Charlie Crist is doing some good……

GOVERNOR CHARLIE CRIST ANNOUNCES PLANS FOR PAPER BALLOTS

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 1 - Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch’screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Where Voters Will Find a New Type of Ballot Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch’screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch’screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Several counties around the country, including Cuyahoga in Ohio and Sarasota in Florida, are moving toward exchanging touch’screen machines for ones that provide a paper trail. But Florida could become the first state that invested heavily in the recent rush to touch screens to reject them so sweepingly.

“Florida is like a synonym for election problems; it’s the Bermuda Triangle of elections,” said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrust USA, a nonprofit group that says optical scanners are more reliable than touch screens. “For Florida to be clearly contemplating moving away from touch screens to the greatest extent possible is truly significant.”

Read more at the New York Times

CRIST BACKS LIMITED STEMCELL RESEARCH

It’s a start……

Gov. Charlie Crist said he would recommend $20 million in the state budget for a program to fund grants for stem cell research.

In an appearance at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa, Crist said the grant program he is proposing would support research within the parameters of federal law, including adult stem cells, umbilical cord blood and placental stem cells, amniotic fluid stem cells and embryonic stem cells from lines permissible for use under federal law.

Earlier in the day, Crist told newspaper editors at the Associated Press Florida Legislative Planning Session in Tallahassee that he would not recommend including research that requires the destruction of human embryos.

Some scientists have argued human embryonic stem cells hold the most promise for finding new treatments and cures for diseases, although not all scientists agree.

Read more here