The Machinery of Democracy: Voting Technology in November 2004, 23 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 553 (2005)

In general Election Day of 2004 proceeded surprisingly smoothly and although some problems were reported, by and large they were best characterized as “no big and lots of littles.” In the end, the margins of victory in most races during the 2004 election exceeded the margin of litigation, meaning the trouble that arose in many states would most likely not have changed the outcome. In the immediate aftermath of Election Day, however, a closer look at experiences around the country revealed widespread problems that, while immaterial to the outcome of the election, nonetheless indicate that much remains to be done in the field of election administration – especially with regard to voting technology. Such problems included tabulation for the ranked-choice voting temporarily halted due to the system being unprepared for the high voter turnout, glitches in ballot tabulators causing the machine to start counting backwards or under-counting, over-counting, ballot mix-ups causing voters to cast ballots in the wrong State House race, voting machines being down for hours due to an encoder problem., data transmission problems, possibly caused by human error, ballot counting machines breaking on Election Night, delaying the final. While the reviews were mixed and data on machine performance is still being gathered nationwide, it is nonetheless clear that Election Day 2004 did nothing to change the minds of those who previously had been strongly supporting or opposing the use of paperless voting technology. It is too early to know how machines of any stripes performed versus other systems. DREs have received special attention from many circles, mostly because of concerns over hacking, malicious code and ties between companies that produce the machines and political parties and candidates. Lost in the post-election focus on technological problems, however, is one aspect that dominated Election Day 2004: quite simply, the appearance of an electoral system simply overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to use it. Consequently, long lines, shortages and other turnout related problems were rampant on November 2. These apparent problems, as much as technology-specific concerns, suggest that election reform is shifting from a political and/or technological to a public administration issue – meaning that resource management and allocation issues are likely to achieve prominence alongside technology and policy in the election reform conversation in 2005 and beyond

Beyond the End of the Beginning

The chapters in this volume contain detailed analyses of election reform politics in eleven states from 2001 to 2003. Over this three-year period, the states and Congress passed legislation that was designed to address the many serious problems with election administration that came to light during the 2000 presidential election. Each of the case studies revealed important insights about how the individual states responded to the 2000 presidential election and the requirements and incentives of the HAVA. The common framework of nine key factors for analyzing reform politics enables us to compare the results of the individual studies and determine the extent to which each of the factors helps to account for the three major types of outcomes: leading major reform states, incremental change states, and late-developing reform states. Taken together, the findings provide the raw materials for developing general conclusions about policy adoption in the area of election law, and insights into the future of election reform

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: SCUBA-2 Data Reduction Methods and Gaussian Source Recovery Analysis

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Survey (GBS) was one of the first legacy surveys with the JCMT in Hawaii, mapping 47 deg2 of nearby (<500 pc) molecular clouds in dust continuum emission at 850 and 450 μm, as well as a more limited area in lines of various CO isotopologues. While molecular clouds and the material that forms stars have structures on many size scales, their larger-scale structures are difficult to observe reliably in the submillimeter regime using ground-based facilities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which three subsequent data reduction methods employed by the JCMT GBS accurately recover emission structures of various size scales, in particular, dense cores, which are the focus of many GBS science goals. With our current best data reduction procedure, we expect to recover 100% of structures with Gaussian σ sizes of ≤30'' and intensity peaks of at least five times the local noise for isolated peaks of emission. The measured sizes and peak fluxes of these compact structures are reliable (within 15% of the input values), but source recovery and reliability both decrease significantly for larger emission structures and fainter peaks. Additional factors such as source crowding have not been tested in our analysis. The most recent JCMT GBS data release includes pointing corrections, and we demonstrate that these tend to decrease the sizes and increase the peak intensities of compact sources in our data set, mostly at a low level (several percent), but occasionally with notable improvement

Sink or Swim: Ranked Choice Voting in the Minneapolis Mayoral Election

Rank choice voting is an inventive reform of elections that is being put to a high profile test the 2013 Minneapolis Mayoral race. Will it work as designed? When will we know the winner? Will most voters rank their second and third preferred candidates? Join elections expert Doug Chapin and Minneapolis City Clerk Casey Carl as they discuss the upcoming election. Professor Larry Jacobs will moderate.Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, UM