Election Updates

After a whirlwind day-and-a-half in Buenos Aires, we have the the afternoon off (partly so the international observation team can get a bit of rest before a very long day tomorrow observing the actual election; partly so the Buenos Aires election staff who have been fantastic hosts for us can get things ready for their big election tomorrow).

I thought I'd start with one discussion about elections in general here in Buenos Aires (and Argentina) that relates back to some themes that Thad and I have been stressing lately --- threat assessment and election security.

As you might imagine, given Argentina's political history there are very different traditions about the physical security of the electoral process. I'll get into some of those differences in this particular essay.

The very first visit of our mission yesterday (for the entire team) was to the "Comando Nacional Electoral", or the National Electoral Center. This office is in a massive building ("Edificio Libertador") which I believe is the headquarters of the Argentine military. Here is a picture of the front entrance (taken when our mission was entering; when we were exiting, Dan Seligson and Sean Greene of electionline.org tried to take pictures as well, but an armed military guard waved them off, loudly blowing his whistle at them). Here is a picture of an even more imposing side entrance. We entered this massive building, and were met by a large contingent of Argentine military brass, and escorted in small groups to an upstairs conference room, that was at the end of a very elaborate hall that was lined with military memorablia, that took us to the National Electoral Center.

Once in the National Election Center, we were given a thorough briefing (entirely in Spanish, testing my limited Spanish, although we did have a translator). The briefing was conducted by a series of military officers, who walked us through a GIS application that they have developed for overseeing national elections; they can use it to spot problems and track ballots boxes across the country. While the officers talked, they had three powerpoints going. Behind us was a room full of computers and people manning the computers, apparently where the GIS applications are run from. The one thing none of us in the group could figure out about this briefing is apparent in this photo of one of the officers conducting in the briefing; we could not figure out who the personnel in the khakis were, who were apparently watching the proceedings via a videoconference.

The GIS applications that they demonstrated for us didn't seem like rocket science; as far as I could tell they were using the popular GIS package ArcView, and were plotting relatively routine information for us like highway maps, locations of polling places, and weather forcasts for election day. This just demonstrated that there is a very interesting set of uses of GIS for election administration that I've not heard widely discussed --- not using it with voter registration data or for analyzing problems after an election has been held, but using it to proactively to keep track of polling places, where problems are arising geographically, and keeping track of ballot boxes, all in real-time. Indeed, some of these applications are similar to the work being initiated by scholars like Henry Brady and James Gimpel (blogged by Thad on September 14, 2005). But it is clear that there are applications of GIS that election administrators might want consider, especially those serving larger geographic jurisdictions, for tasks like keeping tabs on potential distruptions (bad weather or traffic delays, for example) and for keeping tabs on election material.

But the visit to the National Election Center impressed us that the military takes the election process very seriously; they clearly are concerned about monitoring the progress of elections and they were very proud of their GIS application. They discussed in great detail how it will allow them to insure the security and integrity of the upcoming election.

Once we were done with the briefing, the military officers hosted a reception for us in another room. This room was lined with posters about the upcoming election, and with a great deal of information about the geography of the election and showing different ways that the military will be involved in oversight and monitoring of the upcoming here. This photo shows electionline.org's Sean Greene in front of a poster that we believe shows which military officers are in charge of monitoring which parts of the nation's electoral districts.

Today we toured two polling places that were being set up for the election tomorrow (we did a lot of other things yesterday that I'll write about later). The first was a public school (in Buenos Aires, all of the 53 polling places in the upcoming election are located in public schools). One of the first things that we noticed when we entered the school and the polling place was a very heavy police presence. Here is a picture of one of the police officers helping to put up a poster for the voter registration table in this school ("ENET No. 35 Ing Eduardo Latizina", located at Av. Lope De Vega 2150). There were at least six police officers doing various things in this school while some workers were setting up the voting booths for the e-voting pilot.

The second site we visted was located just north of the main downtown area of Buenos Aires, at Av. Santa Fe 4201 ("LIC NAC No. 1 Jose Figueroa Alcorta"). This first picture shows, from the street, the entrance to the school. Members of our mission are still exiting our white tour bus, behind the police car (there were a number of officers in the car). You can see two officers standing on the sidewalk, and there were at least three additional officers visible within the polling place. The second photo, inside the polling place, shows some of the e-voting booths already set up, members of our mission discussing the polling place, and three police officers watching the proceedings.

Clearly this is a different model of security than I have seen in the United States. Both the national military and the local police play a visible role in the process, at least given what we have seen and heard so far. Or course, during the election tomorrow I'll be curious to see the level of police and military presence in and near the polling places, and will report back what we see. It certainly has been interesting to see their presence so far, which is one visible and clear distinction between the election process I've observed in the United States and Argentina.

While I don't have the time at this point to go into a lot of detail about this new report from the GAO (got much better stuff to blog from Buenos Aires in just a few minutes), I thought that I would put a link to this report up now and note that sometime in the coming week Thad and I will probably get back to some more discussion of this new report.

In any case, the new GAO report is "Elections: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Voting Systems are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed." From the quick read I've made of this new report, that title pretty much summarizes the conclusions.

For those interested, here is a key paragraph from the summary:

The federal government has begun efforts intended to improve life cycle management of electronic voting systems and thereby improve their security and reliability. Specifically, EAC has led efforts to (1) draft changes to existing federal voluntary standards for voting systems, including provisions addressing security and reliability; (2) develop a process for certifying voting systems; (3) establish a program to accredit independent laboratories to test electronic voting systems; and (4) develop a library and clearinghouse for information on state and local elections and systems. However, these actions are unlikely to have a significant effect in the 2006 federal election cycle because important changes to the voting standards have not yet been completed, the system certification and laboratory accreditation programs are still in development, and a system software library has not been updated or improved since the 2004 election. Further, EAC has not consistently defined specific tasks, processes, and time frames for completing these activities; as a result, it is unclear when their results will be available to assist state and local election officials.

More later on this report ...

Common Cause of Colorado is hosting the Southwest Election Reform Conference Thursday and Friday. I am presenting on Friday, but today, they had several incredibly interesting panels. The best panel examined vote centers, with Scott Doyle of Larimer County presenting about vote centers there.

Based on the presentation, it is pretty clear that the term "vote center" is a complete misnomer. Although one aspect of the reforms that went on in Larimer County was the creation of these vote centers, it was just a single facet of a multi-faceted effort. The key to the vote center model is public education. Scott sends multiple notices to voters before an election, in large measure to provide them with information on how to vote through some other means than the vote center.

• The voters receive an introductory communication about the election that includes an absentee ballot request. One-third of Larimer County voters vote by mail.
• The voters receive a communication with a signature card the voter uses to sign in at the polls. This communication generally spurs voters to vote early at one of five early voting locations. One-third of Larimer County voters vote early.
  
• Finally, voters can vote at one of the 31 vote centers. One-third of Larimer County voters vote early.
  

In short, the vote center is not the driver of turnout in the County, since two-thirds of voters vote by some other means. Very likely, it is communication between the election official and voter that is critical to turning out voters.

Scott was also very clear that vote centers will not translate well everywhere. Larimer County--where I am right now--is partly urban but largely rural, with ranches, mountains, and a highly mobile commuter population. His voters like to vote absentee and like early voting, so the move to vote centers fit the demographics and culture of the community. This model may not work in other places; election officials need to think hard before adopting this reform without carefully pilot testing it and talking with community members about how various demographic groups within the community will fare after the change.

There are numerous problems with the debate about the security of elections that has been ongoing for the past two years. One major issue is that the debate has been very focused and truncated--the threats and risks of electronic voting have shaped the debate, without giving consideration to threats and risks across the election process and across voting technologies. Moreover, this debate has not been well quantified. We discuss risks but not the relative likelihood that any given risk will come to pass, or the likelihood of one risk vis-a-vis another.

In an effort to address this gap in our understanding of election risks, electionline.org, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and the University of Utah Center for Public Policy and Administration are conducting this informal survey to measure respondents’ assessment of the current threats to the security of the voting process. All responses will be kept confidential, with information reported only in the aggregate and any quotations fashioned so as to protect respondents’ anonymity.

The survey can be accessed HERE. Once you complete the interactive PDF, you just click "submit" and it will email the form to us. We want to have as many different people, and categories of people (election officials, advocates, social scientists, etc.) complete the survey. We will then write up the results in a report on election risks that will come out in 2006.

WE REALLY NEED YOU TO COMPLETE THE SURVEY IN FULL!

It seems that every day I hear about some new initiative somewhere to use SMS or instant message technology for voter mobilization. For example, just yesterday I heard about the efforts in San Francisco to use text messaging to get folks there registered to vote, which I discussed in a blog post yesterday.

Today word from Switzerland is that voters in Bulach, in the Zurich canton, can participate in a pilot project that allows them to cast ballots using SMS, as well as other modes, in a local initiative election. According to one story on this pilot project, "Each voter will be sent a unique user ID through the post. They also have to enter a personal code and their date of birth before they can send their vote, which is recorded to prevent repeat voting."

One of the goals of the project is to facilitate participation of younger voters, and apparently the same technoloogy will also be piloted in two other towns also in the canton of Zurich in elections in late November.

As with all of the many pilot projects that are going on throughout the world involving innovative new technologies, we hope that as part of the evaluation effort data will eventually be released as to the extent to which this pilot does facilitate participation, influences the composition of the electorate, is usable, and yields no major glitches or security breaches. It will really be interesting to at some point be able to document whether conventional wisdom about SMS and text messaging's potential utility in voter mobilization holds water --- does it increase voter participation, by how much, and among which groups of the electorate?

As I was sitting in the airport waiting to get on my flight to Buenos Aires, the television programs in the airport were blaring about the latest natural disaster --- Hurricane Wilma. Due to some odd coincidence, it seems that each time this summer that a major hurricane has headed to the United States, I've headed on a flight right into the midst of the storm, including Katrina, Rita and now Wilma!

In any case, as I was watching the coverage of Hurricane Wilma, my thoughts drifted back to Hurricane Katrina and the hundreds of thousands who remain displaced in that disaster's aftermath, I wondered about what efforts are being undertaken by election officials to figure out where voters displaced from Louisiana and Mississippi now are, and how they are going to get in touch with those voters to make sure they are not disenfranchised in upcoming elections in both states.

Then coincidence strikes again, when I grab a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and find a short article buried on page A6, titled "New Orleans Elections in Doubt As Voter Tracking Hits Snags." According to this story, "The Federal Emergency Management Agency notified Louisiana officials that it won't fund a plan to help displaced New Orleans voters participate in local elections or give state leaders access to FEMA's database containing temporary addresses of evacuated residents."

According to the WSJ story, the state has estimated that it could cost as much as $750,000 for the state to mount a national advertising campaign to inform displaced New Orleans voters that they can vote in upcoming February local elections no matter where they are now located. Indeed, that seems like a lot of money for an advertising campaign, but given what these voters have gone through --- and the obvious need to make sure they are not disenfranchised and that they can participate in selecting city leaders who will be critical actors in the rebuilding of New Orleans --- I couldn't help but think that this is a worthwhile investment in rebuilding the civic capacity of those displaced New Orleans voters. If FEMA won't make this investment in rebuilding the civic capacity of New Orleans, perhaps other federal agencies or private entities can step up to the plate to help, ranging from the EAC, to other election officials in states with high concentrations of Katrina-displaced voters, to private foundations?

While we can debate the FEMA's decision to not invest in the rebuilding the civic capacity of New Orleans, it really seems shortsighted for FEMA not to share contact information with Louisiana state officials. According to the WSJ story, FEMA's rationale for denying access to the list of displaced individuals stems from privacy concerns. Maybe there is indeed some specific legal basis for FEMA's decision (and I have no doubt that Election Updates readers will let me know if this is the case). But it is really hard to see how the concept of a federal agency sharing name and address information with a state agency, in such a special circumstance, can be such a violation of individual privacy to deny such an important request. And if privacy concerns are so pressing --- can't FEMA work out a procedure with the state of Louisiana to allow access to this critical information, so that they can make sure that voters displaced by Katrina know of their rights to cast absentee ballots, that insures that the information is used only for that purpose?

It seems that there must be a solution to both of these problems. And it sure sounds as if FEMA simply doesn't want to be part of the solution to help protect the voting rights of Katrina-displaced voters. Unless FEMA reconsiders these decisions, it does seem that the best recourse will be for Louisiana to work with private organizations and election officials in other states to try to take some initial steps to rebuild the civic capacity of New Orleans.

While colleagues stateside are hopefully busy filling out our threat assessment survey and returning it to us, I'm heading down to Buenos Aires for the next week to participate in the evaluation of their electronic voting pilot project. Some details of the pilot project are now available, and to the extent that I can provide updates about what we are doing and what we are finding, I'll try to do that from the field. This promises to be an interesting pilot project, and hopefully we will have access to high-quality evaluation data which can be shared with the research community.

California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson is hosting a conference involving state and federal election officials and technology experts to "collaborate on the establishment of best practices to define how states should test voting systems." The conference is scheduled for November 28 and 29 in Sacramento. The organization of the conference seems to have cross-cutting discussions: panels on the organizations and levels of government involved in voting system testing, and then some panels on specific issues associated with voting system testing.

Here is the invitation and preliminary panelist list. It looks like an exciting opportunity for those interested in the topic of testing voting systems. I'm going to participate in a session on November 29 titled "Security/Paper Trails/Accountability", with William A. Arbaugh (University of Maryland), David L. Dill (Stanford University), Lillie Coney (Electronic Privacy Technology Project), and Henry Brady (University of California, Berkeley). That looks like an interesting group to have involved in this discussion, and I anticipate a lively and informative session.

There is a story on ZDNet News that discusses an advertisement campaign in San Francisco aimed at getting young Asian-American voters to get registered and voting. As the story notes, the ad is on a billboard above a San Francisco restaurant called "My Tofu House", and it reads "
"Registering to vote just got EASIER. Register to vote. USING your cellphone, Text `IVOTE' to 80837." The billboard is located at Geary and 11th Ave.

You can see a picture of the My Tofu House advertisement here. The group that is behind the campaign is "Mobile Voter", a nonprofit located in the Bay area.

It would be very interesting to get some information here on how many text messages this advertising campaign generates, and what the demographics are of the users. So if anyone out there is associated with the "Mobile Voter" group and can send along some data, we'd love to take a look! Election Updates readers may remember that we blogged about the use of text messages for voter mobilization on October 3, 2005.

Yes, we are election geeks, and that is why we have been following the progress of "ROVER", Riverside County's mobile voting vehicle (which has reminded me a bit of the "urban assault vehicle" in "Stripes"!). Check out the slide show of ROVER's construction and development here.

According to an article in this morning's Los Angeles Times, ROVER is about to hit the streets of Riverside County. It is going to basically be a fully-capable polling place on wheels, with eight of Riverside County's electronic voting machines. Riverside County is going to use this votemobile to make voting easier for those folks who live out in very remote reaches of Riverside County, as a quick look at a map of Southern California shows that Riverside geographically an enormous election jurisdiction.

First stop will be at the Morongo Band of Mission Indians' Cabazon reservation, and from there the votemobile will head to Hemet, Norco, Wildomar and Blythe. I've asked friends and family in Riverside County to see if they can check out the votemobile for us, and if we do get any photos or reports from them we'll let you know.

Apparently some other jurisdictions in Southern California have developed similar mobile voting platforms, and if any readers of Election Updates has any information about these programs --- especially how many people actually vote using these mobile voting platforms and the extent to which they are cost-effective (ROVER supposedly cost $173,000) methods of "convenience voting" --- please pass the information along.

The USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics (CSLP) and the Initiative and Referendum Intitute (IRI) at USC are sponsoring an pre-election event on November 1, 2005, at the USC Gould School of Law, called "Democracy on the Brink: The California Special Election." For those in Southern California, the event promises should be interesting as we get closer and closer to this special election.

Here's the program, which is available on the CSLP website.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY ON THE BRINK: THE CALIFORNIA SPECIAL ELECTION
November 1, 2005
USC Gould School of Law

Sponsored by USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics
and the Initiative and Referendum Institute at USC

As California faces its first special election in more than a decade -- an election designed to replace legislative lawmaking with ballot box governance -- CSLP and IRI host an event bringing together scholars, journalist, and practitioners to discuss what the election portends for California and democracy in America.


Schedule
9:00 a.m.
Welcome: Dean Matthew Spitzer (Dean, USC Gould School of Law)

9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
Panel 1 - "Ballot Box Governance: New Research on the Initiative Process"

Moderator: Dan Rodriguez (Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law)

John de Figueiredo (Professor of Strategy and Policy, UCLA Anderson School of Management) - Campaign Finance

Jonathan Katz (Professor of Political Science, Caltech) - Redistricting

Richard C. Seder (Education Policy Program Director with the USC California Policy Institute) - Education Finance

Joe Mathews (Staff writer, Los Angeles Times) - California Governors

11:00 - 12:30 p.m.
Panel 2 - "The Initiative Explosion: What It Means for State Government"

Moderator: Nick Goldberg (Op-Ed editor, Los Angeles Times)

R. Michael Alvarez (Professor of Political Science, Caltech; Associate Director, USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics)

Joel Fox (Co-Chair, Citizens to Save California; President, Small
Business Action Committee)

Elizabeth Garrett (Director of the USC-Caltech Center for the
Study of Law and Politics; Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public
Interest Law, Legal Ethics, Political Science, and Policy,
Planning, and Development, USC)

Kam Kuwata (Democratic Consultant)

Judy Muller (Political Reporter, ABC News; Assistant Professor,
Annenberg School for Communication, USC)

M. Dane Waters (Chairman and Founder of the Initiative and
Referendum Institute)

See you there!

There was a provocative paper published today in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, by Benjamin Forest, from the Department of Geography at Dartmouth College. The paper, called "The changing demographic, legal, and technological contexts of political representation" (abstract) focuses on three trends that Forest argues are making political representation a more challenging process than in the past:

1. Growing demographic complexity in America
   
2. Legal developments since the 1960s that have increased the number of groups those political rights are protected under the law.
   
3. The use of technology in the redistricting process, especially GIS technology, is allowing for increased precision in the development of electoral districts with certain political or geographic attributes.
   

There is much in this short PNAS paper that will be of interest to scholars of voting rights and the redistricting process. What really caught my eye was Forest's critique of the growing role of technology in the redistricting process, especially the use of GIS. Forest argues in late in his paper:

I believe that political parties have been the major benefactors of GIS technology. Parties have achieved unprecedented control over the outcome of elections by gaining the ability to create precise gerrymanders. Moreover, even where states have made a genuine attempt to expand the representation of interests in redistricting GIS, organizational and bureaucratic practices introduce severe constraints, so that the use of GIS in redistricting has the counterintuitive result of limiting, rather than expanding, access to political representation (pages 15334-15335).

Based on his argument, Forest concludes that "Limiting the use of redistricting GIS to professional nonpartisan commissions may be better than allowing a political free-for-all, where political parties have vastly more power, expertise, and resources than citizens groups" (page 15336).

Like I said earlier, provocative stuff. The argument revolves around discussion of two recent cases, Texas and Arizona. It hardly takes much political science knowledge to point out that neither of these cases should be considered "typical" redistricting examples --- Arizona's recent redistricting experience was conducted with a totally new process, and it is difficult to characterize what has happened with redistricting in Texas. But I'd say that before we follow Forest's advice, we might consider looking further at the impact of GIS technology on the redistricting process generally, and engage in some research to understand how these technologies can be used --- or possibly abused --- in election administration.

The vote in Iraq is over. What is interesting is that the media coverage and statements from the Iraq Election Commission contain an odd mix of language and terms that, unfortunately, also resemble the discussions that came out of the 2004 election in the United States.

The odd disconnect is that the vote was yesterday, and there are some preliminary results but no final election results yet. In fact, ballot boxes are only now being shipped to the election commission in Baghdad. (A quick sidenote: ABC has a nice picture of the ballot box that shows the two primary security features of paper voting worldwide. The first is that the ballot box is sealed Note the red seal on the top middle of the top box being carried. Second, the ballot boxes are clear, so while it is possible to stuff the ballot box, the stuffing is more likely to be observed.)

However, there are already claims of fraud--too many voters turned out in many provinces--which are leading the election officials to conduct an audit of the results. In fact, election officials themselves are suggesting there was fraud. Aljazeera.Net is reporting a statement from the Election Commission stating:

"Despite its intention to announce global preliminary results as soon as possible, it (the commission) needs several more days to complete this difficult and complex operation after finding that figures from most provinces were too high," said the commission's statement in an apparent reference to turnout levels.

When the audit is done, election officials will:

"choose urns [ballot boxes] at random and examine them again, in particular where the figures were too low or too high compared with the general average. "The commission will only announce results when they have been verified."

The Iraqi's also have their own exit poll scandal (although I don't know if they are having their own eruption in the bloggosphere to accompany it!). As Aljazeera reported:

While sources close to the electoral commission were quoted as saying that 55% of voters in Nineveh governorate had said "no" to the constitution, the secretary-general for the Iraqi Independent Front, Abd al-Razaq al-Jiburi, said more than 75% of voters had voted "no". "Figures from many polling stations suggest the percentage of those who have voted 'no' to the constitution ranges from 75% to 80%. "Observers and employees at the electoral commission provided these figures," al-Jiburi added. Asked why most observers expect Mosul to be crucial to the referendum's outcome, al-Jiburi said: ''It is true that Mosul is a decisive factor given that two governorates, Salaheddin and Anbar, have rejected the constitution - there is no room for controversy over their results. As for Mosul, if there is no fraud in the counting of the city's votes, the final outcome will be a 'no' for the constitution.''

In short, we promised the Iraqi's an American election, and we delivered!

As part of their ongoing "Pew Internet and American Life Project", Pew released a study today based on a telephone survey of 2001 adults on digital divide issues. The report found that 68% of American adults (137 million people) use the Internet, 32% (65 million) do not; those who do not use the Internet are still the elderly, those with less educational attainment, and are more likely to be African-American.

There are two results from this study worth further discussion. First (page 3 of the report):

"Fully 22% of Americans say that they have never used the internet or email and do not live in internet-connected households. These truly disconnected adults occupy essentially the same percentage of the population as in 2002, when 23% of American adults said they have never used the internet and do not live with anyone who has access. This group is overwhelmingly over the age of 65 and less educated than the rest of the population."

Of the non-users, 32% said they simply had no interest in being online.

Second, they break Internet access into three categories: those with no access, those with slow or sporatic access, and those who are wired. But what is very interesting about this is that they find that connection speed is the most significant predictor of what people do while connected (page 6). Perhaps not suprisingly, adults who are wired are more likely to do the things online that are easier to do with broadband access (access news and information, purchase products online, engage in online banking, etc). And of course it is worth noting that 11% of broadband users have created a blog (like us), while only 4% of dial-up users are blogging!

These results have some implications for the topics we have been discussing in recent weeks, from the use of new technologies for election administration, to voter education efforts over the Internet, and to the continuing discussion over Internet voting. One of the immediate issues that these digital divide data raise concerns efforts to use the Internet for voter and poll site worker education programs; clearly, if the non-connected or slowly-connected populations continue to stay of the current size (and continue to be concentrated in certain segments of society), strategies will need to be devised to insure that voter education efforts are in place for those who are not connected or who are connected via dial-up means.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) recently released the report "Connecting the Silos: Using Governance Models to Achieve Data Integration". The report received coverage recently in fcw.com, a government/IT media group. The article discusses the difficulties in governing complex information systems especially when multiple governments are involved. (Describes voter registration to a "T"!!) As the article notes:

Although technology is an integral part of the [data integration] challenge, the [NASCIO report] states how an initiative's governance or organizational structure can make or break an initiative. "Data integration will help state government more effectively make use of and deliver information and services within and across domains," Art Stephens, Pennsylvania’s former CIO and now the governor's deputy chief of staff, said in a press release. "This need crosses governmental levels, as well as domain, agency and organization boundaries,” Stephens added. “Establishing a clear governance model to achieve data integration across all domains is the best way to ensure that the transition is seamless and reliable."

Stephens is chairman of NASCIO's Interoperability and Integration Committee, which addresses issues related to public safety communications, spectrum management, data sharing and integration. The brief states that integration is about sharing information and attaining common business objectives across various agencies and jurisdictions. "Building a governance structure allows a stable process to be applied to unique integration requirements," according to the brief. "Furthermore, governance enables the consideration of integration initiatives across the full spectrum of stakeholder participants."

In short, addressing the problem of improving interoperability is a multi-stage process. Not only is it critical to address the interoperability question, something we have discussed in our report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government, but there is also the need to address the question of how an interoperable network will function over time and will actually share the data within legal other constraints.

This is an area where the EAC and NASED can play a critical role. In our IBM report, we note that the role of coordinating data exchanges is quite important. Today, there are many laws and regulatory constraints on sharing data and it may be helpful, at the outset, to determine how to align state laws so that data exchange can occur nationwide. Additionally, small pilot tests, where states develop some sort of informal or formal interstate reciprocity on data use, could also be helpful.