Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), voting systems nationwide must be certified before they can be used. In response to concerns about the Election Assistance Commission’s program to sanction laboratories that perform this vital testing, the GAO recently undertook a review of the accreditation process, finding many effective procedures but also laying out a number of steps that could be taken to improve the overall system.
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While much of the country was focusing its attention on the national party conventions in late August, political scientists had an additional object of interest: the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. In this analysis, Election Reform Project staff summarize a range of relevant research presented at the conference and highlight a number of directions that future research is likely to take.
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