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

[Scarberry, Mark]

If Ginsberg represented Romney in the negotiations over the presidential debate formats, etc. (as was stated in an earlier post), then I wonder how much Republicans will trust him to represent their concerns on this commission. If I remember correctly, Candy Crowley was picked as a debate moderator despite her previously expressed negative views of the Romney-Ryan ticket, and she was not required to agree to follow the rules set up by the debate commission. That proved to be very harmful to the Romney campaign.

Mark

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 9:14 AM
To: Michael McDonald
Cc: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Will the Bauer-Ginsberg Election Reform Commission Improve Our Dismal Election System?


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