Greetings-
Just a quick post to suggest an interesting report out this afternoon on the TechPresident blog.  The move to consolidate the efforts of Civic Commons (home of Open311.org) and Code For America (CfA), notwithstanding the likely trigger being Civic Common’s leader, Nick Grossman moving on, actually makes sense to us.  CfA’s  Jennifer Pahlka’s write up [...]

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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 [...]

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In a recent posting, I recalled the old-fashioned traditional proprietary-IT-think of vendors leveraging their proprietary data for their customers, and contrasted that with election technology where the data is public.
In the “open data” approach, you do not need to have integrated reporting features as part of a voting system or election management system. Instead, you [...]

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During some recent election technology adoption discussions, I’ve realized how some standard proprietary-IT-think has affected acquisitions of election technology. And it is a mind-set that I used to have too, back when I was in the enterprise IT infrastructure business.
Back then, the normal thing was to have a core technology with some primary value, a [...]

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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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You’ll often find the term “open source” here, used to describe either the source code for software, or the license that allows you take that source code and use it. But “open data” is just as important. A recent New York Times article read almost like I would have said it, starting with “It’s not [...]

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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 [...]

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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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While heads-down on year-end activities for the Foundation, I’ve not had much breathing room to think, reflect, and offer commentary here, but then I received an eMail this weekend, which caught my attention and somewhat caught me off guard.  It just goes to show what we often presume to be clear, [...]

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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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