The last time I received my ‘Daily Voting News’ from John Gideon was April 23rd. John, a friend of Why Tuesday? who Barnett and I met at the Claim Democracy election reform conference in Washington D.C., passed away this week after a sudden illness. The photo above is of me and John at the conference in November 2007. Brad Friedman has details on Gideon’s passing.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen issued the following statement upon being informed of the news:

John Gideon was a tireless advocate who contributed greatly to the election integrity movement. President John Kennedy noted that “true democracy… will not condemn those whose devotion to principle leads them to unpopular courses, but will reward courage, respect honor, and ultimately recognize right.” John Gideon was courageously devoted to his democracy, and his strong voice will be echoed in the continued work of thousands of others. My deepest condolences go out to John’s family and his entire circle of friends.

His updates about the world of elections and election reform frequently made it onto this blog, and his dedication to making sure the United States voting system was the best it could be rubbed off on all of us here.

Posted in Election Reform, Friends of WT? | Comments Off

The New York Times editorialized today their desire for the Supreme Court to uphold Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the portion of the law that makes states with a history of discriminatory voting practices go through a series of checks before changing voting rules in those areas. The election of President Obama, they say, is not reason enough to peel back a law intended to expand and protect the franchise.

The election of the first African-American president last year was an undeniable sign of racial progress. But even that breakthrough cannot ensure that legislative districts will not be gerrymandered, voting rolls purged or election procedures modified at the state and local levels in ways that diminish the rights of minorities. For that, as Congress wisely recognized, we still need the Voting Rights Act.

We’ll stay on top of this. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on this today. We’ve shot a couple of tweets to Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic who will be at the White House tonight for President Obama’s prime time presser. He’s soliciting questions for the news conference. We submitted two, one about election reform generally, and the other about Section 5 of the VRA.

Previously in the NYT:
American Voting System STILL Broken
Voting Rights Act Scaled Back
Uphold the Voting Rights Act
Why Tuesday? NYT Op-Ed: Everyone’s Voting For The Weekend

Posted in Election administration, Election Reform, Existing laws, Voting Rights Act | Comments Off

For the 2008 United States presidential election, we teamed with YouTube and PBS to launch Video Your Vote, a program that intended to create the largest library of polling place Election Day video ever in order to help make voting as accessible, reliable and secure as possible (see the NYT article). It was a giant leap for the United States election community, where we can’t even register to vote online (except in Washington and Arizona). As we’ve discussed here before (see my video chat with Princeton professor Ed Felten), in Estonia, they’re already voting on the internet.

Now Google, YouTube’s parent company, is teaming up with some heavy hitters in India to bring vital election info to the people of India with their Lok Sabha Elections Center, the type of project that is much-needed here. I picked up this story via our advisory board member Tom Rossmeissl, who saw it on TechCrunch. (more…)

Posted in Election 2008, Election Reform, International elections, YouTube | Comments Off