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 Election Information on Feb 15th, 2010
I came across an interesting article about voter registration: “The Alternative to Universal Voter Registration” where John N. Hall strongly supports Automatic Registration (AR) over Universal Voter Registration (UVR).
To people who are not election experts the distinction is a bit subtle. UVR has states proactively try to register everyone to vote, while AR has the [...]
Posted in Commentary, Election Adminstration Technology on Jan 25th, 2010
Twelve days ago without a lot of fanfare and perhaps overshadowed by the MOVE Act enactment, the House took a small step forward in pushing a modest voter registration modernization initiative when Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who is the most senior Republican on the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections, introduced the Responsible Online Voter Empowerment Registration [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 11th, 2010
We have a special treat today with a guest blog from Barbara Simons, an eminent computer scientist who is on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. (More on Barbara: her bio.) She has an excellent account of part of the story about where voter registration came from, and why it is [...]
Posted in Election Information on Dec 23rd, 2009
Yeah this is old hat to election-insiders (I am not yet one, so I can still have that sense of wonder but I just took a drive through the “Voting Information Project” web site. I think it’s a cool idea that could be a template to catalyze very useful election related information resources [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology on Nov 30th, 2009
The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act is probably not high on your radar screen of activities in the U.S. Congress — but it is important to me, for two reasons, aside from the most basic one that it enables broader access for overseas voters.
The bill avoided partisan politics that usually sidelines any election [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology, Voting System Technology on Sep 1st, 2009
Last Friday was the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in Washington, DC., where so many of us remember him saying “I have a dream.” The anniversary caught me by surprise when I noted it in the news, and tugged at me all day: what could Dr. King’s words have to say about [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology, Open Source on Aug 13th, 2009
In this week’s news we have a classic example of how transparency (a.k.a. “open government”) has enormous potential to defuse some thorny political issues that can rise to the highest heights of U.S. political news. The news is about Karl Rove’s involvement in Bush-administration actions to dismiss some U.S. Attorneys, including David Iglesias.
A New York [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology on Jul 25th, 2009
A recent New York Times editorial spoke in favor of changes to U.S. voter registration practices, citing a recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. From a technology perspective, those changes raise the question of impact to existing I.T. systems for voter registration, both those [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 8th, 2009
In a previous post I described the Minnesota election process recipe and later described some room for improvement — well, now you can read it straight from MN Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, what he’d like to do to improve the recipe.
Those improvements are mainly in election process and practice. I’d like to [...]
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