the money is being deposited for verification of the name on the account, but how hard is that?
The only control on this is to have somebody review each invoice and confirm that the good or service was actually provided. Some accountant sitting in the basement of the administration building of a university campus does not have the ability to make this declaration. All they can do is to verify there is money in the charge code and that the vendor is one on the list of "approved vendors" for the school. It is up to the department chair/research project leader to decide if the allocation is appropriate.
What is sad here is that the trigger that something may have been wrong here came from an out-of-state bank wondering why so much money was going into their bank from a government on an account that was apparently rather new. It is appropriate to question the department controls on this.
Otherwise, this is just a typical bank fraud case, and not even all that big of a bank fraud situation either. Hardly even newsworthy.
I'm curious about what business it was that had the purchase orders go through and not get money deposited into their account. It may have been somebody who created a new vendor number and simply submitted bogus purchase orders with the project administrator's signature (or department chair's sig), but it seems like that would have drawn a whole bunch of attention. Vendors themselves get reviewed at least to find if they are a legitimate business, although getting a vendor number isn't all that hard of a process (I've done it in Utah).
The failure here is with the department fiscal controls when all of the invoices for the department or research project (research projects get their own charge code) should have been reviewed by the department chair or the project admin (usually a tenured professor). That is the person with the ultimate responsibility here, and likely to be the one to land in the hot seat when all of this falls through. Other accounting safeguards should have also been in place, but that is where the ultimate blame lies to keep this from normally happening.
It certainly isn't any kid that could do this, and most attempts to do this to other departments or project charge codes would get caught very quickly.
It wasn't even changing the bank accounts. This was a situation where somebody got some purchase orders for a university department and the state paid what appeared to be legitimate purchase orders drawn on department funds. The "vendor number" is to speedily process and simplify the task of allocating funds to people who are providing services or products to the university.
Where this scam became a scam was with the process of submitting the purchase orders to the state, and submitting new bank account information for the vendor. Indeed, some of the purchases that were made may have even been legitimate, in terms of having a vendor like a computer supplier deliver a dozen or more computers to the department and then submitting the purchase order to the university accounting office. (I don't know what exactly was purchased here, but this seems to be something on the order of what was done.) The goods were delivered, payment was expected, and a check was cut and sent to what state records said was the legitimate vendor.
The "vendor number" wouldn't be the department's code number, although it is possible that the director's signature was forged and several purchase orders were sent through asking payment for items that have never even been delivered in the first place. The reporters on this incident certainly got the details screwed up in terms of typical purchase order procedures.
Having used Utah state purchase orders myself as a state employee, I can see how this would get missed for some time until the paperwork gets through. Accounting for all of this takes months and quite a bit of good faith is depended upon through out the whole process... although there are a number of points where purchase orders are questioned eventually and have to be reviewed. Smaller businesses would scream quickly if they didn't get their money right away, so it would have to be a larger vendor like Wal-Mart or Circuit City (again, I don't know the specifics here, but this is typical) where the accounting chain is much longer and wouldn't get caught right away.
What is the scary thing here is that this department had so much money to throw around that missing a couple millions dollars wouldn't be missed. It wasn't the "department's bank account number" as all state funds are deposited together in one place, including tax funds and research grants. This is about how money was disbursed once authorization from the project administrators/department chair has occurred and was intended to pay what appeared to be legitimate debts.
The University of Utah does have billions of dollars floating around from various research grants and project of various types, so even though the amount of money here seems staggering, it is a drop in the bucket compared to how much money flows through that campus. It isn't even the first inappropriate allocation of funds, although this one should have had flags come up quite some time earlier from a whole bunch of different sources.... not the least of which was the project lead who should have been reviewing invoices charged to his project (where this design department comes into play) and questioning things that seemed out of place. The state won't allocate money if the project has insufficient funds on the charge code.
Having just served on jury duty, I have wondered if a lottery to select leaders might not be such a terrible thing. In a process similar to jury selection (more or less) where potential candidates for office are screened for felonies and show-stopping problems, and then simply have a random sample thrown up to become selected leaders of government for a short term?
It would sure make picking leaders a much cheaper and simplified process, and it would be debatable if a citizen who has been randomly selected would do any better or be more corrupt than one who has gone through the meat grinder of an election seeking popular votes. It would certainly get people into government who are not lawyers and are more in touch with the lives of ordinary citizens.
This would probably never happen, as it would step on too many political toes.
I love instant run-off, and I think it gets an undeserved bad reputation by voting reformists that would rather fight among themselves than to get genuine reforms to the plurality winner rules that exists in most U.S. States.
Of course, that would imply that 3rd party candidate votes would be worth casting.... something the major two parties don't want to see happening as that devalues their political parties.
50% of the population has below average intelligence.
And they vote. Something to think about.
I can only hope that this "movement" is able to succeed.
I happen to live in a city that is "out of attainment" with EPA air-quality regulations. Every time I got to local legislative meetings (aka a city council or county supervisors board meeting) the political leaders hear the bad news. State legislators even attend these meetings, and they all say the same thing more or less (roughly paraphrasing):
I rip my hair out as a citizen in this situation. Even something so simple as a locally endorsed vehicle inspection program to get the worst polluters off the road is apparently something that can't be done until the EPA officially gets into the act.
Here is the real kicker: The #1 source of contaminates is cow farts (well, officially listed as bovine flatulence). While I live in what is officially a Census "Metropolitan Statistical Area" it still is largely rural and the agri-business firms with huge cattle herds dominate the region. Yet the ideal solution claimed is to use the same tried and true methods of eliminating all passenger vehicle traffic in the community. Go figure. And we can't even start the regulatory process until the EPA gets through with their "studies".
Why do a bunch of unelected and self-appointed (they aren't even appointed by the President at that level) bureaucrats get to decide critical economic decisions that impact the lives of my family and that of my fellow citizens who have never even stepped foot in my town? Don't even get me started on the "scientific methodology" being used to obtain the environmental data in the first place.
On a nation-wide scale when the voting methods were admittedly only valid to +/- 5%?
If the 2000 election were held on a strictly popular vote, we would still (I guess still are) be arguing over who actually won eight years later. You just don't know who would have shown up to the polls if people in "safe" states would have actually been encouraged to come and vote. It certainly would have been more than the supposed margin of victory by Gore, nor does that margin account for differences between smaller vs. larger states that have been discussed in the organization of the electoral college.
What would you have happen, that your "candidate" always win so you can prove that your vote made a difference?
This is a democracy and the way the system works. If you think a candidate deserves to govern, spend time on get out the vote drives, organize fellow citizens that agree with your viewpoint and try to get the message out about what is so special about your candidate. Expecting democracy to be something that simply comes and serves you a buffet when you have missed all of the chances to get involved means that you are capitulating your responsibilities to others. By the time it gets to the ballot box, often the election is decided... you need to get involved much, much earlier in the process.
It doesn't take that much time or money, but it does take getting out of your comfort zone and getting off your behind to try and get something accomplished. Obama would not be president if it weren't for people blogging about him, discussing his ideas, and most importantly, talking to neighbors about him. He really did have a good grass-roots campaign.... which is why he is president and not John McCain. I know for a fact that Dennis Kucinich had an abysmal grass roots campaign organization and hardly anybody even mentioning why the man deserved the job. Money helps, but that is to get the message spread farther and to build name recognition.... which is the whole name of the game.
I got off my hind end and actually ran for (local) office and brought up some issues in my campaign. What did you do?
The California primaries in the 2008 election were huge this last year, and had an incredible amount of attention. That it was Clinton v. Obama instead of Obama v. McCain is besides the point.
That you may not have payed attention to the primary or choose to not be involved is your problem.
As I pointed out, complain to your state assemblymen and not to your congressmen. This is something that can and IMHO should be dealt with on a state level and not on a federal level.
If you can't afford the $1000 plate, run as a delegate in the state or national convention level. I've done that myself, for far less than $1000. It can be done and you can have a significant input into the political process if you care to put forward that kind of effort.
Instead of just seeing Air Force One or a presidential candidate, they'll be calling your house and personally asking for your endorsement. I've had that happen to me too!
Education for elections is 100% based on communication. When it takes 6 months for a message to get from one side of the country to another you can't expect people to really know what is going on.
That still doesn't explain why after the deployment of the trans-continental telegraph (1850's) the electoral college has continued. That is nearly 150 years of nearly instantaneous communication of broad national issues to the people as a whole.
The lag between finding out about a nationally significant event (like the bombing of Fort Sumter in South Carolina) in the 1860's to how quickly people find out about things of that nature today is a matter of just a few hours faster... at most. Maybe a couple of days longer, but certainly not weeks and weeks later.
It certainly didn't take six months for the people in California to find out that South Carolina stated the U.S. Civil War in April of 1860.
The EU president is also largely a ceremonial position as opposed to the U.S. President that has real authority to make things happen.
I'm not exactly sure which is better: a strong central executive who wields considerable authority or a diffused body of leaders each with significantly limited authority.
Also, the EU government analogy is flawed because it doesn't assert nearly as much authority over things like foreign diplomacy, military control (there is no "EU Army"), or citizenship requirements. Not all EU countries even use the Euro.
The EU is sort of between what the USA had with the articles of confederation and the current USA constitution. Not quite completely independent, but the individual EU nations still assert considerable national sovereignty. I don't think a major secession movement in the EU would result in something like what happened with the U.S. Civil War.
This is also precisely why it will never work out, and certainly what Iowa is doing here will never happen for the complete 270 votes that the act will require.
Colorado attempted to do electoral college reform and it was the entrenched political parties that played short-term politics on the issue trying to decide what the electoral votes for that election (2004) would go instead of thinking for the long term implications of their action. Colorado's electoral reform also wasn't a feel-good "we've done something about it" but not really doing anything solution, but rather a real example of reform that would have had national implication and would have had immediate results and impacts.
I could only wish that Iowa would have had the "balls" to have tried that sort of bold approach at electoral college reform, but instead came up with a lame excuse of a solution. Just like in Colorado, the major party leaders didn't want to give up some perceived future political power.
Why do you think that rural Californian voters or New York voters should get no meaningful vote at all at the expense of favoring rural Midwestern voters?
Ask the state legislators of those respective states why they are ignoring the wishes of the rural communities of both states at the expense of the major population centers.
Go ahead, ask New York voters what they think of the dominance of the city at the tip of their state, and you might get an earful. Most upstate New Yorkers that I know are less than thrilled about the political dominance that happens.
BTW, electoral votes don't have to be decided in a winner-take-all situation. Indeed, such a system encourages political machines to develop like Tammany Hall.
Changes to allow more disbursed political control (the point of the electoral college) perhaps ought to be incorporated on the state level as well... particularly for the larger states.
Is tradition worth that much?
Yes. If you are clueless as to why the tradition was started in the first place and are ignoring other more pressing reasons for the situation, then abandoning tradition is a foolish thing to do. That doesn't matter what the tradition you are talking about.
This is sort of funny because it is a (mostly) rural state that is making the change here: Iowa.
Yes, I know that Des Moines is hardly a rural "small town", but most of the political power of Iowa is divided up into mostly low-population areas.
The solution to the issue you've raised here of the proportionality of the various states could be solved with one rather interesting solution:
Increase the number of representatives in the House!
There is no reason why the number of congressmen is restricted to just 335 people, and by increasing the number of congressmen you would also have much more direct voter interaction with each congressman as well. Doubling or tripling the number of representatives would also even out the number of electoral votes between Wyoming and California in terms of this proportionality.
The only alternative way of selecting electors besides the winner-take-all approach is the system used in Nebraska and Maine:
The "votes" for the "senatorial" seats are decided by the "at-large" vote winner, and then each congressional district is treated independently for purposes of deciding who would get the electoral vote for that district's population. In the 2008 election, there was one congressional district in Nebraska that voted for an elector to the other party that was different from the ones selected state-wide.
I do think such a system, if implemented nation-wide, would much more closely reflect the national vote totals in terms of proportionality of the electoral votes.
Colorado did flirt with a purely proportional representation of the electoral votes, but the proposal was shot down in a referendum in the 1984 general election by the voters themselves. If this proposal had succeeded, it would have divided the electoral votes based on the proportions of the state-wide vote totals for each candidate.... giving the potential for even 3rd party candidates (like Ralph Nader) the opportunity to pick up electoral votes. Ralph Nader would have had one an electoral vote in that election too, BTW, if the referendum had succeeded.
Can you imagine what it would have been like in 2000 with the Bush v. Gore contest taken to a national level and having to recount the ballots of every county and voting precinct in every state?
My gosh, this alone ought to be reason enough to think the abolition of the electoral college is a horrible and destabilizing thing. In that election, the electoral college saved the union and the integrity of the election process, even if the "right" candidate wasn't selected in the eyes of some people.
A democracy is a method to allow people of different political philosophies to trade control over the government without having to result in bloodshed and open warfare.
If you aren't willing to relinquish political control via democracy, the only alternative is the point of a gun or a sword. Given the alternative, I prefer genuine democracies in their various flavors.
A "popularity contest" is something more akin to a high school prom queen or something like American Idol. It is cute and resembles democracy, but it has nothing to do with political control over a government or anything do with with real authority and power. I guess like how most student councils work in most schools as well, I should note.