Monday, January 18th, 2010
|
Nearly half a century has passed since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite enthusiasm for the 2008 campaign, USA voter turnout in 2009 was anemic, worse than most nations. In the spirit of Dr. King, we’re working to spark a national discussion about voting. (more…) |
Friday, January 15th, 2010
Our group was founded by personal acquaintances of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to honor the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, for which Dr. King fought for and won for all Americans.
Today, January 15th, is Dr. King’s birthday. But “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day,” a national holiday in the United States where government offices and many private businesses are closed, always falls on the third Monday in January, making a three-day weekend for the people of the United States. Other presidents’ birthdays, and Columbus Day, were also “moved” to make for three-day-weekends, and even Thanksgiving was moved by FDR to try and stimulate the economy.
Our question is this: if the birthday of one of our nation’s most famous election reformers can be moved to make for a three-day-weekend, why can’t Election Day be moved from the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, where it has been since 1845, to make voting more accessible in a country where voting ranks near the bottom of all countries in the world?
We don’t know the answer either. To find out why we vote on Tuesday, click here.
Join our movement to fix America’s broken voting system by following Why Tuesday? on Twitter.
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
|
We’re a non-partisan, nonprofit group working to increase participation in elections. Despite the excitement of the 2008 campaign, predictions of record voter turnout were too optimistic. In 2009, turnout was anemic. This video sums up who we are and what we do. It was produced for Current TV by John Carluccio. Follow us on Twitter for the latest from our team. |
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
In May, we brought you the story of how New York State was atwitter - in reality and online - about how best to ditch a vestigial organ of elections past: the lever voting machine. Today New York City is finally doing it, and not without further debate, David W. Chen reports this morning for the New York Times.
After years of delays and fierce lobbying, the city’s Board of Elections on Tuesday afternoon selected Election Systems and Software, an Omaha company, to provide new electronic voting machines in time for the September 2010 primary.
Voters will now be required to fill out paper ballots with ovals, similar to SAT exams, before feeding them into a fax-like scanner.
The change means that New York City will finally be in compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. That law was passed to avoid a repeat of the recount debacle in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, and to help disabled people vote.
For more on the switch, read the complete story here.
You can watch me watching others attempt to use the machines that led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 in this vlog. Hope you have a laugh.
Photo of NY lever voting machine via the schneider clan on Flickr.
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Please join me and these other awesome speakers Tuesday in NYC from 4-6PM for this event at Baruch College! I’ll be talking about how nonprofits can use online video like we did at Why Tuesday? - and more. No promises about how to interview President Obama, though. You can RSVP online here. Click the image above for a bigger version.
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Voter ID is a controversial topic that we’ve taken on here before. We even shot a vlog (watch the video) to see how long it would take to get a voter ID if you lived in California without a drivers license or car, and it wasn’t easy.
In a new paper for the Harvard Law and Policy Review, Why Tuesday? advisory board member Tova Wang and Frederic Schaffer say that the “everyone else is doing it” argument about voter ID is not quite true.
One of the claims made by advocates of Indiana-like voter identification laws is that other countries require identification to vote, so therefore the United States should too. “If ID cards threaten democracy, why does almost every democracy except us require them, and why are their elections conducted better than ours?” one prominent supporter has asked rhetorically. Senator Mitch McConnell, one of the major champions in Congress of strict voter identification laws, has used the same argument in pushing for such legislation. In the Supreme Court oral argument regarding Indiana’s law, Justice Alito queried, “If [impersonation fraud] is not a problem at all, how do you account for the fact that . . . many other countries around the world have voter ID requirements?”
The “everyone else is doing it” claim is exaggerated. While many countries require identification for voting, some do not. Countries that do not require identification include Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (with the exception of Northern Ireland). In Norway, Ireland, and the Netherlands, voters are required to present identification only if it is requested by a poll worker. In Switzerland, every registered voter is sent a registration card prior to an election, and if the voter brings her registration card to the polling place, no additional identification is needed.
To read their complete research paper in PDF form, download it here. Hat tip to Rick Hasen for bringing my attention to this article.
Related:
Latinos pledge opposition to proposed CA voter ID law
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
That’s me on the big screen (from Los Angeles) having an iChat about Why Tuesday? and American voter participation with Diana Laufenberg’s high school juniors (in Philadelphia) last week. You can read more about our chat, and how we met on Twitter, on Diana’s blog. Here’s a preview:
Last Tuesday (how fitting), Jacob iChatted in at the end of the school day to 60 juniors all jammed into my classroom. They spent the next 45 minutes trading ideas and questions about voting, civic motivations and US history. It was spectacular. When we debriefed on Thursday, many of the kids felt like this was a wonderful way to ‘have class’. A majority of hands went up when I asked if they would like me to try and arrange for other experts to iChat in. When I asked them what they liked about the iChat, they were most impressed that during their conversation with Jacob, he didn’t just talk *at* them. They genuinely felt like he was interested in their ideas and the process of sharing thoughts, rather than just hearing himself talk. (so good)
Be sure to follow me, Why Tuesday? and Diana on Twitter.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Last month, as I let you know in advance here, I participated in a panel at the 140 Characters Conference at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. The panel was called Hollywood Politics: The Making of a Twitter Cause Celeb and it was moderated by blogger Maegan Carberry.
We talked about how, in Maegan’s words, “Twitter has allowed real life celebrities and the newly created class of Twitter celebrities to participate in the political process.” My co-panelists were Variety Managing Editor Ted Johnson, Causecast director of strategic partnerships James Sutandyo and Participant Media’s Wendy Cohen.
I tried to stress how the work we do at Why Tuesday? towards increasing voter participation and turnout in elections goes hand-in-hand with technology like Twitter. Watch the complete panel discussion and read a recap some of my main points after the jump. (more…)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Greetings to those of you finding your way here by way of the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) at the Kodak Theatre, home of the Oscars and if you’re not new here, our video coverage of the 2007 CNN Democratic Debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in Los Angeles. I’m speaking today at 3:35PM PT on the panel Hollywood Politics: The Making of a Twitter Cause Celeb. My co-panelists are Wendy Cohen from Participant Media and Ted Johnson from Variety, and it’s being moderated by blogger Meagan Carberry.
First thing’s first, I hope you’re already interacting with me via Why Tuesday? on Twitter. If you’re not, please start now.
For those of you that have no idea what the #140conf is, here are some details:
At the #140conf events, we look at twitter as a platform and as a language we speak. Over time it will neither be the only platform nor the only language. #140conf is not an event about microblogging or the place where people share twitter “tips and techniques” but rather where we explore the effects of the emerging real-time Internet on Business.
The original scope of #140conf was to explore “the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and (maybe) Politics.” Over time the scope expanded to include Sports, Music, The Arts, Sciences and more. Given the location of #140conf:LA, this event will have a special focus on the use of twitter in the Entertainment Industry.
American voter participation ranks near the bottom of all countries in the world. Why Tuesday? was founded in 2005 to honor the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and make the state of America’s voting system an issue our elected officials cannot afford to avoid. In 2006, our co-founder Bill Wachtel started the Get Out The Why? contest, seizing on the emergence of YouTube in the political scene to put candidates and elected officials on the spot about election reform by asking them one simple question: why do we vote on Tuesday, smack in the middle of the work week?
That’s how I got involved with Why Tuesday?, and after meeting with Bill, we decided to go a step further and make Why Tuesday? not just a 501(c)3 that advocates a dialogue about election reform, but one that forces the issue by using social media. We put our heads together with Joe Trippi, who linked us up with the folks at Echo Ditto and Jim Brayton. On September 25th, 2007, we relaunched the website based around the Why Tuesday? Candidate Challenge. We set out to get every 2008 presidential candidate on the record, on video, about voting in America, and we did (including President Obama and Senator McCain).
From the moment we relaunched the site, Twitter was a part of our platform. At first we weren’t sure how to use it, but looking back, it provided a memorable scrapbook of the 2008 campaign and as Twitter developed, so did our use of it. I tweeted before and my interview with President Obama at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and from a horse-drawn carriage outside the ABC News debate in Manchester, New Hampshire.
As the campaign progressed, we joined forces with a major coalition of nonprofits and news organizations to be a part of the Twitter Vote Report, a tool designed specifically to find voting hot spots on Election Day. This complimented nicely our participation in Video Your Vote, on which we partnered with PBS and YouTube to create the largest library of polling place video ever. Every video was marked on a map, and the highlights were aired on PBS on Election Day. Perhaps this year, the two efforts can combine. One thing is for sure, there’s lots of room for improvement in our voting system, and coverage of it, and Twitter will certainly be a part.
Photo of the Kodak Theater via patrick kiteley on Flickr.
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
“Disruptive innovation” is what we need to fix America’s broken voting system, Mitch Kapor, the election reformer and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Lotus 1-2-3, said on Wednesday night in Los Angeles.
Kapor made his remarks at an event sponsored by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) at the home of Hollywood film producer Lawrence Bender. The event was intended to introduce the Hollywood audience to the OSDV’s Trust the Vote project and its mission, to “re-invent how America votes in a digital democracy.”
Kapor was joined on a panel by Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan and friends of Why Tuesday? OSDF co-founder Gregory Miller, Heather Smith from Rock the Vote and CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Kim Zetter covered the event for Wired Magazine, and said that the main piece of news to come from the event was that the OSDV’s open-source voting code, the type of “disruptive innovation” Kapor was talking about, is now ready for a transparent public review. (more…)
Why Tuesday? is a non-partisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2005 to find solutions to increase voter turnout and participation in elections.
