Slashdot Mirror
Verified Voting
Joe from the EFF writes "Verified Voting has just gone
live with a number of tools
for all you data-hungry election nerds out there. Amongst the goods:
an election
guide for geeks, a voter's
guide to
electronic voting, the Verifier database
of
county-by-county election information and the Election Incident
Reporting System (EIRS) which will be used on E-day by
attorneys and observers in the field to collect data about election
incidents called into the Election Protection
Coalition's
hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. The geek community is playing a particularly
active role in this year's eleciton via VV's TechWatch
program. However, we could still use the help of the slashdot
community, and all you have to do is click: We need to test the
resiliency of the Verifier database
and the EIRS
before the election.
While looking around for information on who/what I am voting for I came across SmartVoter which is run by the non-profit organization League of Women voters.
The site is put together nicely, and by entering your street and zip it prints out a full sample ballot of what you'll be voting on and where to vote. It's completely non-partisian and has a lot of information on each issue, with arguements for and against them.
If you're voting in either California or Ohio I'd definetly check it out before you go to the polls next week.
I'd comment on the links themselves but they're dead.
Even if you are voting contrary to your state majority, you should still vote.
Why?
Because you know they are going to count the popular vote anyway, and if once again a candidate wins the electoral college and the presidency, but loses the popular vote, it is that much more impetus to finally change that system.
Mike
[I'm the lead programmer for EIRS.]
The EIRS site seems to be holding up fine for me, with a surprisingly modest hardware investment.
Yes, there are a lot of things I would structure differently if I were coding this from scratch -- but that's not how the Real World operates. This site was developed primarily by a single developer (me) over a period of a few months. I didn't have the luxury of starting with a clean slate; I had to build on existing tools.
Furthermore, with no budget (because this is a non-profit) hardware is *always* difficult to come by. I would have liked to roll out a lot more machines, but it was not to be.
The current EIRS site is two web front ends talking to a single database machine. And it's currently quite usable for me, at least.
[Although I'm noticing that DNS seems to be very slow -- unfortunately that's out of my control.]
Feel free to disabuse me of my naivete. And check out https://voteprotect.org/?display=EIRMapNation while you're at it -- this is a real-time map being filled with incidents being reported at the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline (remember that number, if you need it on election day!). The core of EIRS is the ability to respond in real time to reported incidents and dispatch lawyers and technologists.
And, yes, the machines serving the hotlines are entirely distinct from the ones which slashdot is digilently trying to take down.
[
- Collect background and testing information from state & local election officials
- Compile and track election irregularity data before, during, and after election day
- Organize and manage teams of people and tasks
- Dispatch attorneys and technologists rapidly to resolve election day incidents at voting places
- Provide an on-line collaborative environment for rapid communication among advocates, attorneys, technologists, election officials, media professionals, and others
- Support subsequent research for election policy-making
Most of the features are for internal use. But the most visible public feature is the Real-time map of election incidents which is updated within seconds as incidents come into the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline. Reported incidents are acted on by our lawyer and techie volunteers, to correct those issues which can be corrected and prevent voters from being disenfranchised.[I'm the lead coder for EIRS, fwiw.]
[