Alan Dechert wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Alan Dechert <adechert@earthlink.net>
Date: Friday, June 6, 2003 10:14 am
Subject: Re: Major voting modernization proposal -- looking for lawyer
(s) to participate
To the academic lawyers interested in election law:
I am the project developer on a very large voting modernization
project.Our proposal has not received funding yet but it's looking
more likely every
day that it will. The current proposal is a recasting of the UC
Berkeleyproposal for the state of California that I co-authored
(dated 2 May 2001)
with Henry Brady, Political Science Professor and Director of
Berkeley'sSurvey Research Center and UC Data. We are now going
for a nationwide
study, bringing in researchers from several schools across the
county. We
also plan to employ some of the top election system consultants,
such as Roy
Saltman, author of the two best known books on election technology.
The current draft of the proposal can be found here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~adechert/proposal2.rtf
Note in particular the section about the Election Rules database.
We intend
to document every rule or procedure in place in all jurisdictions
in the
U.S. Attached to this database will be a "problem report"
database. This
is the part for which we need some lawyers.
For one thing, we'll need someone to take charge of the problem report
database. For now, I will call this person the PRO (Problem
Reports Owner).
The PRO will not normally enter problem reports but sh/e will
certainly able
to do so and probably will enter some from time to time. Mostly,
problemreports will come from researchers that notice some issue
needing attention
and resolution having to do with election law. The PRO will
review the
reports as they are entered and assign them to another lawyer.
Here's an example I just made up:
-------------------------------
Suppose a researcher notices some irregularities in the way
counties and
states purge deceased voters from the voter files. The county sends
election materials to a couple and the husband writes back and
says, "my
wife is deceased." What do the election people do? Remove the
deceasedvoter from the voter file without further checking? If
they have to verify
the death, how do they do that? HAVA now calls for a statewide
voter file.
What's the procedure?
The researcher would write up the issue and post it to the
database. The
PRO would review it and assign it. The lawyer to whom this
problem is
assigned would not necessarily be advocating any particular way of
handlingthe situation. Mainly, the lawyer would document in
detail how it is being
handling and what the law says about it in the various states and
counties.The lawyer would communicate with all relevant elections
people and
legislators (if necessary) to bring attention to the issue.
To minimize communication costs, I think [almost] all
communication should
be via email. I could see a single issue like this involving many
thousandsof emails over a course of several years. All of these
emails would be
indexed in the problem report database. How many issues like this are
there? Thousands? It's a massive undertaking. It needs to be
done, so
let's do it.
WHAT I'M ASKING YOU TO DO
----------------------------------
If you are interested, please read the proposal. Feel free to
call me with
any questions. Send me an email stating what you propose to do
and how much
time you can devote and how much compensation you expect in
return. This
can be brief. As the proposal goes through more iterations, we
may ask for
more detail. Let me know if you are interested in the lead
position (PRO),
or not. I would like to see at least a one year commitment. We
expect that
most of the work on the whole study will be completed within a
year, but the
Election Rules database will be on-going (at least 5 years).
FUNDING
----------------
I have strong indications from people in the know that HAVA money
should be
available in the fall to fund our work. There is also a good
chance for NSF
money and foundation money. We are looking to receive a modest
planninggrant very soon so that we can complete the proposal this
summer and the
project can begin full force in the fall. We are not doing this
work for
free, but we will employ volunteers as much as possible. Somewhat
arbitrarily, I have included 250,000 paid hrs for student
researchers for
the study. I ask for your help defining faculty hrs and
compensation. At
this point, we don't have a very good estimate of what it will
cost ($10
million guestimate) but the idea is that we grab as much of the
HAVA money
we can and get as much of the work done as we possibly can do. If
we do a
good job, we'll be able to get all the money we need to finish the
work.
QUALIFICATIONS
------------------------
Please notice that the general level of qualifications for
participants is
quite high. I am probably the least qualified but then I'm not
really doing
anything other than pulling the people together. I will be
updating the
proposal soon to include the fact that Berkeley economist Michael
Hanemannhas joined the team. You don't necessarily need to be one
of the top
experts at one of the top schools, but it wouldn't hurt. Mainly,
we want to
see some enthusiasm for the project and we want to see evidence
that you
understand the task at hand.
FURTHER READING
----------------------------
You might want to read these pages too for more background on the
project:
http://home.earthlink.net/~adechert/
http://home.earthlink.net/~adechert/votingstudydialog.txt
Alan Dechert 916-791-0456