Posted on August 10, 2003

Civil Society

According to the Voting Technology Project, an initiative of the California Institute of Technology and MIT, antiquated election practices and technologies forced Massachusetts to discard more than 120,000 votes cast during statewide elections in 2000. With support from the Boston Foundation, the project recently released Voting in Massachusetts (50 pages, PDF), which offers twenty-four voting practices reforms, including the provision of same-day voter registration and adoption of electronic touch-screen voting machines (currently prohibited by state law). The city of Boston, for its part, has already implemented several of the suggested changes, and has announced plans to buy hundreds of new optical scanning machines to replace the older, lever machines.