If you accept that  open source in government is a good idea the next question is what to do about it.

As in any public policy initiative, the case needs to be made to the policy makers.  Unfortunately, they are often part of the problem as I noted earlier.   But each impediment to open source that I mentioned yesterday can be addressed and needs to be.

Second, there needs to be a broader initiative that includes more than a single unit of government.  The Champaign County Clerk’s office is unique in what we have done.  I could hardly expect our successes to be matched by individuals.  However, if more units of government were brought into a project, it will become doable.

Third, a coalition of governments needs to pick a project to begin working on.  One possibility is a project that would be smaller and less critical to establish a process to develop.  At the same time, governments need to identify those areas ripest for future development that are critical to their processes and which can enhance our services to citizens.

GOSCON is an organization that has been formed to begin the process of developing open source solutions for government.  I’ve wanted to go their conferences in the past, but our schedule for elections has gotten in the way.  This year their schedule meets up better with mine and I’m attending their conference in DC on November 5th.

It will be interesting to take the temperature of this movement and to see how their ideas can be of benefit to my office, the County, and maybe the state.  I’ll be writing about it when I return.

If I’m correct that open source software is such a winner for the government, why hasn’t it taken off?  There are a number of reasons, not all of them pretty.

Start with the deep pockets of government.  Government can spend money like no one else and rarely feels the pain when they misspend it.  In fact, misspending money often just results in an influx of more money with the suggestion made that not enough was allocated the first time.  Across the country you can bet that most bad software buys are followed by another bad software buy.

Follow that up with fear.  A little fear in this area is a good idea, because it prompts prudence and hopefully foresight.  But when it paralyzes, it’s to the disadvantage of the public.  Open source solutions present an ongoing fear for governments.  Instead of making a single decision about a software vendor, you end up making a series of decisions over many years.

Passing the buck is a favorite past time of today’s government officials.  Buying prepackaged software is part of that culture and links to fear.  When organizations develop software in house, even within an intergovernmental collaborative environment, they can be expected to be answerable for the performance of that software.  Much less so with a vendor or consultant. Once that decision is made to grant a single company the responsibility to develop a software solution, the government body is largely off the hook.  They take victory laps if it works well, but when it doesn’t work well, they practice their well worn fingerpointing.

I’m from Illinois, so perhaps corruption is more on my mind than most.  Nevertheless, software and consulting contracts are a ripe area for white collar patronage.  With ambiguous standards to meet to get a contract, and further ambiguity in meeting the terms, it can be easy to steer contracts to preferred individuals.

Looking just within their own organization, few local governments will find the programming talent to meet all their needs.  The best open source solutions are probably beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy governments.  If you’re not one of them, a prepackaged solution looks pretty attractive.

As a corollary, open source puts at least some strain on the organization’s resources.  And it often comes at the top.  If you’re a manager of a government unit, that often means that you’ll be spending more time shepherding a solution for your organization than if you had farmed it out.  That time may be precious or that manager might be lazy.

There are plenty of impediments.  But there are answers to all of them.  On the financial side, governments are broke and need to find cheaper solutions.  Fear, buck passing, talent, and time demands are problems answered with dynamic programming groups that share responsibility.  The benefits are so great that we have to find a way to work past the impediments.

It’s an unfortunate tendency in our current political climate for legislative initiatives to be viewed as an all or nothing proposition.  It’s delayed the passage of good legislation and probably caused the passage of imprudent legislation that lacks a broad consensus.

So it is with much in election reform.  It’s this climate that allows Rick Hasen to write of me “Don’t Modernize My Voting System” because I oppose a particular plan to do that.  Anyone who spent a week with me would know that I’m continually working to modernize.  For example, I was tracking voter turnout by time of the day six months before Heather Gerken suggests it in the Democracy Index.  Hasen doesn’t think that is any indication of my willingness to modernize.  There is only one litmus test for modernization.  It’s the Committee to Modernize.  Anything less is unacceptable.

Hasen and the Committee to Modernize will no doubt be disappointed with the halfhearted effort of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to modernize.  He has company, because Congressman Gregg Harper wasn’t particularly excited either.  Both sides ought to take a deep breath and adopt the modest changes necessary in HR 1719 to make it secure and safe.

HR 1719, as drafted, allows for currently registered voters to update their addresses on a secure website.  This is a modernization tool that I would welcome, as would many other election officials.  Implementing it for many jurisdictions would be a challenge within their current software packages.  In time, I have no doubt those could be worked out.

But there are plenty of concerns with HR 1719.  First, it’s less than apparent as to whether these updates would come with a mandate to verify information against driver’s license and social security databases.  It’s also unclear as to whether first time registrants would somehow be enabled to use the system.  Further, there is a mechanism within the law to have emails as a substitute for regular mail.  While this can provide some cost savings, its important that every address change be followed by a piece of regular mail to verify the legitimacy of the registration.  Finally, as drafted, the legislation appears to take out the confirmation process whereby election officials are able to remove voters from the registration rolls when attempts to send them regular mail fail and they do not vote in consecutive federal elections.

I’d be surprised if the drafter’s intent was to eliminate all regular mail and to eliminate the process to remove voters from the rolls.  If those issues can be eliminated, then the biggest barrier to this modernization is what to do about first time registrants, and what to do about registrants whose information cannot be verified.  These two issues can be resolved using the reforms enacted in states like Arizona and Kansas as a template.

As compared to the radical proposal put forward by the Committee to Modernize, the online registration updates as proposed in HR 1719 are proven and don’t change the “opt in” nature of our registration system.  It takes the best of what we have now, and improves it.  That’s what good election reform should be about.  Hopefully, both sides can get together and make this bill work.

We’ll keep this up to date as they come in.

http://www.champaigncountyclerk.com/elections/2010_primary_candidate_filings.html

Open source programming for government provides an opportunity for cost savings, greater efficiency and flexibility, and greatly enhanced services to the public.

Currently, government generally seeks IT solutions through vendors and consultants.  For example, the State Board of Elections has used Catalyst Consulting to design and implement our statewide voter registration file.  When Champaign County conducted a technology assessment in 2007, consultants recommended that the county move away from our custom applications and move instead toward “packaged software.”

I doubt that our consultants put a whole lot of study into open source solutions.  Rather, they looked at our own stand alone development abilities as they put together a strategy for Champaign County’s IT future.

If they had looked at open source, they would have found much that makes sense for government.

To begin, government is not in competition with anyone (or shouldn’t be).  Unlike the private sector, governments have no vested interest in denying cost effective solutions to others.  In fact, in many areas, government actually has an interest in intergovernmental cooperation.  For example, on a host of issues relating to property taxes, the data from Champaign County is valuable to other governments.  Additionally, the changes to that data made by other governments could be seamlessly provided to the County if the two organizations shared software.

Next, collaboration on software solutions can only lead to more productivity and efficiency.  This collaboration should be an ongoing process.  What often happens currently is that a few units of government identify a need and a vendor or consultant responds to that need.  The software developed hopefully meets that need at that time for those organizations.  However, we don’t live in a static environment.  Other needs arise, additional best practices are identified, and technologies change.  When circumstances change, packaged software solutions are often incapable of responding to them, either because of a lack of skill or finances or because companies want you to pay for a total upgrade rather than a modest change to your current system.

When you purchase a software solution, you’re taking a chance on whether the company you are working with is going to be around in a decade and whether they are still going to be able to meet your changing needs.  Open source eliminates this very real problem for local governments and replaces that problem with a dynamic process to improve every software solution by bringing the best in government together on an ongoing basis.

On the financial side, open source solutions will save money.  Even with a modest amount of collaboration, medium to large size governments will see savings.  The more who join in, the greater the savings.  For smaller units of government, it will be less about saving because many of them aren’t even looking for software solutions to some of the issues.  Instead, what it means is that these smaller units will be able to take advantage of efficiencies that were before only available to the largest units of government.

Additional millions in savings will be realized as hefty licensing fees go away.  Further, software vendors often force unnecessary yet expensive upgrades onto their clients with the very real threat that they’ll cease to service clients who don’t upgrade.  Governments pay for the upgrade and often pay for transitional training necessary to go to the next software version.

For citizens, open source solutions mean more responsiveness.   Currently, the needs and desires of the community are held hostage to the skills of a software vendor.  With open source, governments can go out and find the person with the necessary skills to implement what the community wants.  In fact, when governments fail, the citizens themselves can find the person.

Next week, I’ll write about the impediments that have prevented the benefits listed here from coming to fruition.

My work with relational databases goes back to 1991.  At that time, I primarily worked the political end of database management and programming.  When I became County Clerk, I brought those skills to the office.  Over time, we’ve developed a number of database applications that have allowed us to reduce staff while increasing our level of service to the public.

At this time, we have no proprietary software solutions in our office, except for the program that designs and counts our ballots and an add on for scanning, imaging, and OCRing  documents.  Our property tax program is designed and maintained by the County IT department and also serves the Treasurer’s office and the Supervisor of Assessments Office.  Our applications for voter registration, notaries, assumed business names, births, marriages and a variety of other items have been designed within our office.

There is no shortage of software vendors for government administration.  Many of the products are high quality, but my experience has been that most are overpriced and lack the flexibility that our organization desires.  We purchased a marriage license program in my first year as County Clerk that was serviceable, but doesn’t even come close to matching the efficiency of our current system.  I have examined a number of the voter registration programs that exist.  I saw only one that impressed me and its price tag was a million dollars, not including the ongoing maintenance and licensing costs.

We’ve developed a system in house that mirrors much of the best of what we’ve seen in other systems.  It’s paid for, no licensing fees, and it gives us additional flexibility and the ability to make modifications based on future needs.  We are currently making upgrades to the system thanks to a federal grant under the Election Administration Commission’s Data Collection Grant. While we will be compliant with the grant requirements by the end of the year, we anticipate continued development of our system until March of next year.  Because we develop using SQL Server for our data and Visual Studio for our front end, our software would not fall under the open source umbrella, but the benefits from the software are much like what you’d get in the open source environment.

Because our system is developed within our office, we can make modifications more quickly and at a lower cost than other systems.  As the federal government and states begin to look at more on line digital government solutions, the need to modify current software solutions will be even more important.

Going it alone, so to speak, is a challenge.  The dividends are substantial, but there is no doubt that it can be very time consuming in the short run.  It would be difficult to quantify the time I have put into software development, but it certainly is measured in the thousands of hours.  Few County Clerk Offices in the state or country have those types of resources available.

That’s the background that brings me to one of the more positive notes out of the Democracy Index (a book I’ve spent considerable time panning).  Gerken makes a call that is long overdue.  It is for open source solutions to government technology issues.

The preferred method for most governments to address their technology issues is to find a solution off the shelf or to pay a consultant to put together a solution or to do a hybrid of the two.  All are costly, and all are legendary for not delivering a product that is vibrant, dynamic and flexible.

Here in Champaign county we are seeing it in the criminal justice area.  We have paid millions for a software solution that already is showing its age and limitations.  We are having similar issues with our payroll system.

Both the criminal justice software and payroll software are functions that every county in America has to deal with.  It is incomprehensible to think that it couldn’t be done at a far lower cost (with likely better results) by collaboration among those counties in an open source environment.

Which brings us to open source software whereby the code for the program is available to all users and can be modified in a way that suits a particular organization.  Modifications to the original code are made available to all users.  There are no licensing fees and no impediments to developing the software to meet the changing needs of the organization.

My next posts will examine these questions.  What are the benefits to open source?  What are the factors that impede those solutions?  How do we make the way for open source solutions in the future?

Ken Blackwell has an oped in the Washington Times supporting the efforts to “modernize” our voter registration system.

I was struck by this line.

The Internal Revenue Service and state tax boards seem to know where to find us every year, yet the current voter registration system requires each of us to file a new registration form when we move or risk losing our vote.

Which was immediately contradicted by the results of this simple google search.  How about this headline.

IRS Seeks to Return $266 Million in Undeliverable Refunds And Economic Stimulus Payments to Taxpayers

The Internal Revenue Service is looking for taxpayers who are missing more than 279,000 economic stimulus checks totaling about $163 million and more than 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million that were returned by the U.S. Postal Service due to mailing address errors.

The proponents of modernization want you to believe that some computer program is going to magically eliminate problems in voter registration.  The exact opposite is true.  There will be more disenfranchisement and more chaos because a computer program is going to override the actions of voters.

There is little data provided by these proponents to support their view.  There is ample evidence of governments inability to handle the job that these proponents want to give them.

Just how long is too long to vote?  How many people don’t vote because of long lines?  How big is the problem of long lines?  Why do these lines occur?  What can be done about it?

Those are the unanswered questions from Heather Gerken’s Democracy Index.  She makes a good case for collecting better data about the problem, but never really delves into those questions, especially  the core question as to how long is too long?

The first problem is not really Gerken’s.  She cites the Cal-Tech MIT study which claims “According to the U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, 2.8 percent of the forty million registered voters who did not vote in 2000 stated that they did not vote because of problems with polling place operations such as lines, hours, or locations.” (Page 9 of the report)

Actually, this number is grossly inaccurate.  The actual number of non voting registered voters in 2000 was 18 million, not 40 million. The percentage of those citing the concerns about lines, hours, and locations was 2.6%.  That means that instead of 1.2 million voters, we are talking about less than half a million voters.  Additionally, within the CTMIT report, and subsequently in the Democracy Index, we see the statistic not accurately described.  For example, on page 13 of the Democracy Index the problem is stated thus “According to the 2000 U.S. Census, about one million registered voters said that they did not vote because polling lines were too long or polling hours were too short.”  What is left out here is the problem with inconvenient polling places, which accounts for some portion of the Census Bureau statistic.  More importantly, Gerken cites the CTMIT study, which does not cite the 2000 Census, but rather the U.S. Census Current Population Survey.

So there exists a document done by two of the finest research institutes in America, that was popularly cited in news articles at the time and now is resurrected in a book by a leading election reform lawyer that inflates the problem of lines at polling places by a factor of at least two, and probably more like a factor of three for self reported problems, and possibly by a factor of 4-5 if we accept the premise of the CTMIT report which states “Similar inflation of the responses might occur with the category “lines” because some people might just be complaining about the system.” (page 87)

So the extent of the problem with lines at polling places is largely unknown.  Gerken is correct here that better data collection is a good idea to determine just how big of a problem it is.  While Gerken likes polling place observation, I’d prefer something that relies less on observers.  In Champaign County we are going to try to create a voluntary method for voters to report on the length of time that it took them to vote.  Hopefully, after the primary, we’ll have better data to provide our voters about this issue.

Of course, we don’t want any lines.  But we get them anyway, despite our best efforts.  So why do these lines occur?  From my observations, conversations and reading, this question seems to be resolved in the minds of most policy makers and voters.  Election officials understand it to be far more complicated and nuanced.  Here again, data will be of great utility.  In no particular order these are the reasons I have seen for long lines: too few judges, not enough polling booths, untrained judges, slow judges, and disorganized polling places.

Of these problems, the one most cited by academics seems to be the number of booths followed by “poorly trained judges.”

The number of booths per voter to vote, be they DRE or optical scan, is the one statistic that is most easily obtained, and it would be valuable.  However, it is not necessarily determinative of problems.  After the last election, I called a county in another state that had a well publicized problem with lines at their polling place.  The election administrator was entirely flummoxed by the long line.  There were two precincts in a single polling place.  The number of voters per machine was essentially the same.  One had an extremely long line.  The other had no line.

The conventional way of discussing the problems of election judges is to talk of election judge or poll worker training.  What is left out, except by election officials, are the nuances to this issue.  The problems related to poll workers take many forms.

First, in Illinois, poll workers (election judges) are named by the political parties.  While our office trains them there is no mandate in Illinois Election Law that an election judge actually attend training.  And yes, we have had people (and their party leader) insist that they be allowed to work in the absence of training.

Second, training can only provide so much guidance.  We feel very good about the quality of our training.  We have scores of positive comments from judges, both after the training and then after they apply that training on election day.  But experience in elections, as in most facets of life, teaches us that training alone doesn’t make for a good worker.  Despite the best training, some people will make mistakes.  Some judges get flustered in the heat of the moment.  Some just don’t retain some details.  Some can become intimidated by voters or fellow judges.  Even a test after the training can’t accurately predict just which of our 600 judges are going to “get it” on election day.

Third, judges come with a variety of abilities.  I have found only one election administration analysis that discusses the issue of speed.  “Poll workers who check for registration must demonstrate their ability to find a name on the registration list as they would on the day of election in a reasonable time (for example, twenty seconds).”  (Page 3 of Immediate Steps to Avoid Lost Votes in the 2004 Presidential Election) Most analysis leaves out this important element that we all have experienced while shopping, driving, etc.  If one person takes one minute to check in a voter while another takes 30 seconds it will often result in lines.

The problems above are almost unknowable for election officials until election day itself.  It’s largely unpredictable who is going to perform well and who won’t.

Of course, even if we knew that a judge would be subpar, the question is what we would do about it.  The answer is that we probably would still assign them.  A slow judge is better than no judge and when you are short, you do the best you can.  Obviously judges who have demonstrated either an intolerable level of inaccuracy or disregard for proper election procedures have to be replaced regardless.

One suggestion provided by some analyses is to have extra judges at busier times.  In fact, Gerken suggests in her book that Maryland used their excellent data about the peak voter turnout periods to assign more judges during peak periods.  I talked to the Board of Elections in Maryland and they don’t actually do that, and I’m guessing that few, if any, states do.  Election administrative analyses are littered with similar ill informed cheap shots.  For example, the report “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections”, popularly known as the Carter Baker report, makes this remarkably absurd statement.  “Fast-food chains hire extra workers at lunchtime, but it apparently did not occur to election officials to hire more workers at the times when most people vote.” (Page 56)  Just two pages before within the VERY SAME report, these same analysts say that we were 500,000 judges short in the 2004 election.

With shortages in judges already, it’s hard to imagine that anyone has the ability to hire peak judges.  Even if the ability was there in terms of volunteers, the next question is whether the law would allow it.  In Illinois, a strict reading of the law would find it illegal, although I can make a case for its legality.  This idea is worth a further look, but be careful of the unintended consequences of such a program.  Such a program might increase judge staffing at peak times but at the expense of judges during the other periods of the day.

Another factor in lines is the layout of the polling place.  Not enough attention is paid to this.  Sometimes we are forced into locations that have a tough time working with a large number of voters at once.  One of our longstanding goals, which has fallen victim to limited resources, is to map out all of our locations to make sure we’re able to move people in the best way through the process.  Sometimes something as simple as adding or moving a couple of tables can improve the process at a polling place.

Of course, the biggest factor in making a polling place run smoothly is to recruit more judges.  Doing this requires an increase in pay to allow people to take an unpaid day from work.  It also involves keeping the job simpler.  The biggest frustration we have in keeping our current judges is that the job becomes so complicated that it elevates the stress level.  Simplification of the rules would do a lot to reducing lines and keeping good judges.  The trend, unfortunately, is not toward simplification, but rather toward even more complication.

While election officials do their best to predict lines and staff appropriately, there is no telling when people are going to actually show up.  No polling place in the country is prepared to have every voter show up when the doors open.  We have always known that there is a rush early in the morning and then again after work.  In 2008 we first started tracking how many people had voted at various times during the day.  Our data is incomplete, but you can see it here.  What we found in the 2008 election is that it did not match any of our previous experiences.  Of those precincts reporting, 60% of the voters cast a ballot by noon.  Just 9% cast a ballot after 5pm.  We had reports of up to 100 people waiting in line at 6:00 a.m. when the polls open. Obviously, no amount of training or equipment could make that line go away in the first couple hours.

Our experience was not unique.  Fortunately, one state has extraordinarily accurate information about turnout from the November 2008.  Maryland uses electronic poll books in every precinct.  Because of that, they know the exact time that voters checked in to vote.  Their analysis is like ours and demonstrates that an unusually high number of people showed up to vote in the early hours of voting on election day.

The last question is just what is too long to wait.  Our experience tells us that it differs from voter to voter.  I’ve talked to voters who didn’t think that an hour was too long.  I’ve had people who came to our office and early voted and complained because the wait was 10 minutes.  There is remarkably little information about this that I’ve been able to find.  Before we go too much further in finding solutions to a problem that is overstated already, it is important that election officials have a true target to shoot for.  When officials actually get that number, I think you can expect those officials to take positive steps to achieve it.

I’ve already written about localism and partisanship, the two reasons that Heather Gerken identifies as barriers to good election administration.  As I stated, election administration is no different than any other area of government when it comes to those two issues.  But a few other issues also need to be addressed and the failure of election reform people to address them will be a failure to truly reform.

One of those issues is the actions of reformers themselves.  Gerken herself points to the problem at various points, but excuses it more than condemns.  To her credit, I quoted her after the last election.  “It confirmed my view that we should never attribute to partisanship that which can be adequately explained by inadequate resources.”  But in the Democracy Index she devotes dozens of pages to criticism of partisans and little but excuses to the reformers.  Samples from her book are quoted below.

Two points are interesting here.  First, Gerken’s book begins with an assessment of the problem, partisanship and localism, and then suggests that we start collecting data.  She is apparently not willing to wait for the data before making her assessments.

Second, just why do reformers need to “mischaracterize problems”.  Why are their opinions “necessarily atmospheric.”?  Why the “demonization”?  Are election administrators willing and often enthusiastic about sitting down to talk about how to improve the system?  Absolutely.  Is our enthusiasm curbed at times?  Yes.  How excited would you be to sit down with Gerken if she had written this broadside about you? “Because people can be deterred by long lines, you will want to reduce the number of polling places or voting machines in areas where your opponent’s supporters live.”  She decries the lack of data, but makes this serious charge without one piece of data to support it.

As Gerken says, data can be both a sword and shield.  But right now, election administrators are routinely fighting a host of reformers who run the gamut from ill-informed to maliciously lying.  In addition, those who are claiming to want data are also pushing ahead with reforms in the absence of data, leaving administrators wondering about the seriousness of the spoken desire of reformers for facts.   The tenor of the debate between reformers and administrators can improve today, with data or without.  I think the ball is in the reformers court.

Here are  a few snippets from the book.

“The problem with reform battles in a world without data is that we all end up acting too much like Lev Tolstoy’s coachmen.  When there’s no evidence to analyze, there’s not much left to do but shout.  We lack the information we need to be confident that we’ve correctly identified the problem and chosen the right solution.  We argue incessantly about which path election reform should take even though no one can even map where we are right now.” Page 57

“Without comparative data on performance we cannot know whether, for instance, well-funded systems tend to succeed or whether the key is centralization, better training or nonpartisan administration.”  Page 64

Reformers “have to talk mostly in generalities,” boserves Jonah Goldman of the national Campaign for Fair Elections, because the underlying policy debates seem so “dull”.
Page 67

“as jonah goldman points out, debates about paper trails have become salient in large part because reformers came up with a simple metaphor for capturing the problem: if we can get a receipt for an ATM, why cant’ touch screen vote machines generate a paper trail?  That frame drives some experts crazy because they think it fundamentally mischaracterizes the problem.  But it’s certainly driven policymaking, confirming physicist G.C. Lichtenberg’s observation that “a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.”  page 79

While top policymakers may be reluctant to hold election officials accountable based on the necessarily atmospheric opinions of reformers,…”   page 80

“While reformers and bureaucrats in other arenas don’t always get along, relations seem particularly strained in the elections context, a problem that may be partially traceable to the absence of data.” page 83

“ so reformers are tempted to overstate the problem or present solutions as silver bullets.” page 83

“Demonization is just too easy in a world without data.”  Page 115

“Do more, do better mantra that reformers must invoke in a world without data.”  Page 135

Proponents of automatic voter registration through various government agencies claim that by doing so, we’ll eliminate the problems that come with independent  groups doing voter registration efforts.  I see nothing in their proposal that could lead anyone to believe that.  Here’s a clip from the modernization website.

Too Much Control by Independent Groups

Our voter registration system leaves the door open to fraud sometimes committed by third-party organizations. By relying on third-party registration groups, election officials are forced to wade through multiple registration applications from the same person and – even worse – countless applications from people who don’t exist. Each election cycle, local officials spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing their best to administer this system, but the forms get in the way. Eliminating voter registration forms and streamlining the process will not only take a weight off the shoulders of election officials, but will also save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

The reality is that even with the so called “automatic” system, millions of voters in America are going to be in a situation months before the election where their voter registration is not up to date.  And the political campaigns, who are raising and spending billions to win elections, aren’t going to sit idly by while those people remain ineligible.

Proponents of automatic registration say it will include a provision for people to opt out of the system and remain off the voter registration rolls.  For the sake of discussion, in Canada, approximately 7% of people have not opted in.  Let’s say a comparable number of people decide to opt out, either willfully, out of ignorance, or perhaps because of a mistake by a government bureaucrat.  I believe that those multi-million dollar efforts to win elections are going to demand a mechanism to register those voters.

It is absurd to think that a law would be passed that would eliminate paper registration forms.  Further, I think it would be harmful to the system.  Third party registration efforts are one of the ways that our country mobilizes those who have previously checked out of our system.

For example, the number of registered voters in America from 1996 to 2002 fluctuated between 123 and 129 million.  It spiked to a record 142 million in 2004.   Proponents of an automatic system suggest that the so called modernization would have led to an even greater number of registered voters.  At the same time, it is highly likely that millions of people would still have opted out prior to the 2002 elections.

Then, as issues about the Iraq War, treatment of terrorist suspects, the Patriot Act, etc. started to capture the public’s attention, who exactly was to have reached out to those newly discontented millions who quietly expressed their contentment in 2002 by not registering.

Outlawing third party groups is one aspect of the “modernization” effort that might look attractive on paper to those who are concerned about groups like ACORN.  However, third party groups as well as the political parties will not likely forego active voter registration efforts and Congress is unlikely to pass any law that would outlaw them.  And those with a love for free speech, free associations, and a vigorous election process shouldn’t embrace any law that would outlaw their efforts.