Last weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in a policy discussion on election auditing in Alexandria, Virginia with academics across many disciplines, election administrators, activists, and policy makers. We spent over a day and half talking about election auditing and where it needed to head next and what technological advances we’d need to [...]
The Economist has an article this week on why people rig elections. The answer is, because it works really well. As the summary report of the key findings notes:
Using dirty tactics during elections helps politicians that are already in office. If they use illegal practices to win elections, they can expect to be in office [...]
There’s been a recent flurry of news regarding open source voting systems.
Last week, there was an event in LA where the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation discussed the release of some of their new open source voting system software. Here’s a story from Wired.
And here is a press release from Sequoia Voting Systems regarding [...]
There’s an interesting story in today’s Week in Review section titled “Why Russians Ignore Ballot Fraud.” Michael’s colleague Peter Ordeshook has written about election forensics with a focus on Russia, and may have additional thoughts on the article.
One point that readers might find interesting is the description of how a biostatistician found evidence of fraud [...]
Congress passed the MOVE Act yesterday, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act.
Just got this email from Rob Ritchie. Fair Vote is a great organization. I hope our readers can distribute this among qualified young people.
Tell a young person about our Democracy Fellowship program!
FairVote always has relied heavily on volunteer interns. We also have paid democracy fellowships in which participants earn a living wage while getting great [...]
Here is an interesting AP story, with photos,regarding the logistical difficulties the Afghans are encountering as they prepare the presidential runoff election.
The first release of the long awaited Voting Information Project, a partnership between the state and local election officials in Virginia, the Pew Center on the States, and Google, is up and running.
The site can be found here.
If you want to see how it compares to the old lookup page, go here. It’s a nice [...]
Thanks to Paul for the heads-up that the EAC has posted the pre-publication copy of this NAS final report on “Improving State Voter Registration Databases.” This report follows up on the Interim Report that was issued in 2008.
This was an enjoyable project to work on. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this [...]
Our own Michael Alvarez is a committee member. The pre-publication report can be found here: http://www.eac.gov/News/national-academy-of-sciences-releases-eac-funded-report-on-statewide-voter-registration-databases/base_view
This is the full report, but it appears that a better formatted version will be released soon.