Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

Much Ado about Maryland Property Assessments

Baltimore Sun continues its series focusing on Baltimore City’s property tax system with a interesting side look at how the state’s assessment office made mistakes undervaluing a specific property belonging to a son of a prominent real estate developer. There are several important points that jump out:

1. The state does the assessments but the local counties and Baltimore City are the ones who benefit since they collect majority of the property tax. This presents an inherent problem since the state does not want to fund operations which are not bringing in income, as illustrated by the complaints in the article about not sufficient staffing. Even though the counties and the city reimburse the state, apparently it is not enough.

2. The city is happy to leave the current system alone since accurate assessments are more likely to cost city money overall, implying that most properties are really over assessed. This dove tails rather nicely with what the Washington Post wrote recently about the impending implosion of local assessments, most of which are based on several years back and the height of the real estate market (hat tip: Adam Meister). Worse, according to the numbers quoted by the Post from Baltimore officials, revenue from property tax is scheduled to decline by about $25 million per year for the next few years. That means that several years from now the city will be looking at a $100-150 million hole.

3. The most galling thing in the article is the fact that the head of the state’s department of assessments had the gall to say that assessors don’t have time to visit properties! There are numerous public and private resources, free and low cost, which allow you to see imagery of real estate. Plus the city has droves of housing inspectors giving out sanitation fines, all armed with cameras.  In the words of the Facebook generation, “dude, you never heard of Google Maps?”

P.S. Here is a Google Maps street view of the property Baltimore Sun wrote about:

View Larger Map

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My letter to the Maryland General Assembly Regarding the Proposed Budget Bill

Dear Senator Gladden, Delegates Rosenberg, Carter and Oakes, and the honorable chairs of the State Senate and House,

I am writing to you today as a resident of the 41st district to oppose the proposed bill titled “Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act of 2012″. Specifically, there are three things in this bill that I would like to draw attention to: increase in income taxes for high earners, taxation of digital goods and taxation of out of state Internet companies with affiliate relationships in the state.

1. Increase in income tax.

a. The O’Malley administration seeks to lower the maximum allowed exemption amounts and deductions for earners over $100,000, effectively raising their income tax rates. As past history has shown, raising taxes on higher end earners does not work. Specifically, the administration has tried imposing a surcharge on earners of over $1 million several years ago, which not only did not bring in more money but caused the state to lose revenue because people moved out of state (as per this WSJ article). Raising taxes on the high earners over $100,000 may have the same effect of driving people to live elsewhere.

b. Furthermore, people earning larger amounts of money generally do not report them via their personal returns. For example, the WSJ estimates around 2.86 million people in the US are millionaires in 2010, yet according to the IRS statistics for 2009 only about 286,000 personal returns with income over 1 million were processed. That means that only about 10% of high income earners actually report that via their personal returns. The rest goes through investments, trusts, corporations, foundations, etc. With higher income taxes in lower brackets, the same may happen with income being routed away from personal returns and into a variety of financial instruments, which may not be even taxable within the state. Anyone making over $100,000 can probably afford a creative CPA who can figure out ways to get around the higher taxes, and at the worse can afford to move out of state somewhere more friendly tax-wise.

c. Last, our economy is still doing pretty badly. Why raise taxes in a bad economy – are we trying to make people more poor on purpose?

2. Taxation of digital goods.

Another set of provisions that are concerning is taxation of digital goods. This provision will only serve to drive digital based business out of state. While I sympathize with local brick and mortar businesses that feel that online competition selling digital goods is not fair, taxation is not the main issue here. Rather, entire industries and business models are being upended by move to the digital realm and adding taxation to this will only serve to drive digital businesses that we need out of state and delay the inevitable changes. Instead of taxation, we should look at ways to modernize the tax system in the digital age, while providing a pathway for existing business to modernize and move online.

Furthermore, most of the larger companies that sell digital goods are not even based in the state and would not be affected. Examples are Amazon, Apple, the Wall Street Journal, etc. Ironically, the ones hit the hardest would be newspapers like our local Baltimore Sun that only recently begun to sell subscriptions.

Last, these provisions will create an unintended consequence of taxation of services – an approach that has been rejected in the past by the citizens and the General Assembly. For example, the proposed bill would tax “fabrication, printing, or production of tangible personal property OR A DIGITAL PRODUCT by special order”. By the currently language of the law it seems to include graphics design services for blogs, music creation and mixing, book writing and editing, and even writing articles for hire like newspapers. All of these are “created by special order” and are “digital products”. It sounds eerily similar to the proposed software services tax from several years ago. In today’s world where books, music and news are almost always produced and exchanged digitally, this would potentially impact harmfully many small business and freelancers that work in the music, publishing and news industries. It would create a strange exemption where something on tangible media would not be taxed which would make a book editor liable for taxes for emailing a manuscript to a client but not for burning it to a CD and mailing that.

3. Sales tax on Internet sellers with affiliate relationships.

Another provision that deserves criticism is trying to get around the nexus requirement established by the Supreme Court in Quill vs. ND by making affiliate relationships tie a vendor to the state. Every single state that has tried this law ended up losing money because out of state companies simply terminate affiliate relationships, resulting in thousands of lost jobs and closed businesses. Instead of doing this constitutionally questionable maneuver why not do what the Supreme Court itself said would be a solution – simplify the state sales tax system by joining the growing Multi state sales tax compact and lobbying Congress to change the law. This solution would enable the state to collect taxes not just from online businesses, but also from catalog companies and other similar out of state sellers.

Furthermore, there are online companies already based on other states that do act as affiliates for merchants and then cut deals with in state residences in a way that bypasses the proposed law.

4. Other ideas.

Instead of raising taxes, and stifling the rapidly developing digital world, how about cutting costs? For example, state employees currently get benefits no longer offered in the private sector. Why not bring those into parity? Another example, is going after the Homestead credit and those who abuse it. Baltimore City has recently done that after a Baltimore Sun story and is schedule to get millions. Another idea is having a state wide Inspector General office just like Baltimore City, which has already recovered millions for the city.

Additionally, another disgusting practice that has to stop is moving money from funds designated for specific things to the general fund. The proposed bill takes money collected from the gas tax and transfers it to the general fund. Instead of doing that, how about spending that money on fixing roads? Another example, is the money from slots which is supposed to go towards education. Instead, we currently have places like Baltimore City looking to borrow over 1.2 billion dollars to pay for school repairs while we, the citizens, were promised loads of money from slots for exactly that.

In closing, I would like to add that many of the younger citizens of the state like myself are much more familiar with technology that lawmakers and would be happy to educate your members. Perhaps, another idea would be to get some technology briefings to members of the General Assembly explaining a lot of these issues, and I am sure many technology savvy citizens and constituents would be happy to help.

Respectfully,
Yakov Shafranovich

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Essential Small Business Tools You Probably Never Heard Of – Part 1

As an owner of a small business it is always surprising to me to find out when speaking with other small business owners about how unaware they are of some of the free and cheap tools available out there to make their business better. In this post, I will list (in  no particular order) some of the tools I have used in the past and currently use, all of which have made a big difference in my business. This part 1 covers financial tools.

Square for in-person credit card payments

Normally in order for a business to take credit card payments, a merchant account is required. Opening one is a tedious process and it usually comes saddled with all kinds of application, credit report, etc. fees. Even once the account is established, there are monthly gateway and processing fees, and sometimes a minimum transaction fee as well.

Square offers a great and cheap alternative for merchant accounts. There are no fees for signing up, no monthly fees, and no minimum activity required. When you apply for an account, they send you a free credit card reader which works on conjunction with an iPhone, iPad or an Android phone (yes, you need a cell phone), and hooks into the headphones jack. The only fee they charge is 2.75% for processing transactions. You can also enter credit card numbers manually for a higher processing fee of 3.5% + 15 cents. Receipts are automatically emailed or SMSed to the owner of the card.

PayPal and Google Checkout for online invoicing

While PayPal and Google Checkout are well known for their payment tools that are used on websites, not a lot of people know about their invoicing features. Both services have an option that allows you to request a payment via email, and optionally send an invoice to your customer (here is PayPal invoicing and Google Checkout’s email feature). This is a great feature for online service businesses that do not charge a set price and it avoids the use of merchant accounts. The cost is the same as their regular payment services (about 2.9% + 30 cents) and there are no minimums or monthly fees. PayPal’s invoicing feature is a more advanced than Google’s.

American Express FX Payments for free international wire transfers

Even for a business that always does business within the US, there always comes a time where a foreign client or supplier comes along, requiring ability to wire money internationally. One alternative is to use a payment service like PayPal above, but they tend to charge extra for international payments (as described here). Another alternative is to use a credit card without an international transaction fee but It gets even more complicated when trying to pay a foreign supplier which is not online savvy and expects wire transfers. Regular banks tend to charge a lot for international wires and they also hike up the conversion rates to their advantage just like credit card companies. The end result is that you end up paying through the nose and get a pretty bad conversion rate.

A great alternative that I stumbled on about six months ago is American Express’s FX Payments service. While it is a bit of a pain to sign up for including an application, some phone calls, it is a great service that is worth it. For starters, there are no fees at all and no minimums. You link up your checking account and they withdraw the money via ACH from your checking account, and then transfer it via a conventional international wire transfer. It does take an extra day for processing. Their conversion rates are pretty close to the trading conversion rates for currencies and they have 24/7 toll-free support. I have been using them to pay royalties to oversea authors for several months and have been very impressed with their service.

PayPal for mobile check deposits

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Extreme Couponing for the Rest of Us

Many have heard of the TLC show “Extreme Couponing“ which shows people basically paying nothing for groceries with creative use of coupons. There is also bloggers like the CouponMom and The Krazy Coupon Lady. The problem with their approaches is that they take a lot of time, and tedious work, which most people do not have. In this post, I wanted to outline a simpler way to use coupons and grocery shop which does not take a lot of time, and which I personally have found to be very easy.

What I do is very simple – I look through five major online coupon sites once a week, usually on Sunday morning and print out whatever coupons my family may need, not just this week, but in the near future. The sites I use are Coupons.com, RedPlum‘s Grocery Coupons, Coupon Network, Smart Source and Target Coupons. Most of these coupons are manufacturer coupons and have several weeks of expiration ahead of them. Target in particular also prints manufacturer coupons in addition to regular Target coupons which theoretically can be used elsewhere. Then I print these, clip them and put them away in my coupon folder. Whenever we go shopping, we check the coupons to see if there is anything there that may be applicable. It usually takes about 5-10 minutes on a Sunday morning, but we have found use for these coupons even several weeks later.

Some additional tips:

• Target allows one Target and one manufacturer coupon per item. We also have a Target card that saves us 5% (which basically covers sales tax). Recently Target has started offering free shipping for Target card holders which we have been trying out for some bulky items like diapers.
• Some stores like Giant double manufacturer coupons under $1. We try to eyeball those deals but don’t pull out a calculator everytime we go shopping there.
• For certain items, we almost always buy store brand like Target diapers and wipes; Giant brand diet soda, etc. You always get savings no matter what and in Target’s case, there are sometimes coupons as well. You can try using the store brand before buying a lot of it in case you don’t like it but certain items like medicine, baby formula, diapers, etc. are all made by the same companies because of the patents involved or FDA approval required.
• We have storage space and extra freezer and fridge space for good deals. We have in the past bought 20-30 boxes of frozen pizza on sale, or 20-30 bottles of soda when they were really cheap. When there is a really great sale (think lowest price in 3-6 months), we try to stock up.
• Certain brands are known to sometimes have coupons on their website. We sometimes spot check those when there is time.
• Amazon.com and some other online retailers have occasionally some great deals on groceries. We have bought cheap dishwasher detergent and cereal online in the past.
• For those living in the Baltimore area – try to shop in the county for beverages since the city charges a bottle tax.

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Baltimore City Government Wants to Sync Elections with the Federal Cycle

As a good counterpoint to my previous two negative blog posts about Baltimore City government (here and here), here is something positive. For various reasons, local elections in the city have taken place in really odd years, like 2011 when no other state or federal election was held. The result was an extremely low voter turnout, extra costs for operating the elections system without funds from state or federal government, and for elected officials, an easy way to get re-elected. Now comes word from the Baltimore Sun, that the city is finally lobbying the state’s legislature to help them move the elections to the federal cycle (I got this via my community association’s email list, which they got from the Mayor’s Office):

Baltimore officials plan to ask the General Assembly to pass legislation to align the city’s municipal elections with the federal cycle, the city’s chief lobbyist said Monday. The change would “save the City money and engage more citizens in our elections,” according to a memo the lobbying team handed out to City Council members at a luncheon meeting Monday.

If the proposal goes through, the first one will take place in 2016, which is the next Presidential election and the current officials just elected in 2011 would server 5 years instead of the usual 4. Of course a lot of work is needed before this happens including both state and local legislation, and probably a charter amendment and a referendum. But is nice to see that there are still people in the city government concerned about finances and election turnout.

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How Many Baltimore City Employees Live in the City

One of the recurring questions that comes up among those that are follow city politics is how many city employees actually live in the city. Common belief holds (correctly or incorrectly) that city employees like police officers, planning officials, etc. can do their jobs better if they shared affinity with the city they worked in. Now, thanks to Baltimore City’s Open Baltimore project, we can actually look at the numbers.

The spreadsheet below is based on the data provided by OpenBaltimore as of January 2011. I added percentage columns and a count of in state, non city resident employees. My analysis appears after the document:

There are several surprising things in this document:

• About 44% /  6,338 of city employees do not live in the city
• About 5% / 743 city employees do not live in the state of Maryland!
• Top six agencies by highest percentage of out of state employees are: Orphan’s Court (5 / 41%), Fire Academy Recruits (11 / 18 %), Mayors Office (16 / 16%), Comptroller’s Office (1 / 11 %), the Fire Department (184 / 11%) and Police Department (327 / 9%).
• By sheer numbers, the highest six agencies with out of state employees are: Police Department (327), Fire Department (184), Health Department (47), Solid Waste/DPW (21), Water/DPW (19), and the Mayors Office (16).
• Top six agencies with out of city, in state employees by percentage are: Wage Commissioner (3 / 100%), Audits /  Comptroller (23 / 63%), Police Department (2,155 / 62%), Finance / Account and Payroll (26 / 55%), Fire Department (902 / 53 %) and State’s Attorney’s Office (191 / 51 %).
• Top six agencies with out of city, in state employees by sheer numbers are: Police Department (2,155 / 62%), Fire Department (902 / 53 %), Water/DPW (450 / 29%), Health Dept (263 / 25%), Highways / Transportation (211 / 25 %), and State’s Attorney’s Office (191 / 51 %).
• Top six agencies with the lowest percentage of city resident employees are: Wage Commissioner (0 / 0%),  Police Department (977 / 28%), Fire Academy Recruits (20 / 33%), Comptroller / Audits (12 / 33%), Fire Department (616 / 36%) and Finance / Accounting and Payroll (20 / 42 %).

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Tax Credits and Perks of Baltimore City Officials

One of the things that keeps coming over and over when I read about city politics in Baltimore is a false sense of entitlement by city officials, both elected and non-elected. For some reasons, they feel that they are entitled to tax breaks, perks and employment benefits that an average citizen on the city can only wish for.

TAKE HOME CARS

For example, currently Baltimore City’s Sheriff’s office is tagging vehicles belonging to the city’s public housing authority in order to sell them at an auction to pay for legal judgements. As pointed out by Adam Meister on his blog, some of the vehicles they are tagging are personal “take home” vehicles belonging to high level officials within the housing authority. This report dating back from 2009 says that at least 247 city employees have take home vehicle which they often taken on interstate trips, personal and paid for by the city (here is some more coverage from the Sun breaking down the numbers).

For a lot of people living the Baltimore-Washington Metro area, commuting to work is a fact of life. Many jobs are shifting away from downtown areas in major cities to places like Bethesda, Columbia, Fort Meade, Aberdeen, Annapolis Junction, etc. The public transportation system has not kept up with these changes and as the result lots of people commute to work, every day with their own private cars, public transportation or combination of there-of. And unlike public transportation and parking costs which may sometimes be tax-deductible via “cafeteria plans”, simply driving to work is not. and GUESS WHAT – we, private citizens, working at private companies or even federal contractors or agencies DO NOT GET FREE CARS!!! Why should city employees get them?

Another problem with city owned cars is that the expense is open ended. It is unclear if there are controls in place regarding the cost of gas, maintenance, personal vs. business use etc. It is also unclear if there are also no controls on whether new cars are bought or slightly used, leased, etc.

As an alternative, it would be trivial to calculate how much it costs to commute by using IRS’s standard formula of $0.55/mile and simply provide that money to the employees. That is what big companies do with some of the traveling employees, but only the ones that actually need to travel for their jobs, not commuting!

ILLEGAL TAX BREAKS

Another area which has been an area city officials have failed in is tax breaks. The current Mayor got caught when the media found out her husband and herself were collecting two Homestead Tax credits, while a married couple is only allowed one. At least they paid that one back.

However, the most egregious example of illegal tax breaks is the Conaway family. The father of the family, Frank M. Conaway, Sr., is the City’s Clerk of Circuit Court. The mother is Mary W. Conaway, the City’s Register of Wills. The daughter, Belinda Conaway / Washington, was a city councilwoman. And the son, Frank M. Conaway Jr., is a state delegate.

Belinda Conaway recently lost her re-election bid for city council after Adam Meister, a local blogger, found out that she apparently lived outside the city and collected the Homestead Tax credit there, which still has not been paid back. She sued the blogger for defamation for 21 million, the suit got dismissed but not before blowing the entire story wide open causing her defeat. The tax credit money has not been paid back.

Her father, then got in trouble when the Baltimore Sun found  in August 2011 that he collected a homestead credit on his rental property. However, not until December of 2011 when the Baltimore Sun ran an extensive series of stories on how much money the city loses in these credits, did the city’s finance department finally focused on this break and forced Frank to pay back over $3,000 in illegal tax breaks.

However, as per the August 2011 story in the Sun, Frank and Mary Conaway actually have a bigger problem. As the Mayor herself found out, you cannot claim the Homestead Credit on more than one property if you are a married couple. Both Frank and Mary claim credits on two different properties, totaling several thousand dollars going back several years. And none of that money has been paid back.

The thing that gets me the most is not issue of tax credits per se – it is really the total lack of apology to the city and its citizens. The entire mindset seems to be that unless they get caught, they are entitled to these tax breaks, and when they do get caught there are no apologies. Why can’t they simply apologize instead of grumbling about not knowing where to send the money?

PENSIONS

While on the topic of tax breaks and Belinda Conaway, it is worth to note that a lot of city employees get pensions. While I have no problems with granting pensions for physically demanding and dangerous jobs such as police and fire departments, why do disgraced former mayors and city council members get pensions – it is not like they can’t find jobs. Mayor Sheila Dixon who resigned because of a perjury charge is getting an $83,000 / year pension and she has a lobbying job also. Why?

What about people like secretaries, office workers, etc.? In the private industry pensions are being eliminated and I don’t see why the government can’t match that.

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Enabling Other Languages on Amazon’s New Kindle Fire tablet

IMPORTANT: The source code and all future development of this application is now moved to GitHub. Please use that page in the future:

https://github.com/shaftekbiz/android-language-settings-app

—————-

One of the interesting aspects of the new Kindle Fire is how much Amazon had customized or simply overrode the default UI, including some of the settings pages. One issue that has come up recently is how to enable ability to use languages other than English. A fellow Kindle Fire in Germany, named Gero Zahn, managed to figure out how to do that by using two separate apps which trick the Kindle Fire to opening the input language settings UI page which while hidden still remains on the device. His approach is described in detail in the following blog post and the credit for discovering this goes to him:

http://blog.gerozahn.de/2011/11/kindle-fire-keyboard-layouts-solved/

I was looking for a simpler way to do this and came up with a very simple Android app using Google’s AppInventor that does just that – gives you access to the input language settings. This approach does not require installing outside applications other than this app itself. If you already have Android Market sideloaded into the Kindle, you can find the app here.

If you do not have the Market installed, you can download the app here:

http://goo.gl/NfEqO

This app is also available on the Amazon’s AppStore but it has not yet been approved for the Kindle Fire. To see this app on Amazon.com, click here.

Make sure to enable ability to load outside apps into your Kindle by tapping the top right corner of the screen to enter the settings section, then click on “Device” and check off “Allow installation” for non approved applications. I have submitted the app to the Amazon AppStore for approval as well, and hopefully it will be available directly from it.

For the technically inclined, here is a short explanation of what is happening:

Actions on Android that cross application boundaries are triggering using something called “Intents“. There are two of those that trigger language settings, of which the first (com.android.settings.LanguageSettings) has been customized by Amazon to show their own keyboard options. The second is the one that actually triggers the language selection menu and is called “com.android.inputmethod.latin.InputLanguageSelection“. The action for it is called “android.intent.action.VIEW“.

UPDATE #1:

In my testing, only the following languages work:

• Danish
• English UK
• English US
• French
• German
• Hebrew
• Norwegian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Swedish

UPDATE #2 – January 22nd, 2012

The app has been updated to v1.3 and it is now a fully native Android app and no longer uses App Inventor. The size has been brought down from 1.4 MBs to 22 KBs. I also added support for Android 4 (ICS). The code will be open sourced shortly. You can use Google Market to update, or the same link above.

Posted in Programming, Projects | 39 Comments »

My Impressions on Visiting Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and Public Transportation

Earlier today my spouse dragged me away from the comfy computer chair and screen into the somewhat frigid outdoors for a trip with the kids and a stroller to the Inner Harbor. To avoid traffic and expense of parking we decided to take public transportation, and being that all three of our kids are under 6, it helps that both the Metro and Light Rail do not charge for them. While we originally planned to take the Metro, because we gave some a ride along the way, we ended up taking the Light Rail from Mt. Washington instead to the Convention Center station, from where we walked down Pratt Street to the Harbor. We walked through the Harbor, took the skywalk across Pratt Street, went up Gay St. to Lombard and walked half way, then took the free Charm City Circulator back to the Light Rail’s University Center/Baltimore Street station from which we went back to the University of Baltimore/Mt. Royal station because we took the wrong train, and ended up taking a second light rail train back to Mt. Washington. We ended up paying about $6.40 for Light Rail fares for two adults, both ways instead of gas and parking fees downtown, plus endless entertainment for the kids on the trains. I do feel bad for the people in the light rail car on our way back when our youngest shrieked loud enough for everyone to cover their ears, but overall it was a fun experience. The most interesting thing was watching how excited kids get over everyday things like trains, buses, elevators and boats. We even saw the Occupy Baltimore camp and their tents.

Over the course of our trip I kept seeing all sort of strange and interesting things Baltimore is famous for, but the nagging overall feeling I kept getting is that while the city overall has tried to attract people to visit, there were a lot of small “finishing touches” that just weren’t there, and made the overall experience good, but not great. It felt like there is a small step that remains to be taken and no one thought about taking it.

Some of the things that concerned me:

• At the Light Rail station, no instructions were provided as to how to use the Charm Card (I happened to have a WMATA SmarTrip card left over from a trip to DC which works the same way). I eventually found the instructions online and even then, it turns out that you cannot use one card to pay for two adults. For a visiting tourist, that is a major issue. To make the whole thing even funnier, they have instructions inside the light rail car itself, at which point it is too late to get a ticket.
• While there is handicap access, there aren’t any details on strollers.
• At the Light Rail stations, inside the cars and online, there is no mention of the Charm City Circulator - a free bus downtown. We ended up walking about 7 blocks to the Inner Harbor, and would not have done that even we knew the bus was available. While I understand that the CCC is a city project and Light Rail is state operated, but a little cooperation would go a long way.
• The signage pointing to the Inner Harbor on the street corners is ambiguous - we weren’t sure we were heading in the right direction until we got very close to the Harbor.
• We tried to use the skywalk at the convention center because my kids wanted to see it and went to use the handicap elevator to go up with a stroller. The elevator worked and opened, but lo and behold there were two homeless guys sleeping inside! We decided it was best not to disturb them and have them nap in their cozy place. For a tourist that could be somewhat jarring.
• In the Harbor itself, there is very little signage regarding the public transportation available near by aside from generic signs pointing how blocks it is to the closest station in which direction. I remember seeing downtown maps in NYC when visiting.
• On the way back, we took a skywalk across Pratt street. While the elevator on the Harbor side worked perfectly without any sleeping people in it, the other side had no working elevators, so we ended up going down three floors of parking ramps to get the floor.
• We wanted to hitch a ride on the CCC on the way back, but the mobile app did not have prediction times for the bus, the station pole did not have time estimates on it and the regular website claimed it would be another 10 minutes. So we started walking only to get passed by a bus 2 minutes later. If you go out of your way to make sure the buses are tracked, you should also make sure that the website for tracking works! We eventually caught another one half way through.
• On the way back, we took a Light Rail car only to discover later on that it was going to the wrong destination (Light Rail has three lines). It would have been much easier if when the car came, it was clearly indicated and announced that this was the wrong car.

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My experience with Maryland absentee ballots

Just some brief notes on my voting experiences with absentee ballots in Maryland.

The instructions for requesting a ballot appear on the state’s Election Board website. There is a PDF form to print out and return, but interestingly you can submit the form via email or fax, and you can request the ballot being sent to you via email. They even allow the ballot to be sent to a different mailing address but it was the email option that interested me the most. You only need the voter’s name, address, date of birth and party affiliation to request a ballot (you do have to sign). To request the ballot I did just that by getting the PDF form and returning the signed version via email.

About 2 days later I got an email pointing me to the Maryland voter registration status website, where people can check on their voting registration status. To access the site, you need to know the voter’s name, date of birth and zip code. Once logged in, there is a link to the absentee ballot which requires knowing a tracking number which was included in the original email. Once in, there are several PDFs containing the ballot, a prefilled oath form to be signed by the voter and PDF containing the envelope information. The tracking number is included on the oath and the envelope BUT not the ballot itself which has no marks identifying the voter.

What was a little concerning is the ballot itself – it referenced two charter amendment questions, the full text of which I could not find online. I eventually found both of them on the Baltimore City Council’s legaslative system but it took a lot of digging (see this, this, this and this). Question A proposes letting the city borrow money to fix the school system as a non-lapsing (permanent) fund which can be funded by donations or ordinance of estimates assignment. It is interesting to note that the city’s Department of Finance opposes this amendment and the Department of Law raised some important legal issues as to whether the amendment itself is even legal. It is also interesting to note a somewhat weird power point presentation from the school system. All of these documents are available here. The second question lowers the age requirement for council members to 18 from 21, and requires people to be registered voters in the city, as opposed to be registered voters in general.

The ballot and oath must be returned to the Board of Election via postal mail. Once counted, supposedly it will show up in the same online system allowing the voter to check that their vote was counted – something conventional voting does not allow (although people are trying).

The most worrisome aspect of the whole process is security – once you know the basic registration information for a voter, you can then request a ballot online and mail it in. What would make it more secure is that the voter tracking number should be sent via postal mail instead of email to the registered address or at the least a post card saying that “someone requested a ballot for you”. While the Board of Elections may match signatures, it would be trivial to get copies of registration records and signatures just like the Board of Elections plans to do with petitions against illegal immigrant in-state tuition several months ago.

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