The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting is next week in Washington, DC, September 1-4, 2005. For those interested in new research on election reform (and who are located in the Washington, DC area over what I’m sure will be a hot and humid Labor Day weekend!), there are some very interesting panels and papers slated for the conference.

One panel will take place on Friday, September 2, at the lovely hour of 8AM, in the Omni Shoreham (unfortunately, until the final conference program is issued we won’t know the exact location of the panel). This panel is “T-21: Mobilizing Voters at Home and Abroad: The Impact of Innovations in Voting Technology.” Papers will be presented by:

• Henry E. Brady (University of California, Berkeley): “Voting Systems and Voting Rights: Legal Arguments and Empirical Research Since Florida 2000 and Bush v. Gore”.
• Pippa Norris (Harvard University): “Rearranging the Deckchairs on the Titanic?: Evaluating the Initiatives for Voter Mobilization and Electoral Reform Introduced by the UK Electoral Commission”.
• R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech) and Thad E. Hall (University of Utah): “Lessons and Trends in E-Voting: Initiatives in the U.S. and Abroad”.
• Charles Stewart (MIT): “Measuring the Improvement (or Lack of Improvement) in Voting Since 2000 in the US.”

The panel will be chaired by Robert Pastor (American University).

Participants in this panel are some of the leading scholars studying election reform and voting technology, and this should be an interesting and informative panel to attend. As of today, we have received papers from Stewart and Norris, and will discuss those as we have time over the next few days … we, of course, are still struggling to finish our own paper, but we should have it done by the end of the week and will then discuss it at length here!