U.S. Elections Under a Microscope
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As the November presidential election nears, several groups are mobilizing to monitor the voting process -- including a group of observers from across the globe and over a thousand techies who will help evaluate voting machines. By Laila Weir.
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Foreign observers who watched election preparations in the United States have concluded that there's plenty of room for improvement. Among the changes they recommend: public financing of elections.
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November 6, 2004 â An  Open Source web based Survey tool is playing a key role in keeping track of voting irregularities in todayâs US Presidential Elections. PHPSurveyor (http://phpsurveyor.sourceforge.net), a PHP based online survey tool, is being used to gather data across the United States about all voting irregularities. In the first 10 hours of voting alone, over 13500 incidents had been recorded using the software. The tool was selected by the Verified Voting Foundation as part of their Election Incident Reporting System (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/eirs/) as one of three major system components â all of which are Open Source.    The Advokit tool provides a structure within which campaign leaders can match volunteers to tasks, and manage task completion. The MapServer tool displays clickable maps. PHPSurveyor is used to allow Verified Votingâs thousands of volunteers across the United States to enter voting irregularities and incidents online as the day progresses. Researchers can view the collected data in real time by mining down through a map of the US, viewing incidents at a Nationwide, Statewide, or County level.  PHPSurveyor developer Jason Cleeland said âIâm very excited that my tool is being used for a project of this scale and importance. Itâs an indication both of the success of Open Source as a development strategy, and itâs flexibility in allowing organizations to freely bend an existing project to new uses.â  âWhile PHPSurveyor is generally a tool for simple development and collection of survey responses online, the Verified Voting Foundations âTechWatchâ group of technologists have been able to integrate it with realtime reporting mechanisms that allow legal teams and press across the United States, and the world, to respond immediately to any problems in the Presidential elections as they occur.â  PHPSurveyor was first developed in 2003 by Jason Cleeland in response to his organisationâs need for a better way to run and record surveys. âPaper based surveys were effective, but required a large commitment in terms of staff resourcing,â Mr Cleeland said. âFor a non-profit organisation, finding the time for staff to perform the required data entry was a real problem. Yet at the same time, we had a constant need to run surveys of our members. Writing an online survey tool solved these problems. It eliminated the double-handling of the respondent completing the survey, and a data entry operator transferring that response to computerâ said Mr Cleeland. âInstead, the respondent completes the survey online, and the data is immediately available for review.â  From a relatively basic system, the tool quickly grew a wider feature set. âIt was the release of the software on Sourceforge as an Open Source GPL product that really broadened PHPSurveyors outlookâ said Mr Cleeland. âWithin a matter of weeks some IT developers from a public non-profit TV station in Dallas, Texas had started adding code and providing improvements. And since then, more ideas, suggestions, and improvements have flowed from all over the world on a constant and sometimes overwhelming basis.â  At the time of writing PHPSurveyor had collected over 23500 incident reports on the US Presidential election, with 13500 being entered in the 10 hours since voting commenced. âI expect that by the close of polls there will be around 30 to 35,000 entriesâ Mr Cleeland said, âand that by the time all the paper reports have also been collected the tool will have collected at least 40,000 responses. This is very exciting to watch â to see a tool that was intended to handle around 1000 survey responses, to one that can collect - in a very short time frame â over 40,000 indicates to me the benefits of opening source code to the world.â
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Political fires are still burning brightly ahead of this weekend's elections
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From taxes to the election, there's a whole lotta shakin' goin' on in Washington. A special report.
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Could differences in economic performance among states determine how the election shakes out? The answer is a definite maybe.
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Congress' investigative agency, responding to complaints from around the country, has begun to look into the Nov. 2 vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.
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Washington (Billboard) - While the race for the White House  draws most of the public's political attention between now and  Election Day, operatives of both parties and private-sector  industries will focus a good deal of effort on state races.
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With most states reporting massive new voter registrations and many political observers worrying about potential voter confusion and allegations of fraud on Nov.2, one organization has created a web-based tool to answer questions and provide information.
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A look at a number of states where poll monitors are massing for Tuesday's election. Authorities worry they could confuse or intimidate voters, particularly where races are close.
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Some demographics and details about how Americans felt about the 2004 presidential election.
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Administrators are hoping that the victor in this year's presidential election will win by a wide margin. A close race, they fear, will result in more charges of voter fraud and demands for recounts. Kim Zetter reports from Washington.
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Urged on by Democratic lawmakers, the Government Accountability Office plans to investigate the way votes were counted in the presidential election. The office cautions, however, that it is powerless to act if irregularities are found.
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As the primary season continues, observers of the electronic-voting scene ask whether it's possible to tally the ballots efficiently while restoring Americans' faith in the process. Random, mandatory audits of cast ballots show promise, but even after demonstrated successes, not everyone's on board.
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Problems loom for the presidential election including voting equipment changes that could delay the outcome past Nov. 2, a group of international observers said Tuesday in a report.
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Voters have plenty of resources to find out who&#39;s leading the latest polls, President Bush or Senator John Kerry, or which states are leaning blue or red.
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International election observers predicted problems with new rules and technology for Tuesday&#39;s US presidential election that were designed to avoid a repeat of Florida&#39;s counting fiasco four years ago.