It appears to be a slow news day on Election Day, though I did come across one somewhat disturbing story on a bogus election flier in Tarrant County, TX. It remains to be seen what the actual facts are of the story regarding who posted it.

NPR’s Day to Day reported today on why Americans vote on Tuesdays. Historian Mary Jo Klein and Jacob Soboroff (WhyTuesday.org) are interviewed and discuss how the 1845 law is outdated and has no bearing on our modern-day lives.
Why Tuesday website

Alas, youtube has everything, including an exchange over Justice Department Official Tanner’s comments about identification and older minority voters. To watch, click here.

Just got this off of the APSA wire. These folks do some neat work with voter files, voting technology, and voter turnout, and as a result, may be interested in people from the election reform field.

Leading political advertising firm working with Democratic and progressive groups is seeking a Targeting Analyst to join our team. MSHC Partners will allow you to put knowledge and research into practice in campaigns. We foster an environment of innovation to remain at the forefront of data driven political strategy. Duties include: Developing voter contact strategies. Developing micro-targeting models using advanced statistical analysis and data mining techniques. Selecting target universes for direct political communication using voter files and models of turnout, candidate support, persuadability, and issue support. Design, execution, and evaluation of field experiments. Requirements include: Post graduate degree in political science or other social sciences, including advanced training in statistics and research design. Knowledge of electoral behavior, political behavior, political psychology, and/or political communication are valuable. Experience working with voter files or other political databases. Proficiency in conducting statistical analysis in SPSS, Stata, SAS, R and/or other statistical software. This is a full-time position based out of our Washington, DC office with a competitive salary and generous benefits. Send resume and salary history to careers@mshcpartners.com. No phone calls. Equal opportunity employer.

There is an interesting story in the New York Times about the rapid growth in the number of college students taking advantage of study abroad programs. With more than 200,000 such students likely to be away during the 2008 elections, it raises the interesting question of how these students can be tapped into the voting process.

Obviously, this is something where the combination of Internet-facilitated registration — such as being done by the Overseas Vote Foundation’s new system — and Internet transmitted ballots, via email — can be helpful in promoting the voting process.

On the subject of overseas voting, I was in the Salt Lake County elections office last week, discussing absentee voting, and they told me that in 2004 they received military ballots back from soldiers in MARCH 2005 that were post-marked before the 2004 election. If you ever wonder why people support electronic ballot transmission, that would be one reason!

The EAC is looking for comments on the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. You can comment online by following the links on the EAC website

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There is a nice article on AlterNet that argues election vendors should be “sued like big tobacco.” One problem with this analogy is that Big Tobacco has long marketed a known dangerous product which has no identifiable benefits to the consumer. But let’s ignore that analogical problem; the essential argument is that election vendors knowingly sold defective products to states and localities, and should be sued for doing so.

I don’t know what the evidence is that they knowingly sold such products. There is an anecdote in the report about a production facility in the Philippines, and some other examples of vendors selling machines that had not been completely certified (does this constitute marketing a known defective product?).

The last sentence of the report is telling: But the overall push on this is to reclaim public control of public elections and the dangers associated with outsourcing of our elections to private companies for certain key election functions.

I think there is nothing wrong with holding election machine manufacturers to the same standards that we’d expect of any product manufacturer. This last sentence, though, seems to me to indicate a deeper motive: driving the manufacturers out of business and wrecking the industry.

I wonder what the alternative is going to be. I’ve attended a number of presentations about open source elections software, publicly created elections machinery, and the like, but these conversations always grind to a halt when you ask who will produce the machines, who will certify the software, and who will manage this process.

If someone is going to argue for an end to privately manufactured elections machines, then I hope they’ll also start to wrestle with the difficult next step: how will this be managed by state and local governments?

The EAC has issued Six Quick Start Management Guides for Election Officials. The reports can be downloaded from the EAC’s website.

The State of Delaware has developed a cool new system for finding polling places using Google Maps. The article about it and the website for seeing the system are at the link above.

There was an election audit summit that Mike blogged about. Joe Hall, a PHD candidate in IT at Berkeley posted his notes from it on his blog. It is pretty interesting. The posts at the end are interesting too, but only in an inside baseball sort of way!