[EL] Will the Bauer-Ginsberg Election Reform Commission Improve Our Dismal Election System?

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Michael McDonald <mmcdon at gmu.edu> wrote:

> 2. Federal grants to states to support on-line voter registration. This one
> seems like a no-brainer. On-line voter registration decreases costs of
> processing registration applications and increases the accuracy of the
> information by cutting out an office worker to transcribe paper
> applications. A number of Republican states have adopted it, with no hint
> of
> fraud.
>

I also think it's a no brainer, but one that needs to be done carefully and
thoughtfully. The past year saw at least two instances of online voter
registration implementations where they 1) asked for your name and
birthdate and then a driver's license number was used as an authenticating
data element to allow the change to go through; but 2) the DL number was a
SoundEx number which means you can easily compute it from the first two
elements. That is very poor practice and without controls against automated
registrations and other out-of-band protections (sending a postcard to
confirm an address change), this could have resulted in not just badness
but wholesale badness.

And with security, just like with financial auditing, it is definitely not
something where past results are a good indicator of future performance.

So, yes, but let's do it right. best, Joe


-- 
https://josephhall.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20130213/00d885d3/attachment.html>