Posted in Commentary, Election Technology Reform on May 27th, 2011
For those of you who have been following the recount saga in Wisconsin, here is a bit of news, and a reflection on that.
So, the news from a couple of days ago (I’m just catching up) is that the process of re-counting is complete, but the resolution of that close election may [...]
Posted in Ballot Design, Commentary, Election Adminstration Technology on May 10th, 2011
Continuing our Bedrock election story (see parts one, two, and three if you need to catch up), we find the County of Bedrock Board of Elections staff, including design guru Dana Chisel, in the “ballot design studio,” a dusty back room of the BBoE. Chisels in hand, staffers ponder the blank slate, or rather sandstone, [...]
Posted in Ballot Design, Commentary, Election Adminstration Technology on Apr 8th, 2011
At the end of our last visit to the fictional Town of Bedrock, we left Fred as he applied to run for mayor. Now we’ll continue the story, but with a focus on Bedrock itself, in order to continue building up a detailed, yet simplified, account of actual U.S. election practice.
The focus is on Bedrock [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Dec 3rd, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Commentary, Voting System Technology on Nov 24th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 22nd, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Commentary, Risk, Voting System Technology on Nov 19th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 17th, 2010
Taking a break from news and commentary on election operations issues, I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about current TrustTheVote project efforts that are very relevant to the activities of many election officials right now: tabulating election results, as part of the process of certifying results and finishing the operations for [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 16th, 2010
Continuing on with our recap of election technology faults and oddities in the recent election, not the most alarming but perhaps the most perplexing is a story from Gadsden, AL. From the the news article, it seems that Etowah County’s election officials rely on their voting system vendor, Election Systems and Services (ES&S) to provide [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology, Election Information on Nov 15th, 2010
NYT reported on the continuing counting in some New York elections, with the control of the NY state house (and hence redistricting) hanging in the balance. The article is mostly apt, but the reference to “hanging chad” is not quite right. FL 2000’s hanging chad drama was mainly about the ridiculous extreme that FL went [...]
The OSDV Foundation is a
pending
501(c)(3) non-profit California public benefit corporation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
