I got a great and deceptively simple question recently: what guidelines should be used for testing of voting machines?

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It never ceases to amaze me how often, and in what varied circumstances, I meet people who are not only quite clued in about election technology reform, but also surprising aware of some of the devils that lurk in the details. Today’s devil: "field validation" of voting devices, or: if I went to vote in a precinct, and someone told me I was about to vote on the wonderful new trustworthy voting system that I had heard about, how would I know that that was the device I was about to use?

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Oregon is one of several states that this month have legislative activity that’s starting to look at the phrase "Internet voting". Wired Oregon reports on Attempts to Bring Elections into Digital Age as a pair of bills, one for online voting, and one for online voter registration. But the reference to the recent report on the Pew Center on the States is a bit misleading.

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Live from NASED, want to pass along a comment about the engineering realities of a Digital Public Works Project, in the midst of listening to Congressional staffers discuss what’s up on the Hill regarding election reform legislation.  I just tweeted about the likelihood of making election day a federal holiday (its real and that should make our friends happy), but related comments on the panel sparks another observation.

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Greetings All-

I’m blogging live from the National Association of State Elections Directors Conference, Day-2.  And you can follow us Twittering live from the conference too (@osdv).  A quick comment here; perhaps more as the Day progresses.

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Wow! We learned a lot from visiting with the U.S. Congress this week, by attending and demonstrating to the Congressional Internet Caucus at the annual State of the ‘Net conference.

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Thanks to the Alert Reader that pointed me to http://change.org, the "Top Ten Issues" contest (winners to be presented in briefing to the new administration), and the issue about election technology reform at "Move The Country Towards Transparent Election Systems". (Check it out! You might want participate in the poll yourself.)

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Maybe it’s the "sleeper" event of the post-election, pre-inauguration season in DC — the "Voting in America Summit" conference (sponsored by Make Voting Work, a project of The Pew Center on the States in partnership with the JEHT Foundation).

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In a previous post, I noted two things we’ve learned from this election. The first (and subject of that post) is to what extent the Internet has changed the way elections are conducted. The second, and the focus here, is to what extent the election taught us anything about the need to re-invent HOW America votes.

In the past two days, I’ve been asked several times whether the election, as it turned out, reduces the importance of our Project or not. Seriously.

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In the aftermath of this historic election a couple of observations are worth making.

First, the need for election reform and how America votes persists. Had the election not gone down in the manner it did, and had Senator McCain not conceded when he did, make no mistake challenges would have ensued. But I’ll leave that for another post. For this one, let me turn attention to the second. So,

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