Our recent book, “Evaluating Elections: A Handbook of Methods and Statistics” (written by Lonna Atkeson, Thad Hall, and myself), was the subject of an article in the current issue of The Canvass: States and Election Reform, from the NCSL.

Here’s an excerpts from their interview with Thad:

“We wrote this for a couple of audiences. We had election officials in mind,” says co-author Thad Hall. “We want them to understand that in some ways they’re already sitting on a wealth of information, and they can use this data to think in the future how they can make things work better.”

“We also wanted this to be thought of by legislators,” he continued. “The laws may be fine; lawmakers need to think about building up capacity at the state level to promote better training, or to provide localities with resources so they can evaluate existing data. Imagine if a legislature said, ‘We want our universities to help our jurisdictions evaluate their data.’”

Note that in the article there is also a link where those with an NCSL affiliation can get a 20% discount on the book!

I recently discussed ideas and materials from this book at the NIST/EAC Future of Voting Systems Symposium (February 26-28, 2013), and at the EAC’s Roundtable Discussion — Informing Change: A Review of Events and Issues of the 2012 Elections Cycle (January 9, 2013).