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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Putting an open source application into service – or “deployment” – can be different from deploying proprietary software. What works, and what doesn’t? That’s a question that’s come up several times in the few weeks, as the TTV team has been working hard on several proposals for new projects in 2011. Based on our experiences [...]

Read Full Post »

As I often do, I had a thoughtful Martin Luther King Day — as you can see from my still pondering a couple days later. But I think I now have something to share. Last time I wrote on MLK, I likened two unlikely things:

King’s demand for social justice and peace, using Isaiah’s prophetic [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Here is some interesting news from Spokane WA, where ballot counting has been seriously delayed because election officials are hand copying tens of thousands of ballots. It’s an interesting lesson in how vote-by-mail (Spokane is an all-VBM county in WA) creates higher operational requirements for accountability, transparency, and election integrity.
Some readers may not be familiar [...]

Read Full Post »

Last time, I wrote about what I learned from two curious statements in the context of the NC experience with and litigation about flakey voting machines. Today is Part Two, starting by explaining what I mean by “flakey”, and finishing with a response to Johnnie McLean’s (NC SBE deputy director) statement at the conclusion of [...]

Read Full Post »