It's Friday, when I said we should check back in with what we've found out about the current state of play on voting methods in the states we chose. I looked at Florida, and I'm frankly overwhelmed -- their Division of Elections has a memo on voting system standards that says very little reassuring about security (but a whole lot about accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, which seems to be a large part of the drive toward touch-screen machines). Florida has a bunch of local organizations working on this(see the sidebar, with local organizations listed by state) and procurement appears to be done by the supervisor of elections in each county.
I'm not feeling all that much closer to finding something useful to do, much less something useful to do that Unfogged is a sensible means of organizing. Does anyone have any interesting results, or better ideas, or a pep talk?
So we've been talking about harnessing the massive brainpower and productive energy of the commentariat here to do something useful, rather than having pointless conniptions when we realize at the last moment that our country is legalizing torture. Under the assumption that such brainpower and energy exists, here's a plan for an Unfogged-sized project so that we can continue talking like idiots in our usual manner the rest of the time with less guilt. The underlying plan is not set in stone -- it's what came out of prior discussions that sounded practical and useful to me. Criticism welcome and almost certainly necessary; alternative ideas also welcome; but if it sounds good to you, the comments are for volunteering to do some work. (Note: No one who comments here should consider this a guilt-trip. There will be no looking askance at anyone uninterested in doing this in other threads, and assuming this takes off, we'll try to keep it confined to the comments to dedicated posts.)
Voting Machines Project:
(The following is the result of absolutely no focussed research. It is distinctly possible that someone else is already doing exactly this and just needs help. But I don't know offhand of anything filling precisely this niche.)
We've all read a million stories about horribly insecure voting machines; clearly something needs to be done about this globally. I read the stories when I come across them and am horrified, but I don't do anything because I have no idea where purchasing or procedural decisions about voting methods are made, or when they're being made. I know it's at the state level, but that's it. The goal of the project is to figure out who, in each state or locality, is responsible for making decisions about voting methods, and to pressure them (writing letters, getting in touch with journalists) to make those decisions correctly (correctly, from my perspective, means in a manner that incorporates a voter-verified paper trail that functions as the official ballot and is available to be recounted. Talk me out of this position if you think I'm wrong).
The first step is to get information organized about this. There are loads of people on the web covering the issue, but I haven't come across anything that would serve as the kind of reference I think is necessary. What I think is necessary is a wiki organized with a page for each state. That page would start with links to any press coverage or blogging about voting-methods-related issues in that state; from those links or other research, there would be a summary written of (1) what the current governing law in the state says about voting methods; (2) what person or organization within the state is responsible for making discretionary decisions about voting methods; (3) what the current and near future state of affairs is -- is the state testing new machines? Have they just bought? Are they making purchasing decisions? What do they have now? And the goal would be to identify soft spots where a state can be pressured away from an undesirable method, and toward something acceptable. We'd want to cross-reference the pages to pages relating to particular manufacturers and models -- I know that Diebold is the boogeyman here, but I don't know a thing about other manufacturers. And a link to the relevant federal law, HAVA.
We've got a couple of volunteers to do the wiki administration -- pdf and mrh both piped up. What I think we need now is people to take on responsibility for a state or set of states. Ideally, if you wanted to volunteer, you'd snag your home state, given that local knowledge is likely to be helpful. Practically, we have an oversupply of New Yorkers and no one that I know of from, e.g., Maine. So name your preferred state or states in the comments, and I'll keep a list of who's doing what. And come up with improvements to the plan -- this is my first shot at this, and I don't have any special attachment to doing it this way rather than any other.
Some sites that have useful voting machine-related information:
Black Box Voting
The Brad Blog
Rebecca Mercuri.
If you know of another good source, tell me and I'll add it to the post.
[Note: Even if we don't successfully create a useful reference source, if we find specific issues where we can exert some pressure, that was the point. So keep that final goal in mind.]