Pito’s Election Reform and Government Technology links
This is one person’s idiosyncratic collection of links and articles and stuff that I found interesting, instructive, and possible worth your time if you too are interested in Election reform and the technology issues surrounding it.
Technology for Government Transparency
- Paper: “The Role of Information Asset Registers”. A standard from the UK for providing descriptive information for any government web site which provides some kind of data API. Unlike our Data.gov, which is centralized, this model puts the description of the datasets with the data.
- more to come
Recent Software Glitches
- (6/9/2009) “Voting System Adds Nearly 5,000 Ballots to Tally”
Not enough details here yet, but it seems like either a user error or a software glitch caused a major miscount. On the other hand, you can argue that the existing redundant checks led to the discovery of the error, so the ’system’ worked. - more to come…
Interesting Non Profits
- TrustTheVote.org: I am involved with these guys, who are part of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. They/we are working with officials in all the states to define requirements and determine a set of specifications of hardware and software to apply to all stages of the election process, from voter registration to vote casting, counting and tabulation.
- more to come
News and News Sources
- Newsletter: Daily Voting News. A service of VotersUnite.org, Daily Voting News is both a news site and an email newsletter that you can subscribe to. It’s a great way to keep up with voting and election news from around the country.
The Permanent Record
- The challenged Ballots from the 2008-2009 Minnesota election were all scanned and made available to the public, including fascinating notations indicating why they were challenged. If you want to see some of the crazy things that people write on ballots while voting this is a great resource.
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