NEW YORK, NY – On Tuesday November 3rd, a minority of New Yorkers ventured to the polls to cast their ballots. There were more than a handful of elected posts up for grab, most notably Mayor, City Comptroller, Public Advocate and District Attorney. Much was at stake in these elections, not only in the City, but also in Virginia and New Jersey. Be it a weak economic outlook, increasing unemployment, health care, gun control, education, gay rights or a slew of other imperative issues, City voters by-and-large decided to stay quiet, stay home, and not vote. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

“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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy died late last night at the age of 77. I’ve pulled from today’s New York Times obituary the many instances over his career that Senator Kennedy fought for voting rights and pasted them below. For the complete article, click here.

• Mr. Kennedy left his mark on legislation concerning civil rights, health care, education, voting rights and labor. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at his death. But he was more than a legislator. He was a living legend whose presence ensured a crowd and whose hovering figure haunted many a president.

• He returned to the Senate in 1965, joining his brother Robert, who had won a seat from New York. Edward promptly entered a major fight, his first. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Voting Rights Act was up for consideration, and Mr. Kennedy tried to strengthen it with an amendment that would have outlawed poll taxes. He lost by only four votes, serving lasting notice on his colleagues that he was a rapidly maturing legislator who could prepare a good case and argue it effectively.

• Freed at last of the expectation that he should and would seek the White House, Mr. Kennedy devoted himself fully to his day job in the Senate. He led the fight for the 18-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft, deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, and the post-Watergate campaign finance legislation. He was deeply involved in renewals of the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing law of 1968.

• His most notable focus was civil rights, “still the unfinished business of America,” he often said. In 1982, he led a successful fight to defeat the Reagan administration’s effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act.

In recent years, Senator Kennedy stayed active on the issue of voting rights, working for the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act and issuing a strong opinion about voter ID.

The New York Times obituary ends with a quote by our very own board member, Norman J. Ornstein:

“He was a quintessential Kennedy, in the sense that he had all the warts as well as all the charisma and a lot of the strengths,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute. “If his father, Joe, had surveyed, from an early age up to the time of his death, all of his children, his sons in particular, and asked to rank them on talents, effectiveness, likelihood to have an impact on the world, Ted would have been a very poor fourth. Joe, John, Bobby … Ted.

“He was the survivor,” Mr. Ornstein continued. “He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he will end up by far being the most significant.”

Photo of Senator Kennedy by Stephen Crowley for The New York Times.

Sarah Burris wrote the following blog after attending the election reform panel at Netroots Nation 2009. Burris blogs at Future Majority and served as a reporter for Rock the Vote’s project Rock the Trail during the 2008 elections. She was a recipient of the Democracy for America scholarship to Netroots Nation in Austin, Texas in 2008.

One of the panels I attended at Netroots Nation was Repairing our Democracy: Voter Registration Modernization and other Solutions with speakers Secretary Debra Bowen California’s Secretary of State, Dean Logan the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County (the nation’s largest county), Jonah Goldman a national expert on voting and elections, and Justin Levitt counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. The panel was also moderated by Eric Marshall, campaign manager for the National Campaign for Fair Elections in the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s Voting Rights Project.

Highly knowledgeable experts on the panel seemed to develop the consensus that the system is broken. Read the rest of this entry »