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Melissa Harris writes in the Baltimore Sun,

Experts on voting say Maryland is one of the states most at risk for Election Day failures as it tries to recover from a glitch-filled primary amid one of the fiercest political seasons in decades.

Maryland’s problems - like those facing several other states and many counties nationwide - stem from a reliance on among the most sophisticated election systems in the country, manufactured by Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of two leading companies in the industry.

“The analogy I like to use is retrofitting an old car - right now the country is putting 2006 parts on a 1950 Chevy,” said Gracia M. Hillman, a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the agency created by Congress to help execute the Help America Vote Act of 2002. “You have to have a very detailed manual, step by step, to work these machines. And the last time I put together something with a manual, I had a glass of wine and wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t have several hundred people waiting in line.”

Tova Wang, who studies elections for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, said that states have learned from Florida to avoid punch-cards and hanging chads, but also have moved away from electronic voting machines that don’t allow recounts - such as Maryland’s.

After taking office in 2002, Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. repeatedly expressed support for Diebold, while also criticizing elections chief Linda H. Lamone, a holdover from the previous Democratic administration. At the time, Diebold had links to the Republican Party - the then-CEO of its parent company had declared in a fundraising letter that he would deliver the state of Ohio to President Bush in 2004.

Over the past year, Ehrlich has increasingly become a Diebold critic as he faces a tough re-election challenge, arguing that the company’s equipment was susceptible to hacking. Members of the governor’s staff have said that updated research by computer scientists demonstrating vulnerabilities in the systems drove the switch.

Update: The City has released revised versions of the two proposed affordable housing policies: Alternative 1, Alternative 2.

The City has released the final agenda for the Wednesday, November 1, 2006 meeting of the Planning Commission. (I’ve updated my previous post on this here.)

Included in this agenda are discussions of the Affordable Housing Policy and the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance. The background materials for these two topics have been posted, and now comprise the complete records, including commentary from staff and copies of all the email and letters submitted by the public. The Affordable Housing document is an 85 page pdf, while the APFO record is 120 pages long.

One of the big questions regarding the APFO is whether the ordinance should be sensitive to the six-year planning horizon that MCPS uses, or only to the two-year funding horizon. MCPS would prefer the former, while most of the public would appear to prefer the latter.

In the Affordable Housing debate, the major question is whether Olde Towne should have special treatment under the ordinance.

If you are interested in these topics, I suggest reading through these documents and possibly attending this Wednesday’s session.

Land of opportunity, indeed.

Dennis O’Brien writes in the Baltimore Sun:

In a country where rags-to-riches stories are commonplace, Quiñones’ rise from the fields to the operating room, from illegal immigrant to citizen, is an unusually compelling tale of perseverance and talent.

Living in a run-down trailer in those early days, toiling in the fields as a migrant worker, a stranger in a land whose language he couldn’t speak, Quiñones said he often wondered why he had left family, friends and a job in Mexico.

“There were times I would sit in that trailer and say to myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” he recalled.

“There are a lot of Mexicans who come in illegally and end up succeeding, owning their own businesses or something along those lines,” said Ben Johnson, director of the Immigration Policy Center, a research and education organization in Washington. “But I have to say, this is the first I’ve ever heard of anyone becoming a brain surgeon.”

“I came with the idea of making a lot of money and going back, but I abandoned that idea after I saw the opportunities here for being able to achieve what you set out to achieve - and helping people at the same time,” [Quiñones] said.

In particular, Quiñones benefited from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It granted temporary and permanent residency status - or green cards - to roughly 2.7 million illegal immigrants, many of them farmworkers in California.

Quiñones at first received temporary residency status, allowing him to work legally in the U.S. A few years later - while he was at Berkeley - he got his green card. By the time he applied for citizenship in 1997, he was in his second year at Harvard Medical School, spoke fluent English and had letters of recommendation from two members of the Harvard faculty.

In June, Quiñones won a $150,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, most of which he plans spend on an optical microscope capable of time-lapse images that can track the migration patterns of neural and brain cancer stem cells.

Last month, he was inducted into an alumni hall of fame organized by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, a group that gathers private donations to provide financial aid to college-bound Latinos.

Twenty Latinos in the U.S. have been so honored. They include U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzalez and Antonio Oscar Garza Jr. the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.