Those Pesky Diebold Machines...

Recently, some stories have come up regarding the Diebold voting machines, this time favoring Senator Clinton against Senator Obama in the New Hampshire primary. While I believe there is a statistical rationale to being able to find wacky voting results (see Elections, U.S. Presidential, years 2000 and 2004), I did not believe that this was the case in New Hampshire. An excellent Salon Blog recently covered this topic before

I could get to it and quoted a just-completed study by two sociologists. They found that precincts that tended to use optical scan (Diebolds) were demographically different from those that did hand counts, and that was the reason for the differential between the candidates.

This is exactly what I suspected, and it only serves to prove the point that Americans have lost trust in one of our most fundamental systems--that which is supposed to ensure fair and honest elections. We need to be able to see the perils of an unbalanced voting system:

• Will our poorest precincts have lesser technology, more prone to error than the richer precincts around the country?


• Should there be a standard voting machine, so that no matter where any person might go, they'll be able to use the same machine that they're used to?


• Will standardization of back-up systems, to allow for a hand-count, for instance become the requirement of a voting machine?


• Should we work on an Internet-based voting system to maximize the number of people who vote?

Certainly that last one will be important in the future, but it will need to happen, provided the proper security is ensured. It might be at that point that we finally realize a true democracy in this country.

Technology in the World of Social Profit Organizations

If you're reading this, you've probably read my profile and see that I'm the Director, Information Systems at GMHC, which is a charitable organization. I do not like the sobriquets of "charitable" organization or "non-profit", because essentially, we are neither. We do not provide charity nor do we work for nothing. I prefer to tell people that I work in the Social-Profit sector. GMHC, and other organizations like ours generate a great deal of social profit; not only do our immediate clients benefit, but society in general most definitely profits from our work.

Since coming to GMHC, I have thought a lot about how I can measure the return on investment (ROI) of the work that my team and I contribute, in both human resource terms and purely hardware and software terms. Should I measure what our annual budget says we spend and amortize all of the hardware that was here and look at it in comparison to our revenues? Should I total the cost of running this department and create an index based on a per-hour basis that I can apply to the time saved to the end-user in our organization? I don't like any of those, because even though they have their applications in the For-[money]Profit sector, they don't truly capture what IT does in the Social-Profit sector. Or for that matter, what the true social profit is.

I am going to continue to explore this and will report my findings on this blog. Stay tuned for more Social Profit!