The October 26 issue of Roll Call has an interesting story about bills pending in Congress to alter election law. The article does not discuss bills on Puerto Rico’s status, or gerrymandering, or public funding. Instead it talks about bills to alter voter registration and the voting process itself. The article focuses on a bill to require the states to let people register to vote on-line, and another bill to let overseas voters vote on-line.

The California Board of Common Cause met on October 24 and mulled over whether to make an endorsement either for or against the “top-two” ballot measure that will be on the California ballot in June 2010. But the group decided to postpone that decision until the spring of 2010, when the campaign for and against will be in full swing.

On October 21, the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, a non-profit corporation, announced that it has completed work on freely available open source technology for vote-counting machines. “Open source” means that the software programs would be publicly available, so that any programmer could review it for accuracy and reliability. The corporations that produce vote-counting machines generally keep their computer program a trade secret, which makes it difficult for outside experts to know how reliable it is and how it might be compromised by skillful hackers. See this story from Wired magazine.