Attention, nerds

Timothy McNulty | July 2, 2009

For our data-obsessed friends and/or those interested in Pennsylvania's outrageous, 19th century-level bureaucracy:

The federal government issued Pa and four other states $2 million each to streamline statewide election data last year and now a study report is out looking at how it worked in last year's election.

The good news: the reporting of Pennsylvania election data was three times as good in 2008 as in 2006. The bad news: political pushback from the state's 67 counties kept the statewide data from being completely streamlined. From the report:

The strong tradition of political autonomy at the county
and municipal level determined by the decentralized
character of Pennsylvania's election data collection system
shifted grant program implementation almost exclusively
toward technology solutions and away from streamlining
and integrating the data collection process at state, county,
and precinct levels. In fact, the project team construed
any immediate process changes as politically unpalatable.
As the remaining phases of the program are completed,
the lessons learned during the 2008 data collection effort
will be applied to specific database enhancements to
simplify and streamline data collection efforts.

(Emphasis added.)

The full (60 page pdf) report is here and a press release from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is here.