Here in NoVA they have the official people sitting at the table, then party people sit behind them in chairs to record names of people coming to vote. They can't talk to the voters, but AFAIK, if they think there's a problem they can talk to the head of the precinct to complain.

They're our version of Jimmy Carter's election monitors. There doesn't have to be anything nefarious (and they can serve as a check on potential errors or issues with the poll workers).

E.g. http://www.vademocra...t/Voterprotection

As a volunteer, you will monitor a precinct to assure compliance with Virginia and federal voting laws. You do not need any prior election law experience; we will train you to properly utilize our materials developed by some of the leading election law practitioners in the country.

The program is also recruiting volunteers for the critical post election canvass. The outcome in close elections is ultimately determined after the polls close and your assistance is critical to ensure every ballot is counted correctly and fairly.

By utilizing your valuable skills and prior experiences, you will ensure the voices of all Virginians are heard and counted. All of the hard work done in preparation for Election Day is lost when votes are not counted, or our Commonwealth's election laws are violated. This is your opportunity to preserve the fragile freedoms that form the foundation of our great Commonwealth.

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.

http://www.balloon-j...ore-geekenfreude/

[...]

By contrast, as the Michael Scherer’s piece I quoted yesterday describes, the Democratic cyber-team spent 18 months just to build the essential infrastructure of a usable meta-database and developing the software tools that would allow the Obama team to exploit that information for use in different settings throughout the active campaigning season.

And then there’s this, by Steve Lohron the NYT’s Bits Blog:

Another truly important change was in the technology itself. “Cloud computing barely existed in 2008,” Mr. Slaby said.

This time, the Obama campaign’s data center was mainly Amazon Web Services, the leading supplier of cloud services. The campaign’s engineers built about 200 different programs that ran on the Amazon service including Dashboard, the remote calling tool, the campaign Web site, donation processing and data analytics applications.

Using mainly open-source software and the Amazon service, the Obama campaign could inexpensively write and tailor its own programs instead of using off-the-shelf commercial software.

“It let us attack and engineer our own approach to problems, and build solutions for an environment that moves so rapidly you can’t plan,” Mr. Slaby said. “It made a huge difference this time.”

[ETA: by contrast, the Romney development process, again, as reported by Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher [h/t commenter dmislev]:

To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm..

[But there were] a series of deployment blunders and network and system failures. While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet.

Part of the issue was Orca’s architecture. While 11 backend database servers had been provisioned for the system—probably running on virtual machines—the “mobile” piece of Orca was a Web application supported by a single Web server and a single application server. Rather than a set of servers in the cloud, “I believe all the servers were in Boston at the Garden or a data center nearby…]

Open source. Build it yourself. Don’t had over your wallet to a consultant and take (allegedly) turnkey delivery days or weeks before chequered flag goes down.

[...]

Amazon must be grinning from ear to ear now. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.