Oregon could become the first state to implement automatic voter registration, Governing recently reported. Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown, currently in her second term, introduced a proposal in the state House last month that would allow Oregon to automatically register potential new voters when they apply for a driver's license. Read More

Progress on elections reform so far — even including President Barack Obama's announcement during the State of Union address that it would become a priority — has not inspired many to believe major change is on the horizon. But a cause that technologists have championed for years now — make voting easy — is now also a priority for the White House. TurboVote, a website built to help people register to vote, calls itself a "Netflix" for voting. Now the White House is talking as if it's looking to make that type of approach a federal standard. Read More

For all the chatter about how many Facebook likes or Twitter followers politicians have, I've never seen a news organization or website pay any attention to how many voters each Member of the House of Representatives has. It turns out that some Members are much more popular than others, based on their actual vote totals in 2012. Read More

The people involved in running American elections say it's sometimes surprising that the U.S. system is as well-regarded as it is. Elections officials in attendance at a Pew event earlier this week called for reforms to American elections because, as Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan observed, voting in one can be a wildly different experience for people in different counties or even different states.
Technologists might find this situation vaguely familiar. There's another system that asks large numbers of independent actors to all pass interchangeable atomic units of data back and forth in the service of rapid and accurate communication: The Internet. Read More

New Jersey Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno announced over the weekend that people displaced by Hurricane Sandy and unable to vote in their home districts should be considered "overseas voters" for the purposes of the election, allowing them to email or fax in a ballot application through a procedure based on one laid out by the Federal Voting Assistance Program.

But the procedure New Jersey elections officials were using was not designed to process such a volume of ballots, and the procedure they put in place was, by all accounts, barely designed at all. Halfway through election day, it appears that the state's effort to use technology to help people vote might do more harm than good.

In just a few days the long presidential election campaign will be over, and — hopefully — the deciding votes cast. But Election Day will for some mean polling places changed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, voter ID laws to comply with, potentially long lines to get to the voting booth and maybe even some unfamiliar decisions to make on the ballot.

There's an entire fleet of online tools to help voters through this process, whether they're dedicated to helping report problems at polling place or to get up to speed on where to vote and what to vote on. TechPresident has been compiling a list of election-day resources that we're ready to share. We think we got most of them but invite you to help by letting us know about any we've missed. We're also sharing an anyone-can-edit Google spreadsheet with the list we've found so far, and hope you can add to it.