Archive for February 2015

Danville, IL’s new election director is a 21-year old college student who will get his degree this spring. Still, he has embraced his new job and could be the harbinger of similar generational shifts across the profession.

Connecticut (the “Land of Steady Habits”) has a new habit of fighting about what to do about recent election problems. The Secretary of State says the state should appoint nonpartisan registrars – and the current partisan registrars (surprise!) don’t like it.

The EAC held its first meeting in four years yesterday – electing officers and doing some crucial business on voting system testing and certification. It’s a promising start and hopefully it bodes well for the agency’s future.

The idea of a federal constitutional right to vote is once again gathering steam, but Yale Law School’s Heather Gerken notes in a new paper that such a right would likely be even more difficult to enforce than it would be to enact.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver discusses why “sports nerds” are lucky to have so much high-quality “rich data” to analyze … which contrasts with what’s available to election geeks but offers the promise of a way forward.

MIT’s Charles Stewart describes the latest version of his Survey of the Performance of American Elections – an invaluable lens on voter experience across the nation.

Today’s news roundup includes updates on a number of recent blog subjects, including trouble in Hartford, voter ID in Nebraska, frustration in Mineral County and potential Congressional action on the state/federal proof-of-citizenship fight.

A federal appeals court ruled that Alabama’s runoff law – which provides for an election 42 days after the primary – violates the MOVE Act’s requirement of 45 days for military and overseas voters.

NPR’s Pam Fessler has another terrific story focusing on the choices election officials face – and the challenges those choices pose for vendors – as they consider acquiring new voting technology in the current buyers’ (actually “just looking”) market.

Johnson County’s Brian Newby is back with a new ElectionDiary post that muses on several proposed changes to elections in Kansas. He makes important observations about the need to think carefully about these changes, but notes he’ll make do regardless.