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 experience working in our national office. We are accepting applications right now for fellowships running from January to July 2010 and September 2010 to July 2011. Click here to share our job announcement with anyone you think might be interested in this great opportunity to make a difference.

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 effort, and better than many states, but the link to Google maps and the other information is far cleaner and efficient.

Nicely done!

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 NAS project was getting to work with election officials in Oregon and Washington on their 2008 interstate matching project, and to also then work with Jeff Jonas, William Winkler and Rebecca Wright on our research study about that project, “Interstate Voter Registration Database Matching: The Oregon-Washington 2008 Pilot Project. That paper was presented by Rebecca earlier this summer at EVT/WOTE ’09.

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.

The Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission released their report about their investigation of electoral fraud allegations in the recent Afghan presidential election. Their order is here. The first finding indicates the wide extent of the potential problems in the election: “the EEC has ordered the IEC to invalidate 210 polling stations around the country where the EEC found clear and convincing evidence of fraud.”

And here is what I believe is the EEC’s complete results of their investigation, polling place by polling place.

While I’ve not myself had a chance to work through any of this raw data yet, according to what is available from guardian.co.uk this implies that as many as a quarter of the votes might be invalidated.

We had a great discussion with various people in Estonia about the country’s voter registration system. In Estonia, when you turn 18, you are automatically registered to vote at your address at that time. In addition, the person obtains a national identification card that has both a photo identification component and a digital signature. The identification card can be used for a variety of reasons, including making banking transactions and wire transfers over a certain amount (Estonians never have had to write checks in modern times; their financial transactions are all done via wire transfer.) Then, every time a person moves, they notify the local government of their move and their registration is automatically updated. However, if a person does not update their status they are still registered at their previous address. Unlike in America, however, a person who moves still only can have one registration; there are no people registered in multiple states. It is interesting that the government there has a population registry that tracks births and deaths, one of the basic backbones needed for a voter registration system.

I had an interesting conversation this morning with some private sector auditors here in Estonia. One interesting part of the discussion was a bit of a hypothetical–how would they audit election day voting? The thing that was interesting was that the first thing they were concerned about was not the vote counting but was the election day polling place operations. Would the polls be private and without coercion? They also thought that hand counting ballots is a recipe for lots and lots of recounting since stacking and counting ballots is harder than it seems.

Here is the note Mike and I received from Kristjan:

The final number of e-votes is 104,415. I also received an approximate size of the electorate from the Electoral Commission. It slightly varies on a daily basis and it is larger than the electorate for national and EU elections – namely, in local elections also those can vote who live in Estonia with the permanent residential permit (i.e., russian minority mostly). So, the current size of the electorate is 1,094,326 voters, which means that about 9.5% of the electorate voted online.

BTW, he also noted that, given that local elections have about a 50% turnout, this means about 20% of voters will vote online.