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.

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes.

[snip]

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

“We believe we’re catalyzing a re-birth of the industry … by making the blueprint available to anyone who wants to use it,” Miller said.

The foundation has elicited help from academics and election officials from eight states as well as voter advocacy groups, such as Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, to guide developers in building the system. Technology bigwigs such as Oracle, Sun and IBM have also approached the group to help with the project.

[snip]

The code currently available for download and review represents only a small part of the total code and includes parts of an online voter registration portal and tracking system, election management software and a vote tabulator. Prototype code for producing ballots has been completed and will be posted soon. Code for auditing is still being designed.

The voting firmware and tabulator program are built on a minimized Linux platform (a stripped down version of Sharp) and the election management components are built with Ruby on Rails.

The foundation already has California, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington interested in adopting the system and is in talks with 11 other states. Florida, which has been racked by voting machine problems since the 2000 presidential debacle, has also expressed interest, as has Georgia, which uses machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) statewide.

“Currently two vendors impact 80 percent of the vote” nationwide, Miller said, referring to Premier/Diebold and Election Systems & Software, which recently merged in a sale. But if all the states that have expressed interest in adopting the open source system follow through with implementing it, about 62 percent of the nation’s electorate would be voting on transparent, fully auditable machines he said.

The foundation is especially interested in getting a system that would be workable in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest and most complex election district with 4.3 million voters casting ballots in seven languages.

Miller passed along these clarifications to me about Zetter’s post (which he also posted as a comment on the Wired site):

[1] While we are aware through other elections officials that there are aspects of our work that both FL and GA are likely interested in (especially as to transparency). But to be sure, we have not had any formal chats with officials from either state WRT participating yet. We’re working on it. If Gregory mis-spoke at the event, we apologize and want to set that record straight.

[2] Its not quite right to suggest we are trained on L.A. County adopting our work… just yet. We are definitely interested in supporting the efforts of the VSAP (Voting Systems Assessment Project) in L.A. County; its a huge undertaking with some spot-on vision. And yes, we believe that the ballot ecosystem framework we’re developing (which really can ensure accuracy, trust, transparency and security) is in line with their vision. However, we do *not* have any “system” per-se that we want them to adopt. They need to complete their VSAP process first, and believe when they do, what will result is an alignment with many aspects of our framework. One key finding we expect them to make (and we’ll discuss this in detail on our blog shortly) is that the Federal Certification process is antiquated if not obsolete for the technology innovation required to restore trust in voting systems. That noted, one thing we didn’t say much about Wed evening (not the right audience, frankly), is that we have considerable design effort underway to create something that can help NIST/EAC re-think the certification process, by decoupling software into a device independent layer from the hardware used to cast and count ballots. We think this is essential, but that’s another discussion rat-hole.

This is an extremely important issue and we’ll stay on top of it. For our past coverage of electronic voting issues, including my video chat with Princeton professor (and Electronic Frontier Foundation board member) Ed Felten, who hacked a Diebold voting machine, check out our electronic voting and open source posts archive.

Ultimately, even if our voting systems become open source and secure, there’s still one question that remains: why do we vote on Tuesday?

Photo of (left to right) Dean Logan, Mitch Kapor, Heather Smith, Debra Bowen, Greg Miller by Luke Wooden via Wired.

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.

MIKE BLOOMBERG UNVEILS PLAN FOR AUTOMATIC VOTER REGISTRATION AND WEEKEND VOTING

The Mayor’s Plan, “Easy to Vote & Easy to Run” Will Also Eliminate Barriers that Discourage Residents from Voting and Will Reform New York’s Antiquated Ballot Access Laws

Mike Bloomberg announced his “Easy to Vote & Easy to Run” plan to transform the City’s election system over the next four years. The plan will make it easier for New Yorkers to participate in the democratic process by reforming New York’s antiquated ballot access laws to enable more candidates to run for office and give unaffiliated voters greater ability to participate in the democratic process, creating a New York City “Democracy Index” to assess the administration of elections in New York City, and urging Congress to pass laws that enable automatic registration of all eligible voters and to move Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend.

Since taking office in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg has been a vocal advocate for election reform. After the 2004 presidential election, the Mayor created the Election Modernization Task Force to provide guidance to the Board of Elections on new voting machine implementation, phone and internet voter assistance, poll worker training, and other issues. Many Task Force recommendations were incorporated into 2005 State legislation, ensuring the City received federal funds to comply with new voting machine regulations. Today’s announcement builds on the Mayor’s record of accomplishment.

“For far too long, our election system has been plagued with antiquated rules and procedures that effectively limit its fairness and effectiveness,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “This plan will enable more New Yorkers to engage in the democratic process by making it easier for them to run for office and easier for them to vote.”

Heather K. Gerken, the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, an election law expert, and an advocate for the modernization of our country’s antiquated election administration system, endorsed the Mayor’s plan. Professor Gerken is also the author of The Democracy Index, a blueprint for how the United States should spur improvements to its election system by using a ranking system, similar to that utilized by U.S. News & World Report to rank colleges, which would measure the ability of states to efficiently run elections against their peers.

“Mayor Bloomberg has taken the lead in improving New York City’s election system with this impressive new election reform plan,” said Professor Gerken. “A New York City Democracy Index will help the City identify problems before they happen and ensure that every New York voter can have confidence in the election system. This first-in-the-nation index is destined to become a national model for other localities and states, and perhaps even the federal government.”

Marc Morgenstern, Executive Director of Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign to empower and encourage every eligible 18-29 year-old in America to register and vote in local and national elections, also endorsed the Mayor’s plan. Since 2004, Declare Yourself has registered almost 4 million young people, contributing significantly to the turnout of 24 million young voters in the 2008 Presidential Election.

“Mayor Bloomberg’s plan will improve voter access, particularly for under-represented groups such as our young people,” said Mr. Morgenstern. “The Mayor’s creation of a democracy index and support for voter registration modernization can help move our election system into the 21st century and promote fuller participation in our democracy.”

Norman J. Ornstein, Co-Founder, Why Tuesday?, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization founded in 2005 to find solutions to increase voter turnout and participation in elections, praised the Mayor’s plan. Mr. Ornstein is also a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, serves as an election analyst for CBS News and writes a weekly column called “Congress Inside Out” for Roll Call newspaper.

“This set of reforms is a huge step forward to making the voting system work and revitalizing democracy in New York,” said Mr. Ornstein. “It should serve as a model for elections across the country.”

Key Elements of Mike’s “Easy to Vote & Easy to Run” Plan:

* Create a “Democracy Index” to Reform NYC’s Election System: The city’s “Democracy Index” will include metrics that assess the effectiveness of the election administration process, focusing on easily comprehensible and quantifiable performance outputs related to registration, voting and tabulation, rather than complicated policy inputs. For example, the index will measure how long voters must wait in line and how long it takes for voter registrations to be processed.

* Make 311 NYC’s Voting Hotline: Mayor Bloomberg will work with the City’s Board of Elections to enable 311 to field all election-related requests for information, including questions regarding poll site location, absentee ballots, and complaints about election administration or fraud.

* Support National Voter Registration Modernization: To boost voter turnout while making our election administration less costly and more efficient, Mayor Bloomberg will support the federal effort to automatically register all eligible voters, also known as “Voter Registration Modernization.” This important reform would save the Board of Elections time and money that it can then put towards preparing for Election Day.

* Support Federal Effort to Institute Weekend Voting: To make it easier for voters to exercise their right and to increase voter turnout, Mayor Bloomberg will call on Congress to pass the Weekend Voting Act, sponsored by Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin and Congressman Steve Israel of Long Island, which seeks to shift Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday and Sunday. In polls, one quarter of eligible voters who failed to vote blamed scheduling difficulties.

* Halve the Signature Requirement for the Petitioning Process: In order to make it easier for candidates to qualify for a spot on the ballot, the Mayor proposes changing State election law to halve the number of signatures required to the lesser of (a) 2.5% of the party voters in the district or (b) half of the current number required under State law.

* Streamline Ballot Access Requirements: After consulting with good government groups, the Mayor will propose State legislation that would significantly simplify and streamline petition requirements by eliminating the arcane, technical rules that currently exist. The legislation will set a higher threshold for disqualifying petitions and candidates, and streamline the process for correcting errors.

* Open Up Petitioning Process to Independent Voters: Independent voters represent nearly 20% of the electorate and are the fastest growing group of voters in the city. To enable them greater participation in the political process, the Mayor proposes changing state law to enable independent voters to gather and sign petitions for candidates that are members of a political party.

###

Mayor Bloomberg is no stranger to the inconveniences of voting. On Election Day 2008 the Mayor had to wait in a 40-minute long line to vote in his own precinct, saying to the Daily News “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never even seen a line outside the door at this polling place.”

For more information and to download the PDF of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan, visit mikebloomberg.com.

Photo of Mayor Bloomberg in line on Election Day 2008 via the NY Daily News.

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.

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.

The Washington Post summarizes the Pew report, and gives a brief history of the issue:

“These outmoded practices and procedures create a system that is susceptible to human error from start to finish,” the center said in a summary of its findings.

The Pew group suggests creating common standards for voter records to allow sharing of data, with the eventual goal of giving each citizen a single voter record that can be easily updated as they move around.

Calls for modernizing voter registration have arisen regularly in reaction to emotional election disputes. The 2000 presidential race resulted in a hard-fought recount battle that eventually ended in favor of Republican George W. Bush, prompting federal legislation revising vote-count procedures. Last year’s presidential race also included GOP criticisms of the tactics used by Acorn and other liberal groups that manage voter-registration drives.

The New York Times explains why the groups co-chairs decided to participate, and how they think this group will help the election reform movement:

The two chairmen of the Committee to Modernize Voter Registration — Trevor Potter, the general counsel for both of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaigns, and Marc Elias, who most recently was the lead lawyer for Senator Al Franken during the recent Minnesota recount — say their campaign experiences have persuaded them that the country needs to move toward a more automated registration system.

[snip]

The chairmen stressed that they had not worked out many of the details in a proposed overhaul of the registration system, which would likely bring more federal involvement to a system that is currently run largely by state and local governments. Mr. Elias added that, at this early stage, they were promoting themselves as a “resource for those on Capitol Hill” who would have to pass the legislation reworking the registration system.

How much would these eventual reforms cost? What would they look like? And who would benefit from the reboot? The Washington Times looks into those questions:

Neither [chairman] was ready to set a timetable for presenting Congress with draft legislation, and the two agreed that any attempt to get Congress to alter the electoral system is bound to face serious hurdles. But they also said they think carefully worded legislation can gain backing from key leaders on both sides of the aisle.

A system that automatically registers every eligible voter will give no party an obvious political edge, they said. And regularly updated lists based on federal data could ensure that elections officials have correct information on Election Day.

One outstanding question is cost. Doug Chapin, the director of Pew’s elections initiatives, said preliminary estimates suggest that a computerized system would be far less expensive then paper systems. But the upfront expense of an overhaul remains unclear, Mr. Chapin said.

Hat tip to Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog for providing links to these stories.

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.

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.

“We must have a system of error correction that is speedy enough so that people aren’t disenfranchised and the error is corrected,” Secretary Bowen said. “We need more consistent rules of residency for students. Some places are down right hostile about allowing students to vote, some are welcoming, but many are very hard on students.”

“There are huge barriers to over seas voters and our military. When I visited Iraq and Afghanistan I met with the voting official who is not elected but appointed to do the job. . .”

Bowen continued to describe an over 500 page manual that the military official must be familiar with because there are so many voting laws for each state he must know.

“If we’re disenfranchising people who are serving us it’s time for the states to voluntarily figure out one cohesive consistent way that it works.”

LA County Clerk Dean Logan told a story about a meeting he had with other election officials where it was asked if they could redesign the entire voter registration from if anyone would keep the original… none would.

Logan said they had 500,000 newly registered voters, and on the 15 day cut off for voter registration deadline California Counties had a Midnight Madness for people who had up to the last minute to register to vote.

“We had people coming in in their pajamas and it was packed! But the day after that cut off, we received 64,000 forms by people who missed the deadline. The next day 100,000 people sent in forms. We failed them administratively,” he admitted.

But, Mr. Goldman said that new technologies provide a “non-partisan solution to a non-partisan problem that we can all work to fix.”

Mr. Logan agreed believing

“despite this archaic system we are using technology better, allowing people to verify their information. But if you’re online and realize that you need to change your address or you need to correct it, then that’s where it stops, there is no way to update that.”

The panel agreed the system breakdown is targeted at registration itself. Everything that happens on the back end is relatively smooth, even Logan said that when it comes to provisional ballots 80-90% of them count and can be verified, but the breakdown happened in the registration process somewhere.

Secretary Bowen said the argument against a massive reorganization and standardization effort would be the constant “states rights” argument. But Bowen believes that registration difficulties that occur in places like Florida and Ohio do affect California in a substantial way. Everything from Universal Registration to Election Day Registration are all options on the table but neither are being considered at the federal level.

The Military and Overseas Voters Empowerment Act (“MOVE Act”) authored by Senator Chuck Shumer was approved by the US Senate

“after a Rules Committee survey last May showed that as many as one in four ballots cast by military voters went uncounted in last year’s presidential election,” Shumer’s office said.

Among other things, “the bill would require states to provide ballots electronically. Additionally, it beefs up the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) at the Department of Defense, which is the main source of election-related information and assistance for many members of the military. The legislation, S. 1415, also addresses problems the military and overseas voters face in registering to vote from outside the U.S. It would bar states from rejecting military ballots for lack of a “Notary” signature—a feat difficult to achieve in the bases of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Student VOTER Act was also re-introduced this session back in March. Late July will also bring the second hearing for the Student VOTER Act in the Committee on House Administration and will hopefully go into mark-up in September when it should also be in line for a floor vote.

Matthew Segal from the Student Association for Voter Empowerment told me via email that Majority Leader Steney Hoyer has been extremely supportive so he’s optimistic we can get the bill on the floor this year. If you missed it, former US Senate Leader Tom Daschle has been a fantastic public advocate on the Student VOTER Act, and Zoe Lofgren, who chairs the subcommittee on elections within the Committee on House administration has also now signed onto the bill, as has Susan Davis, who is another member of both the full committee and subcommittee.

Segal says

“their leadership will assist us in getting the bill marked up this September. We [also] hope that other youth organizations will join us in making this one of their principal legislative priorities for 2009 and 2010.”

As Bowen said, issues like Voting Rights aren’t as sexy as issues like Health Care, but the ability to register to vote, be able to vote, and have that vote counted as its cast is the foundation of our democracy. We should be able to count on all of those things.

Greetings to all of the election reformers in Pittsburgh at Netroots Nation 2009. I’m sorry we can’t be there with you like we were last year when I was on the grassroots video panel and we brought you vlogs Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and even Bob Barr. But it sounds like, from monitoring the #nn09 hashtag on Twitter, that there’s lots of great stuff going on, including talk about election reform. Even California Secretary of State (and election reformer and veteran of the Why Tuesday? vlog) Debra Bowen spoke to NN09 (pictured above) We can’t wait to hear all about it. Be sure to send us updates in case were missing anything. But we’re watching from afar!

Photo of CA SoS Bowen via sterno74 on Flickr.