Category Archives: voting system vendors

PCEA research white papers

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration’s report is getting a lot of attention and praise following its release on Wednesday. One aspect of the report I want to highlight is the degree to which the Commission aimed to ground their findings in the best available research, academic and otherwise.  It renews my faith that it may be possible to build a field of election administration that is more technocratic than it currently is.

The report’s appendix, available through the supportthevoter.gov web site, is a valuable resource on the available research about each aspect of the commission’s charge.

I want to lift up an important subset of that appendix, which is a collection of white papers written by a collection of scholars, drawn from a variety of fields and perspectives, that summarized the large literatures that were relevant to the commission’s work.  A collection of those papers has been assembled in one place, on the VTP web site, so that others might have easy access to them.  Here are the authors and subjects:

Much of this research effort was assisted by the Democracy Fund, though of course, the research is all the work and opinions of the authors. Speaking personally, I greatly appreciate the support and encouragement of the Fund through these past few months.

EAC calls upon voting system testing labs and vendors to adopt conflict of interest and partisanship bias policies

The EAC released this statement last week, and here is one paragraph quoted from the statement:

Federally accredited test laboratories and certified voting machine systems play an important role in our nation’s elections and public confidence in those elections. In the interests of maintaining public trust in the integrity and fairness of the election process, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission strongly encourages testing laboratories and voting equipment manufacturers to adopt policies that prohibit the organization and its employees from engaging in activities that may create the appearance of a conflict of interest or partisan bias.

I wonder, if such policies had been adopted years ago, how might the debates about voting technology and election reform been different?

No doubt, these are good suggestions; vendors and testing labs should heed this advice.