Ringling College seniors Ryan DeYoung and Greg Tariff recently contributed their artistic abilities—and their summer vacation—to General Motors’ quest for a gas-free automobile. The two were among 21 international students chosen to participate in GM’s “Zero Gas” design challenge, a three-month internship in which six teams of student engineers, designers and artists developed plans for fuel-cell concept cars aimed at emerging global markets. DeYoung, an animation major, and Tariff, a graphic design major, created visual representations and marketing materials for the designs, including a carriage-like vehicle for India’s rough roads and a motorcycle-inspired car targeting Russian drivers. “I always thought of cars as a hobby,” says DeYoung, who, like Tariff, loved cars even as a kid. “Now I’ve started to consider it as a possible career.”—Hannah Wallace

Art Buzz

With the vagaries of the contemporary art scene in Sarasota (witness the closing of mack b and three other galleries this summer and the move of Greene Contemporary and Sonnet Gallery to New York), artists who continue to want to live here because of the intimate camaraderie are cultivating opportunities elsewhere. Sabrina Small, who returned to Sarasota in March after living six years in Berlin, has opened an airy, compact white-cube studio on 10th Way to paint her imaginary creatures based in reality, while maintaining gallery connections in Berlin and Stuttgart. In September Small was invited to have a solo show at a new gallery in Hamburg. Tobey Albright, former curator and co-director at mack b, is finding more time for his own work, enjoying a painting retreat with good friend Tim Jaeger on a nature preserve just outside of Bordeaux this summer. There he also began planning for his multimedia installation in Landau, Germany next June. But Sarasota remains home. —Mark Ormond

Hot Seat
Election activist Skip Parish wants to change the way Sarasota votes.

Skip Parish is a bit of a mystery man, a high-level technology consultant who has worked with the FBI, the Department of Defense and Wall Street firms. He’s also a Sarasota High and USF alum who maintains a home here. Since 2006, Parish has been devoted to his “hobby” of improving technical voting systems. Parish would like to see elections officials think like the intelligence community and spend more time on countermeasures to safeguard voting in Florida.

He’s a familiar face at Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent’s office, known for making frequent public records requests. Parish is a lifelong independent voter, but on election night, he’ll be in the tabulation room, filling the role of computer expert for the Democratic Party. He walked into this interview waving a hot-off-the-press copy of Sarasota’s optical scan ballot.

Do you have a complaint with the ballot design?

I would have positioned the Congressional race (Vern Buchanan and Christine Jennings) a bit differently.

Do you think people will overlook that race because it’s listed below the presidential race?

The farther down on the ballot, the more propensity they have to do that. See where the supervisor of elections race is right in the middle? They’re not going to miss that one.

Do you think the new paper ballots will prevent errors in counting the votes?

People don’t understand that these ballots will not be manually recounted unless there is a close election.

If we were to always do a manual recount, would you consider this voting system to be acceptable?

It’s less acceptable than what Manatee uses. It has a lot more bells and whistles on it, and there’s just that much more to go wrong. This system that we have, we’re going to be discovering things for the next three years.

What’s the best voting system in use today?

The lowest-tech one.

When did you begin looking into Sarasota’s voting machines?

In October 2006. I didn’t think very much of [the touchscreen Ivotronics]. I sent a note to the Supervisor of Elections and said, here are five or six things you can do that won’t cost a lot to make these safer, things like putting plastic tabs around the memory cards so people couldn’t pull them out when they voted, putting duct tape on the plugs so they weren’t pulled out. I never heard back.

Why do you think Florida has had such voting problems?

There’s a small group of people that certify the machines in Tallahassee. It’s not a competitive field. There are only three vendors in the country of any size, and politics are involved in it.

How would you improve the process?

The state has an interest in certifying the machines. They really don’t want to see that they didn’t work. If you had federal testing, that wouldn’t be a problem. The federal testing has many more resources. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland could do it. They need to get better quality and less lobbying by the suppliers.

What’s your ultimate goal?

I think it’s being achieved. We’re getting better elections out of it, more attention to details. We’re getting more disclosure. Things are better than they used to be. —Kim Cartlidge