Archive for February 2015

New 2014 data from Charles Stewart’s Survey of the Performance of American Elections is out, and it provides support for anecdotal evidence of voters’ continued embrace of alternatives to the traditional Election Day polling place.

Hamilton County, Ohio recently fired more than 100 pollworkers for poor performance in 2014 – with the vast majority dismissed for failing to cast a ballot of their own.

The Washington Post has a new piece looking at the push to establish local voting rights for legal non-citizens – a practice that exists in a handful of communities and has roots in recent history, even if its immediate future prospects (and current effects) are somewhat limited.

DC pollworker and election geek Sam Derheimer shares the details of a new data collection effort in the Nation’s Capital – a simple, straightforward project that promises to generate data to improve elections for voters and election officials alike.

Nebraska’s Unicameral Legislature may soon take up the issue of voter ID after a bill was reported out of committee yesterday. The proposal includes an interesting twist: a provision that allows voters to be “positively identified” using county voter registration documents.

MSNBC has a quick rundown on five states likely to debate voter ID in the near future. It’s an easy bet that the partisan cross fire on ID will open up in one or more of these state capitols very soon.

Oregon is once again proposing to use state databases to automatically register eligible but unregistered voters. Despite legislative misgivings, it isn’t clear that it has a partisan effect, but the implementation challenges are real.

New data from CQ Roll Call illuminates the sharp difference in the scope and pace of activity between Congress and state legislatures. While the figures are admittedly crude, they still reinforce the notion that on most issues, state legislatures are where it’s at.