Honest Voting

This site makes me salivate, and not just because nerds and geeks are hot the lifeblood of our economy. In fact, it’s a lot of what this webpage here would be like in an ideal world, a world where all of my multiple personalities had doctorates, videocameras, terabytes of memory, and USB ports.

Caltech President David Baltimore and MIT President Charles Vest established this project in December 2000 “to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election.” Specific tasks of the project include:

• Evaluate the current state of reliability and uniformity of U.S. voting systems
• Establish uniform attributes and quantitative guidelines for performance and reliability of voting systems
• Propose specific uniform guidelines and requirements for reliable voting systems

At the top of the Voting Technology Project (VTP) page the reader can branch to specific category headings — Voting Technology, Election Audits, Election Management, Election Fraud, Threat Risk, and Convenience Voting — for working papers, reports, and conference listings in that general topic area.

Off to the left, you can delve into specifics by data type: types of publication, elections listed by year from 2004 to 2008, datasets, photos, testimony by project members and affiliates. Of course there’s a blog.

The VTP isn’t sitting on its hands. Co-director Michael Alvarez says that the VTP is conducting the evaluation of the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s 2004 Internet voting project (SERVE); the VTP shortly will have a website devoted to its research on Internet voting. Another co-director, Jonathan Katz, co-authored a well-known paper on the effect of voter identification laws on election turnout (referenced in an earlier post). Yet another co-director, Ted Selker, has made a name for himself not only as a VTP member but as director of MIT’s Context Aware Computing Lab and as director of Counter Intelligence, a forum discussing kitchens and domestic technology, lifestyles and supply changes as a result of technology.

Put the VTP into your blogroll if you’re interested in cutting-edge election technology information.

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