So, we have a phrase we like to use around here borrowed from the legal academic world.  Used to describe an action or conduct in analyzing a nuance in tort negligence, is the phrase “frolic and detour.”  I am taking a bit of detour and frolicking in an increasingly noisy element of explaining the complexity [...]

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Thanks to some excellent recent presentations by EAC folks, we have today a pleasant surprise of an update to our recent blogs Voting System Decertification: A Way Forward (in Part 1 and Part 2). As you might imagine with a government-run test and certification program, there is an enormous amount of detail (much of it [...]

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Today, we’ll continue our illustrative story of elections — and as in the first installment of the story, we’ll keep it simple with the setting in the Town of Bedrock. As we tune in, we find Fred Flintstone in downtown Bedrock at the offices of Cobblestone County’s Bedrock Board of Elections (BBoE). He’s checking up [...]

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As I said in my recent MLK posting, I’m starting a series of blogs that should provide a concrete example of election management, at a small scale and (I hope) with some interest value.  But before I tell a story of election management, we need to first have a story of an election, and this [...]

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Some of you have heard the rumors and rumblings. Yes, an exciting new project in our open source elections technology framework is in the works.  And yes, it is an important tool for the front lines of democracy: election polling places.
We’ll have a  bunch more to officially say about our digital poll book project shortly.
But [...]

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As Greg said in his New Year’s posting, we’ve been planning a variety of activities for 2011, and reflecting on what we did in 2010, much that remains to do, and to do better. But at the risk of boring you with a laundry list, I wanted to provide some additional detail on some of [...]

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Yesterday, judges in New York state were hearing calls for hand recount, while elsewhere other vote counts were being factored into the totals, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the same question “where are the election results?” was getting very serious. In the Ivory Coast, like in some places in the U.S., there [...]

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More tabulator troubles! In addition to the continuing saga in New York with the tabulator troubles I wrote about earlier, now there is another tabulator-related situation in Colorado. The news report from Saguache County CO is about:
a Nov. 5 “retabulation” of votes cast in the Nov. 2 election Friday by Myers and staff, with [...]

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In my last post, I recounted an incident from Erie County NY, but deferred to today an account of what the technology troubles were, that prevented the routine use of a Tabulator to create county-wide vote totals by combining count data from each of the opscan paper ballot counting devices. The details are worth considering [...]

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Behind the election news in Buffalo, NY, there is a cautionary tale about voting system complexity and confidence. The story is about a very close race for the state Senate’s 60th district. One news article includes a reference to “software problems with the new electronic voting machines in Erie County.”
The fundamental issue here is [...]

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