Rock the Vote last month sent out about 600,000 emails to prospective voters regarding the possilbility of a draft. Now GOP Chairman Ed Gillespie has sent a cease and desist letter to try to get RTV to stop. You can read Gillespie's letter(pdf) as well as Rock the Vote's head Jehmu Greene's response(pdf).
posted by bitdamaged on Oct 25, 2004 - 22 comments

Remember "They booed the results of their vote. They were upset that they had voted for the 'wrong guy'"? Well, now our so-called third graders are all grown up. (via Kos)
posted by soyjoy on Sep 29, 2004 - 19 comments

2000 Election results ranked by avg statewide IQ. Shame on me for even posting this here in this slavering den of liberal fervor, but if it's true, it certainly is kinda fascinating.
posted by jonson on May 6, 2004 - 75 comments

factcheck.org -- a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.
posted by crunchland on Mar 28, 2004 - 11 comments

Are we using the worst voting procedure? "Voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices." Plurality voting, in which each voter selects one canidate, is vulnerable to a third party spoiler (Nader) or with many canidates can lead to the (near) election of a candidate most voters despise (le Pen). Some alternative voting systems include instant runoff where canidates are ranked by voters, a Borda count where voters assigns points to each canidate, or approval system where voters vote for as many canidates as they like. (via argmax.com)
posted by Quinn on Nov 5, 2002 - 63 comments

Making Rehnquist Proud Just like Rehnquist and his earlier political service, Jim Crow is still hard at work. "Tim Hutchinson and the Republican Party have claimed that they want to reach out to African-American voters, but when election time comes they have nothing to offer but intimidation and harassment," Cook said. "We ask Tim Hutchinson and his party to stop disenfranchising African-American voters and obstructing the democratic process."
posted by nofundy on Oct 25, 2002 - 15 comments

Patriotic Voting?
Granted, this is in Seattle, not New York, but here's the bit I found interesting: Voter participation is expected to jump all the way up to almost 35% because of what this article calls "patriotic fervor." Call me a cynic, but I can't help but think that when it comes to citizenship, most of us would still rather just chant 'USA! USA!' at a ball game. Comments?
posted by Gilbert on Sep 19, 2001 - 25 comments

ELECTION: A note of sanity on voting systems from Lauren Weinstein's well-worth reading Privacy Digest; it notes the inherent weak spots in all voting tally systems, and compares manual to machine and electronic ones.
posted by baylink on Nov 11, 2000 - 3 comments

A better way to select party candidates.
Instead of holding silly primaries that end up picking the worst possible candidates from each party, why not have party leaders pick the best 3-4 candidates and then have registered party members vote (by mail or at the convention) and announce the winner in August? [more inside]
posted by daveadams on Oct 27, 2000 - 6 comments

I hope all the Californians that are reading this today have voted. There's a great site at CalVoter.org that features a page listing all the top financial backers of the propositions. There are some curious contributors in there, like why are oil companies and public utilities behind the "try gang kids as adults and put them in real prisions" prop? There's a few dot com millionaires on the No on 22 campaign, and obviously a lot of tobacco companies want to see the cigarette tax repealed.
posted by mathowie on Mar 7, 2000 - 4 comments