Monday, October 16, 2006
Statewide voter registration systems need overhaul
There is a great extended interview in the MIT Technology Review this morning, where colleague Thad Hall discusses the problems with the existing technology in the US for statewide voter registration databases, and in which he talks about the future of these systems. A link to the story is on Election Updates.
Recently, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project hosted an interesting conference on voter registration and voter identification. There was a brief presentation at that conference by Stephen Ansolabehere (a political scientist at MIT), in which he noted that the new statewide voter registration databases would be "dynamite" for political campaigns --- and that they will open the doors for all sorts of new political communications strategies. Exactly how they will be used, of course, is not clear --- but given the highly competitive nature of American politics today, no doubt campaign managers and consultants are today devising new ways to use these developing databases. (Here's another link to Election Updates, where I briefly described Ansolabehere's presentation).
Recently, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project hosted an interesting conference on voter registration and voter identification. There was a brief presentation at that conference by Stephen Ansolabehere (a political scientist at MIT), in which he noted that the new statewide voter registration databases would be "dynamite" for political campaigns --- and that they will open the doors for all sorts of new political communications strategies. Exactly how they will be used, of course, is not clear --- but given the highly competitive nature of American politics today, no doubt campaign managers and consultants are today devising new ways to use these developing databases. (Here's another link to Election Updates, where I briefly described Ansolabehere's presentation).
// posted by Michael Alvarez @ 9:30 AM 
