Greetings to those finding us by way of Personal Democracy Forum 2009. Our Executive Director Jacob Soboroff is speaking June 30th on the panel Online Video: Lessons from the Obama “Idea Factory” and 2008 Campaign. This video sums up who we are and what we do. It was produced for Current TV by John Carluccio and aired on TV and on Virgin America.
| Embed: | |
| URL: |
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.
April 29th, 2009
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
April 14th, 2009
It was just announced we’re nominated for what the New York Times calls “the Oscars of the Internet,” the Webby Awards! We’re nominated for Best Activism Website, but the Webby winners aren’t just the judge’s picks! Click here to vote for Why Tuesday? to win the Webby People’s Voice award. Read the rest of this entry »
April 6th, 2009
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. Read the rest of this entry »
March 30th, 2009
Check out the gift I got from my folks for my 26th birthday last week, a Votomatic punch-card voting machine from Palm Beach County that was used in the 2000 recount election!
This thing is now sitting in my living room as a reminder of the work we do every day at Why Tuesday? to make voting in America as reliable, accessible and secure as possible. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
If you come here often, you might remember that I checked out some of these very machines right around the time that HBO’s Recount ran last year.
March 23rd, 2009
Tuesday night President Obama will address the nation during a prime-time news conference. The folks at the Washington Times, the Nation and the Personal Democracy forum are giving all of us the opportunity to ask the President a question, so we submitted this one about fixing America’s broken voting system. Vote it up by clicking here!
March 19th, 2009
Props to friend of Why Tuesday? Steve Garfield, one of the first video bloggers ever, for asking Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick via vlog if he’d support weekend voting. And props to the Governor for responding to Steve. Read the rest of this entry »
March 18th, 2009
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, goes the expression. Well, according to the New York Times, the American voting system IS broken. So let’s fix it. For us here at Why Tuesday? it was an extreme pleasure to see an extra-long editorial making the case for election reform this morning.
In last year’s presidential election, as many as three million registered voters were not allowed to cast ballots and millions more chose not to because of extremely long lines and other frustrating obstacles. Ever since the 2000 election in Florida, the serious flaws in the voting system have been abundantly clear. More than eight years later, Congress must finally deliver on its promise of electoral reform.
At a hearing last week, the Senate Rules Committee released a report sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the sorry state of voting. It said that administrative barriers, such as error-filled voting lists or wrongful purges of voter rolls prevented as many as three million registered voters from casting ballots. Another two million to four million registered voters were discouraged from even trying to vote because of difficulty obtaining an absentee ballot, voter ID issues and other problems.
The bad news didn’t end there. According to the report, another nine million eligible voters tried to register but failed to because of a variety of hurdles, including missed deadlines or changes in residence.
[snip]
President Obama championed election reform when he was in the Senate, and Democrats, who have been far more committed to the cause than Republicans, now have healthy margins in both houses of Congress. Supporters of a more fair, efficient and inclusive system of voting should not let this moment slip away. The millions of registered voters who are being turned away deserve a lot better.
We know well that President Obama supports election reform. He said so to me in this vlog we shot with him in Iowa during the 2008 campaign.
The NYT editorial mainly advocates for universal voter registration, sort of like what we saw when we visited North Dakota on Election Day, and for more lenient voter ID laws. There’s no mention, however, of a problem that is routinely cited by Americans time after time in U.S. Census data: for many Americans, votin is simply inconvenient. In more than a handful of states, you can only vote on “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” Why Tuesday? Here’s the answer.
Previously in the NYT:
Voting Rights Act Scaled Back
Uphold the Voting Rights Act
Why Tuesday? New York Times Op-Ed: Everyone’s Voting For The Weekend
More voting news today:
LA Times: Conservatives invoke Obama in Voting Rights Act challenge
March 17th, 2009
I just got back from South by Southwest in Austin and found out some great news!
Why Tuesday? has been nominated for a “Golden Dot Award” by the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet!
The Golden Dot Awards recognize achievement in online politics. To be eligible, nominees must have used the Internet to try to influence the political process between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2008. We are nominated for Best Vlog for our work trying to find solutions to increase voter participation and turnout in our elections — and you can help us win!
Nominees must have campaigned, organized, created political media, or conducted advocacy online. The Golden Dot Awards are decided by a combination of the popular voter and a panel of judges. Winners will be announced on Thursday, April 16, and the winners will be honored at the 2009 Politics Online Conference (April 20 - 21). Read the rest of this entry »
March 14th, 2009
At the SXSW festival in Austin Texas, I talked earlier today with Lawrence Lessig of Change Congress about people’s faith in the American government. While we’re here, follow us on Twitter via @whytuesday. Watch my full interview with Lessig on NPR Soapbox .
March 14th, 2009
I’m down in Austin repping Why Tuesday? at SXSW (follow me @whytuesday on Twitter). Sitting in the What your Startup Can Learn from Barack Obama and Howard Dean panel. It features these cats, four of whom I met while on the campaign trail:
Jake Brewer, Internet Dir, Energy Action Coalition
Scott Goodstein, CEO, Revolution Messaging LLC
Mary Katharine Ham, Staff Writer, Weekly Standard
Clay Johnson, Dir of Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation
Michael Bassik, Chief Digital Officer, Air America Media
