An apparent counting error by local election workers delivered a stunning, primary recount victory for Nashua Ward 8 Democrat Latha Mangipudi on Monday.

Last Tuesday, former Aldermanic President Carl Andrade had scored a narrow, three-point win over Mangipudi for the right to face former House Majority Leader Peter Silva, R-Nashua, in a special election this fall.

That primary outcome was Andrade with 170 votes to 167 for Mangipudi.

But after the one-hour recount in Secretary of State Bill Gardner’s office, Mangipudi came out the winner with 191 votes to 146 for Andrade.

“This proves to me once again that democracy works, the process works, and I think it’s wonderful that both Carl and I ran an energizing, positive campaign. I really thank him for that,” Mangipudi said.

Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said upon opening the box of ballots on Monday, it became clear local election workers had sorted the ballots into two stacks while they were counting, one with votes for Andrade and the other votes for Mangipudi.

The problem was during the recount state officials found one bundle of votes put into the “Andrade” stack were votes for Mangipudi.

They were bundled in packs of 25 votes each.

“Once I saw that, I could only hope that one of my stacks of votes had been put into her pile but no such luck,” Andrade said.

The recount confirmed a 24-vote change from one candidate to the other, as the same misplaced bundle contained a single write-in vote for Silva.

“It was pretty straightforward once we started going through them that this became a counting error on the night of the primary,” said Deputy Secretary of State Scanlan.

Andrade said both candidates realized a simple mistake had occurred and accepted the outcome.

“There was no question about the intent of every voter’s ballot. What happened here was a bundle of ballots got put in the wrong pile,” Andrade said.

Mangipudi faces Silva Nov. 5, the same day voters will decide municipal offices. The winner will succeed Democratic state Rep. Roland LaPlante, who resigned in February because of health issues.

“I am obviously glad I asked for the recount because it was human error,” Mangipudi said. “Otherwise, we would never had known this happened.”

Andrade was an experienced figure in city politics, serving on the city’s aldermanic board for numerous terms and running twice for mayor.

Mangipudi served on the Nashua Board of Education more than a decade ago though she also worked in 2005-06 to form a state political action committee focused on US-India relations.

“We both committed to support the other whoever won the primary,” Andrade said. “Latha and her family worked very hard in this campaign will make a great addition to the House from Nashua.

“It was gratifying to see Latha attracted a lot of new voters who don’t typically show up in an election like this. I think that’s great for the future health of the Democratic Party at the local level.”

Mangipudi said through this contest, the two candidates got to know each other very well.

“This became a real friendly competition between us,” she said. “I knocked on 800 doors in the ward, and I think we both were surprised that more than 500 in total showed up to vote.”

Roughly 525, or just under 9 percent, of Ward 8’s 5,981 registered voters turned out Tuesday.

Initially, Mangipudi said she probably wouldn’t bother with a recount since the turnout was so small and election workers had totaled up the ballots three times. She eventually asked for a recount and paid a $10 fee.

“I wasn’t surprised when she decided to seek the recount,” Andrade said. “When it’s that close, your supporters are always going to encourage you to make extra sure.”

State Rep. Ken Gidge, D-Nashua, was among more than 20 friends and supporters of both candidates who turned out to watch the recount.

“This shows you once again why in any close race like this one, you always want to see the ballots,” Gidge said. “It’s hard to believe there could be a swing of 24 votes, but mistakes happen.”

Andrade said these paper ballots were folded over by local election workers and a rubber band was stretched over each bundle.

“It looked like they counted them three times to make sure each stack contained 25 ballots but they must never have unfolded the bundles to make sure that my votes were all in one pile and hers were all in the other,” Andrade said. “You would think they would have looked in and checked to make sure what they were counting.”

Source: Nashua Telegraph

Democrat Latha Mangipudi has won the Sept. 17 special primary election following a recount Monday, beating opponent Carl Andrade in the final analysis by a sizable margin – 191 to 146.

“There was a whole pile of 25 ballots that were misplaced on Carl’s side instead of mine,” Mangipudi said Monday by phone, following the official word from the Secretary of State’s office.
The original count had Andrade winning over Mangipudi, 170 to 167. Mangipudi immediately requested a recount.

She said Andrade, who was in attendance at the recount, is not contesting the official result.

“I congratulated him for a wonderful run – this is a democratic process at work, and I’m so glad I did the recount – it’s an education for all of us, and reinforces that every vote counts,” Mangipudi said.

Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said it appears to be a straightforward case of human error.

“It’s pretty clear what happened – human error,” Scanlan said. “It appears a bundle of 25 ballots for one candidate was in the sorted pile of the other candidate, so when they did the election and sorted the ballots out and came up with piles for each candidate and put the ballots into piles of 25, what appears to have happened is a pile of 25 ballots for Mrs. Mangipudi got put into Mr. Andrade’s pile,” Scanlan said.

He added while it’s not unusual for an election separated by three votes to flip during a recount, it is unusual to have such a large discrepancy during a recount. The lesson, for candidates, is “never give up.”

“That would also be true for those counting ballots – you can never double-check enough,” Scanlan said.
Mangipudi will now go up against Republican Peter Silva in the November 5 general election for the win – and a State Rep seat in Concord.

Source: Nashua Patch

An acclaimed Indian-American pianist, composer, and musicologist is among the recipients of so-called ”Genius Grant” for 2013, formally known as the MacArthur fellowship, that comes with $625,000 (approx Rs 4 crore) pocket money to recognize the brilliance of its winners.

Announced to much fanfare in September each year just before the Nobel season, the awards increasingly features Indian-Americans (the economist Raj Chetty is a 2012 awardee and computer scientist Shwetak Patel was recognized in 2011). But even by that token, this year’s fellow, Vijay Iyer, strikes a unique note.

He not only composes and collaborates across multiple genres and disciplines, but his scholarly research centers on the act of listening. Much of this goes back to his undergraduate degree (maths and physics at Yale) and graduate work (an interdisciplinary PhD program in Technology and the Arts, focusing on music cognition) that resulted in a 1998 dissertation titled Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Music.

Outside academia though, he is better known as a Grammy-nominated jazz pianist who has had a long-standing collaboration with the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (both have played at the Indian Embassy in Washington DC) and South Asian chamber trio Tirtha, featuring guitarist Prasanna and tabla player Nitin Mitta. Iyer is embarking on a new job as Professor of Arts and Music at Harvard University when news came about the Genius Grant, which does not in any way interfere with the plans of its recipients or how they choose to spend the money.

Among the 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2013 is Kyle Abraham, a dancer-choreographer who was living on food stamps just three years ago.

Source: The Times of India

Indian American television producer Akash Goyal won an Emmy Award in Los Angeles Sept. 15 at a gala celebrating the 65th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The event took place one week before the Prime Time Emmy Awards, which were presented Sept. 22 and aired on CBS.

Goyal was part of a team that took the prize for Outstanding Interactive Program as senior producer for “Night of Too Many Stars: America Comes Together for Autism Programs” for ComedyCentral.com.

The show was a fundraiser that aired in October of 2012 and raised $3.7 million.

Goyal has also worked on the Web team for Village Voice Media and for WPIX-TV.

Source: IndiaWest

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a distinguished professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, whose landmark research showed that cutting emissions of black carbon and other short-lived climate pollutants can significantly lessen the impacts of regional and global climate change, improve the health of millions of rural poor, and avoid crop losses, will receive a 2013 Champions of the Earth award, the United Nations’ highest environmental accolade, according to a UC San Diego press release.

The Champions of the Earth prize is awarded annually to leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector, whose actions have had a significant and positive impact on the environment. Organized by the United Nations Environment Programme, Ramanathan was nominated in the Science and Innovation category.

“I am very honored to accept this prestigious award, which recognizes the critical role of science and research in addressing the major environmental challenges of our time,” said Ramanathan. “Policymakers across the world are realizing that through cost-effective actions such as reducing methane emissions from natural gas and oil production, and capturing emissions from waste dumps, or phasing out products using hydroflurocarbons, or HFCs, major reductions in short-lived climate pollutants can be achieved, with significant add-on benefits for health and food security. As the science shows, fast action on black carbon, methane and HFCs – coupled with major cuts in carbon emissions – can make a critical contribution to achieving low carbon, resource-efficient, and inclusive development for all,” the Indian American professor added.

“We are proud that Prof. Ramanathan is being acknowledged for his science and for his humanitarian efforts, ensuring that research is translated into public policy,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla.

Ramanathan, who also serves as UNESCO professor of climate and policy at The Energy and Resources Institute University in New Delhi, India, co-led an international research team that in 1997 first discovered the climate impact in Asia of widespread air pollution, known as the atmospheric brown cloud.

Further studies by Ramanathan and fellow researchers highlighted the effects of growing levels of soot and other forms of black carbon, sulfates, ozone, and other pollutants emitted by cities, industry, and agriculture – termed the ‘brown cloud’ – which warm the atmosphere by absorbing sunlight, and are contributing in particular to the accelerated melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Brown clouds can also disturb tropical rainfall and regional circulation patterns such as the South Asian monsoon and reduce agriculture yields, potentially affecting over a billion people on the subcontinent.

Ramanathan’s research underlines the idea that cutting emissions of black carbon, methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and other substances collectively known as short-lived climate pollutants, with lifetimes of a decade or less, along with mitigation of CO2 emissions, can reduce the rate of warming by as much as half in the coming decades.

Ramanathan has also translated his research into action, by establishing a project, known as Project Surya, in India to phase out inefficient cookstoves in collaboration with The Energy Resources Institute and Nexleaf Analytics.

Inefficient cookstoves – used by some 500 million families in developing countries – are responsible for an estimated 25 percent of all black carbon emissions. Some 3.1 million premature deaths – especially among women and girls – are also caused by inhalation of indoor smoke from cookstoves.

Source: IndiaWest