If New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has his way Americans would be automatically registered to vote, they would be voting on the weekend, and it would be easier to gain access to the ballot if you wanted to run for office in New York City.

Today Mayor Bloomberg announced his “Easy to Vote & Easy to Run” election reform plan which includes an endorsement of Rep. Steve Israel and Sen. Herb Kohl’s Weekend Voting Act, a piece of legislation that we’ve talked a lot about here. The data-friendly mayor also wants to create a Democracy Index in New York City to help target, as he has done with the 3-1-1 system in New York City, problem voting areas throughout New York’s five boroughs.

Why Tuesday? board member Norman J. Ornstein is quoted in Mayor Bloomberg’s press release announcing his plan, saying “this set of reforms is a huge step forward to making the voting system work and revitalizing democracy in New York. It should serve as a model for elections across the country.” The Mayor’s complete press release is below. (more…)

Posted in Demcoracy Index, Election 2008, Election Reform, Mayor Bloomberg, New York, Why do we vote on Tuesday? | 3 Comments »

If you’ve ever used an ATM, chances are you’ve used a Diebold. If that name sounds familiar to you, you may remember that in April of 2008, I interviewed Ed Felten via Skype, the Princeton professor who was able to hack a Diebold voting machine, one of their other ventures. The AP reported last week that Diebold is selling it’s voting machine unit for millions of dollars to Election Systems & Software, giving them a pretty firm hold on the voting machine market in the US.

Diebold, based in North Canton, announced the sale of its Allen, Texas-based subsidiary Premier Election Solutions Inc. on Thursday and said it will get $5 million plus payments representing 70 percent of collections of the unit’s accounts receivable as of Aug. 31.

Diebold said it would disclose the additional payments at a later date.

Diebold expects to recognize a pretax loss on the deal in the range of $45 million to $55 million.

[snip]

Candice Hoke, an election law professor at Cleveland State University, said the sale raises questions about the consolidation of election services. “It’s a massive consolidation of voting-system vendors,” she said.

The increased size and influence of ES&S could make it harder for smaller, innovative companies to enter the market, she said. “The market power (of ES&S) will be so significant,” she said.

At the same time, Hoke said, ES&S’s growth could allow it to spend more on research to develop better voting machines.

We’ve followed closely stories about voting machines here. For the whole bunch of them, check out our electronic voting archive.

Photo of Diebold ATM via jeffwilcox on Flickr.

Posted in Electronic voting | 1 Comment »

In June, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, also known as the folks that give out the Oscars, created a stir by switching the number of nominees for best picture from five to 10. Would the show get longer? Would the movies nominated suffer in quality? Would there be documentaries included? Those were some of the questions that Hollywood insiders were wondering.

Us election reformers had a different set of questions on our minds: How would the votes be counted? How was the winner going to be picked now that the field was going to be so much larger?

Michael Cieply at the New York Times has the answer, announced this week by the Academy:

The best picture will now be chosen by a preferential voting system, rather than the single-choice voting used in other categories. In a statement, Tom Sherak, recently named president of the academy, said preferential voting will help choose the best picture candidate “with the strongest support of a majority of our electorate.”

In the single-choice system, voters pick their film and the one with the most votes wins. Oscar voters will now be expected to rank their best picture choices, one through 10. Without such ranking, the wider field of nominees raised the possibility that a film would win top honors though it was preferred by only a small plurality of voters.

A preferential voting system is also known as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), a system that has been pushed by our friends at FairVote and I think it’s fair to say Rob Ritchie, FairVote’s Executive Director, was pretty excited.

“It’s encouraging to see the Motion Picture Academy wisely adopt instant runoff voting,” said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonpartisan election reform organization that supports IRV. “It serves as another example of how IRV can not only improve how we pick our favorite movies, but how we can have more meaningful choices for leaders and representatives in our elections for public office.”

FairVote also reminds us that this isn’t the Academy’s first time using IRV, and they tell us a little bit about how IRV works:

Used by the Academy in Best Picture voting before 1945, which was the last time ten pictures were nominated, IRV is a system in which voters rank their preferences in order of choice. The nominee with the fewest votes is eliminated, and ballots cast for that film are moved to voter’s next choice among the remaining films. The process continues until one film has more than half the votes and is declared Best Picture of the Year.

For more about where and how IRV is used in election systems throughout the United States, read FairVote’s press release.

Photo via Media Decoder at the New York Times.

Posted in Election Reform, Instant Runoff Voting | Comments Off

Why Tuesday? board member Norman J. Ornstein is among members of the new Committee to Modernize Voter Registration, which was announced on Monday and received a good deal of media attention.

As part of the same announcement, our friends at The Pew Center on the States released a report called Bringing Elections into the 21st Century: Voter Registration Modernization, which focuses on problems with the current voter registration system and has recommendations from Pew on how to fix it. You can download Pew’s report here. Keep reading for a roundup of news coverage from the debut of the new group. (more…)

Posted in Election Reform, Registration | Comments Off