E-voting Archives

OMB Watch founder Gary Bass, who has advocated for greater government accountability for almost three decades, is leaving next year to head the foundation of the Bauman family, he announced on Monday.

From his perch as executive director of OMB Watch, Bass has pushed for more public involvement in the regulatory process and greater disclosure of contracting data. It was OMB Watch, not the federal government, that started tracking all federal awards online in 2006. The organization's FedSpending.org, was the precursor to the government's USAspending.gov site, which now publishes all federal contracts.

Bass said he will leave by the fall of 2011 to serve as executive director of the Bauman Foundation. In 2008, the foundation's employees donated $117,500 to Democratic candidates, party groups and political action committees, according to OpenSecrets.org. More recently, the foundation has supported voter registration efforts.

The foundation's President Patricia Bauman, like Bass, has led initiatives to increase public access to government information, according to her profile on the website of the progressive group Catalist, where she is a board co-director.

"I remain intensely passionate about the organization and the issues it covers, and my commitment to government accountability and social justice will not fade when I step down as executive director next year," Bass said in a letter to acquaintances on Monday. "I have learned there comes a time when an organization's founder needs to move on in order to strengthen the very organization the founder loves."

OMB Watch has begun searching for a replacement and is inviting applications and recommendations from the public when the job notice becomes available.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is a big proponent of open source voting machines, which developers say are more secure and less buggy than the proprietary devices made by various manufacturers and in use nationwide. (Here's a helpful article published in IEEE Spectrum magazine explaining open source vs. closed source voting machines.) Bowen got another chance on Wednesday to plug open source voting when she spoke at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, saying it reduces time and costs.

She said as the Nov. 2 Election Day nears, officials in Los Angeles County will transcribe by hand 30,000 to 40,000 voter registration forms a day. The manual process creates mistakes as officials work to figure out if entries are, for example, people's middle names or surnames.

"Paying people to type data from a form is one of the silliest things we can do in 2010," Bowen complained.

Ari Schwartz, a longtime advocate for protecting privacy in the age of Web-based government, is leaving his post at the Center for Democracy and Technology to press for change from within the administration at the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

After working at the Washington civil liberties group for nearly 13 years, Schwartz on Monday announced that he has accepted an offer to become a NIST senior adviser for Internet policy. The move will allow him to continue examining issues related to identity management, cybersecurity and privacy, he said.

Recently, Schwartz helped CDT negotiate with the Office of Management and Budget to lift a decade-old rule banning federal websites from using Web-tracking tools and add constraints that would protect users' personal identities.

Schwartz will join the federal government on Aug. 30.

"I've always said that my position at CDT was my dream job. In fact, it exceeded any expectation I could have ever had. Mostly that is due to the great colleagues and mentors that I've had here. On the other hand, I have great admiration and respect for those in public service," he said in an e-mail. "I have been on the lookout for the right position in the federal government and I'm confident that this is it."

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag announced on Monday that the National Finance Center, which processes payroll for 675,000 federal employees, will start issuing electronic pay stubs as a default.

The idea, which will save taxpayers $4 million each year, came out of the SAVE Award, a contest for federal employees to submit ideas to cut red tape and save government money. Over three weeks in the fall, feds submitted more than 38,000 ideas, and the public voted on the best submissions. The winner got to meet the president and to see her idea included in the fiscal 2011 budget request.

Tim O'Reilly, the open source advocate who coined the phrase "Web 2.0," hailed the government's move toward electronic pay statements as a product of effective crowdsourcing. He Google-buzzed,

When you're a platform provider, you get more for less. Apple wrote 10 apps or so, but ended up with 150,000 because they built platform capabilities and enabled third party development. What's really cool is how this thinking is permeating the government.

O'Reilly has said that "the choice of defaults is probably the single biggest choice any developer makes." He cited photo-sharing application Flickr's decision to make public the default value for uploaded photos as an example of the sweeping impact defaults have on how applications are used.

An important lesson about defaults that the government might take home from Facebook--which changed default privacy settings in December without announcing them, sparking a backlash--is that it ought to make sure that federal employees are aware of the new changes and can opt out easily.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists flew to Capitol Hill last week to promote the Startup Visa Act, a bill that would amend immigration law to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to stay in the United States -- and create jobs here -- if they demonstrate funding from U.S.-based investors.

This wasn't just a stakeholders' party. So far, more than 780 voters have sent over 2,800 messages to their elected representatives through 2gov, a nifty tool that channels Tweets to Congress. And 95 percent are supporting the bill.

2gov taps into the viral nature of Twitter to bring as many voters as possible into the decision making process in government. Once users sign onto 2gov using their Twitter accounts and submit their online petition, their statements aren't just broadcast live on Twitter. An engine grabs the Tweet, verifies the identity and the constituency of the person who sent it, so that Tweets can be collated it into a report and delivered to the right elected representatives.

2gov's authentication process weeds out astroturfers -- people who have been paid to create online buzz and the illusion of a real grassroots movement. The term was coined from the brand of synthetic grass, if you were wondering.) David Binetti, the chief executive officer of Votizen, the company that developed 2gov, said he'd been trying to use the concept for USA.gov, the monolithic government information portal that he
co-founded in 2000, but the technology wasn't quite ready.

The tide has changed a lot since. To cast a wider net, 2gov will soon be integrated with Web sites such as Facebook. Plans to use phone text messaging to send out petitions are in the works. Binetti said he was pleasantly surprised by the level of civic participation: More than 90 percent of Tweeters had been legitimate voters. He expected more than half of users to be spammers. Why? More online users are realizing the need to take responsibility for political speech and ensure it gets through to the right channels.

"People want to have their voice heard, and they're realizing that more things get into the political discourse if they have some measure of authenticity," Binetti said.

Startup Visa made a trending topic last week, meaning that it was one of Twitter's most talked-about issues. (You can read more about the controversy the bill has invited here.)

An hour after an e-gathering of Startup Visa supporters was scheduled at noon on March 2 on Twitter, 5,000 people announced their presence by Tweeting with the #Startupvisa hashtag. Binetti jumped on the bandwagon. He Tweeted, "I support #Startupvisa and it's more important than Justin Bieber." (Justin Bieber, the 16-year-old pop star, is still trending; Startup Visa is not anymore.)

Nextgov has launched the Nextgov Awards, an inaugural program to recognize federal managers who have shepherded a program, policy or management practice that is not only innovative, but bold and brave.

Yes, we know, there are a lot of awards programs in government. But when we asked federal managers and industry executives what is missing, they told us unanimously: No awards recognize federal employees who took on risks -- personal, political and otherwise -- and boldly acted to see their idea to fruition. Or if their idea died, at least they took on entrenched bureaucratic interests in an attempt to make government better through the use of technology.

We invite you to visit our awards page to learn more and to nominate someone who fits the criteria. The technology isn't the reason for the award, but the bold idea must rely on it in some way. And we encourage you to tell us a story about the individuals you nominate. We want you to wow us because we know there are dozens of stories of federal employees trying to improve government and the lives of citizens, but they are up against big odds. Yet, they have acted bravely and with resolve to bring about change. We want to know about them, the drama they faced and the results they achieved. And, of course, the technology they used.

The winners of the Nextgov Awards will be honored at a luncheon at TechWeb's Gov 2.0 Expo in May. (Nextgov is a TechWeb partner for the event.) We'd love to see you there.

More to come.

Although there were some scattered reports of e-voting problems, looks like most concluded that the e-voting meltdown most feared did not happen:

E-voting '08: Problems, yes, but it could have been worse

And this from Tech Insider blogger Bob Charette from his other blog, The Risk Factor, who also cites the ComputerWorld article above:
No E-Voting Meltdown - Thankfully

VA sampling of news reports on problems with electronic voting:

Voting Obstacles in Va., Pa.
Scattered problems reported in historic U.S. vote
E-voting glitches hamper elections in seven states
Colorado Voting Machine Removed, Quarantined, After Vote Flips Multiple Times to McCain
E-voting problems reported early in battleground states
Optical Scanners Winning War of Voting Machines

Michigan Clerk Sees Problems With Electronic Voting Machines

Kenton County Problem with Electronic Voting Machine