In this post I would like to talk about an article on techPresident.com . It’s a political website which is nonpartisan. It is founded and created by Andrew Rasjej and Micah Sifry in 2007. Its aim was to monitor the United States Presidential Election of 2008. The site follows how the campains use the internet. Especially the social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.
The internet and technology are changing the democracy in the USA. In this post I will talk about the article ‘Thousands of People Have Used Remote-Controlled Pens Over The Internet To Register To Vote’ which was put online at Friday October 26 2012.
The 2012 election for the USA president is one never seen before. More than 100,000 people have signed and completed their voter-registration forms by using remote-controlled pens over the internet. The site GottaRegister.com is made available by The Obama Campain.
This is how it works: The system works by capturing the motion of an individual’s signature on a filled-out voter registration form online through a tablet device. Allpoint’s system transmits the captured data from the motion of the signature and sends that information over the internet to a pen, which then renders the individual’s signature in ink on a paper voter registration form in Allpoint’s offices in Oakland. The staff then mail those forms off to the relevant local elections boards within 72 hours. Allpoint uses federal voter registration forms, which all states are bound by law to accept. (source: http://techpresident.com/news/23051/2012-thousands-people-used-remote-controlled-pens-over-internet-register-vote )
The problem in the US with the elections is often the voter registration. For many people, it’s to much work to fill out papers, finding an envelope and stamp and then sending it to complete the registration. A report showed a quarter of the people in the US who are eligible to vote, were not registered. By offering this online service, the election parties could get much more votes.
The spokesman of the service (Allpoint Voter Services) is Jude Barry. He claims that Allpoint’s online system has an almost 84 percent completion rate. Other programs for voter registration had much lower completion rates, as news articles showed. (See http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/07/voter-registration-drives-adopting-new-sophisticated-methods/ for the news article)
Barry claimes the system is less labor intensive, more reliable and more efficient than volunteer-driven effort to register voters. It’s also cheaper than paid voter registration drives. With the service, they have established a national, mobile, online registration system. I wonder what this means for the election results. Just a few days and we will know.
My sources:
http://techpresident.com/news/23051/2012-thousands-people-used-remote-controlled-pens-over-internet-register-vote
https://www.gottaregister.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/07/voter-registration-drives-adopting-new-sophisticated-methods/
http://techpresident.com/news/21768/new-mobile-voter-registration-technology-could-bridge-online-offline-gap
http://www.pewstates.org/
For a short video of President Obama, promoting the site, go to:
