Also on today’s menu:
The Case For Controlled Burns
Machine Count, Or Hand Count?
Those Missing Text Messages
Ten hospitals, including those in Franklin and Laconia, have closed their maternity wards over the past two decades, and Frisbie Memorial Hospital in Rochester recently announced plans to do so. Responding to the concerns of residents that now have to travel farther to give birth, lawmakers and state health officials are boosting funding for labor and delivery units. The Legislature increased what the state Medicaid program pays for labor and delivery, and last week, the Executive Council approved using $250,000 in federal money to help midwives and birth centers deal with spiraling malpractice insurance costs.
Leaders at the New Hampshire hospitals closing their labor and delivery units have cited declining birth rates as one factor in making birthing centers unsustainable, but also point to the low Medicaid reimbursement rates.
Dr. Tim Fisher, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, said the rate increase should particularly help rural hospitals in lower-income communities that have more Medicaid patients. Those are the types of hospitals that have tended to close their birthing units.
The Case For Controlled Burns
The New Hampshire Bulletin has published a two-part series about the return to controlled burns as both a way to prevent devastating wildfires and to support the natural landscape. The first part emphasizes how Abenaki leaders are working alongside the U.S. Forest Service to research the practices used by indigenous people to keep the forests healthy, and the second part describes the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department’s use of prescribed burns to support ecosystems that depend on fire to survive.
Heidi Holman, a wildlife biologist with Fish and Game, said prescribed burns are critical to the survival of the Karner blue butterfly. Wild lupine is the butterfly’s host plant, which allows it to complete its caterpillar life stage and become an adult. Without fire, trees encroach on open fields, casting shade on the lupine and killing it off. Prescribed burns maintain those openings and provide nutrients. The blackened ground seems devoid of life, but the fire has left the exact conditions required to sustain it.
Holman believes fire is important for other reasons that science has yet to fully understand, such as its role in nutrient cycling and its impact on a kind of bacteria that grows on lupine that may be critical in how it competes with other plants.
Machine Count, Or Hand Count?
Republicans in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire, Washington, and West Virginia have introduced legislation to ban the use of ballot tabulators, instead seeking to require that votes be counted by hand. Machines sometimes miscount votes, but there are procedures in place to ensure that any discrepancies do not affect the outcome of an election, and close races where every vote counts are handled by giving candidates a right to ask for a recount.
Franklin’s former long-time ballot clerk June Dolloff succeeded for years in holding off the switchover to ballot machines because she trusted people more than machines to give accurate counts. However, voting experts say that “using hand-counting as the default method to count ballots, which requires that all voters cast paper ballots, is incredibly expensive, burdensome, and time-consuming.” In fact, research shows that vote tabulators are more accurate than hand counts, which allow for a vast amount of human error, especially when the people counting ballots are overworked and tired around an election. Jurisdictions often hand-count smaller groups of ballots after a tabulator is used to verify the accuracy of results.
Tabulators also allow for accessibility features to assist voters with disabilities who cannot hand mark a paper ballot.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that uses ideas from both parties, recommends pairing machine tabulators with an audit of paper ballots. “This balance minimizes the potential for human error during vote-counting while maintaining a strong system of manual error-checking to unearth discrepancies that may arise during tabulation,” they write in an explainer.
Those Missing Text Messages
Senior leadership at the Secret Service confiscated the cellphones of 24 agents involved in the agency’s response to the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and handed them over to the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General, according to two sources, NBC has reported.
The agency reportedly handed over the phones “shortly after” a July 19 letter was sent by Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s office around the time he launched a criminal probe into the Secret Service’s missing text messages from Jan. 6, the sources said. Cuffari had alerted Congress that his office was unable to obtain text messages from agents’ cellphones that it sought as part of its investigation into the Secret Service response to the insurrection. The Secret Service has said the texts were lost as part of a previously planned systems upgrade that essentially restored the phones to factory settings.
In a letter obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and released Friday, anonymous staff within his office accused Cuffari of “significantly editing reports to remove key findings” and “interfering with staff efforts to gather information necessary to perform independent oversight.”
Podcast Version Of News Café
Substack, the platform used for the News Café, now offers an audio version of the news for those using the Substack app. Simply click on the headphones icon at the top of the article to listen to the day’s stories.
Support Our Efforts
The News Café is a virtual meeting place where we discuss the news of the day: local, statewide, national, and international.
An offering by the Liberty Independent Media Project, the News Café does not rely on advertising, as most media outlets do, freeing us to provide an independent focus on events and cultural issues. The project instead relies on direct monetary support from donors and subscribers, as well as providing news to other media outlets.
If you like what we’re doing, and want to see more local news you will not find elsewhere, please give what you can.
Subscriptions to this newsletter are available for as little as $5 per month. Subscribers can share their knowledge, thoughts, and questions about any topic, and we may select some of those subjects for more in-depth analysis.
If you’re unable to pay but still want to receive all of the free public posts in your in-box, click the Subscribe button and select a free subscription.