Probably what's going on is that someone on the board of trusties gets money from the political establishment in Florida and is worried that they'll lose it if the voting barriers are fixed and different leadership is elected.
This has similarities with the shenanigans pulled by Sinema and Manchin around the Build Back Better plan. Political horse trading to advance the agendas of special interests, at great expense to millions of people.
I wonder if the tech community could get involved to increase transparency around this stuff. Imagine if we had an open graph of the money flow so we could write a SQL query like (pseudo code) "select * from donors where payee in (select id from trustees)". Let people crowdsource the data and then maintain a page of declarative queries so that anyone can instantly see the web of money around public officials. It could be part of a build system that automatically creates a NASCAR jacket for each official so we could see who their donors are in AR.
Maybe such a thing already exists. It's traditionally been accomplished by investigative journalists and lawyers, but why couldn't it be public? It seems like it would be an effective way to end the bribe system.
The chair of the board is a GOP mega-donor & “adviser”. Search “Mori Hosseini” for plenty of examples of he and his company getting cozy with the Desantis administration.
The school receives most of their funding from the state, and the state gets to appoint half of their board. The school is concerned that the state could retaliate against them for allowing the professors to testify. Which is probably illegal, but probably wouldn't be addressed for months or years.
The easy way out of this is for the court to subpoena the professors. I wouldn't be surprised if U of F was taking this stance to force that to occur, and which point they can shrug, and say "we tried, but they were subpoenaed..."
> Probably what's going on is that someone on the board of trusties gets money from the political establishment in Florida and is worried that they'll lose it if the voting barriers are fixed and different leadership is elected.
That sounds like an overly biased, rosy fantasy.
Many of us that do not have an R or a D near our names are concerned about how easy it is to cheat the system with ballot harvesting, mail-in ballots, or, at will manipulation of voting laws by secretaries of state rather than legislative bodies, as the Constitution says.
This has similarities with the shenanigans pulled by Sinema and Manchin around the Build Back Better plan. Political horse trading to advance the agendas of special interests, at great expense to millions of people.
I wonder if the tech community could get involved to increase transparency around this stuff. Imagine if we had an open graph of the money flow so we could write a SQL query like (pseudo code) "select * from donors where payee in (select id from trustees)". Let people crowdsource the data and then maintain a page of declarative queries so that anyone can instantly see the web of money around public officials. It could be part of a build system that automatically creates a NASCAR jacket for each official so we could see who their donors are in AR.
Maybe such a thing already exists. It's traditionally been accomplished by investigative journalists and lawyers, but why couldn't it be public? It seems like it would be an effective way to end the bribe system.