Clarification to State Election Web Sites Post
I’m writing to apologize and to set the record straight.
The post I wrote over the weekend on state election Web sites has caused a bit of controversy — I have received numerous e-mail inquiries from state officials who felt I ranked their states too low and officials who questioned the criteria I used to rank the sites. They’ve all been polite and constructive, and I plan to address each one individually, as time permits. Such a reaction is normal when something like this happens, and I am glad that I am getting this type of feedback.
To set the record straight, I looked mostly at design and ease of use aspects of these Web sites, but not what you can or can’t do with them. However, if something cool was there (i.e. provisional ballot tracker in N.C.) or notably missing, I pointed it out. But I simply didn’t have enough time to scour deeply through each and every Web site. I failed to label my rating criteria in the original post and misled a number of my readers. I am deeply sorry for this confusion; I never expected such a situation to happen. Any good study has its methodology available, but this was not designed to be such a deep study — it was merely a glance.
Therefore, I stand by my original reporting here, but apologize for my omission of exactly what I was looking for. Perhaps if I had added the other criteria to the survey, the results might have been different.
I do look forward to communicating with all of the officials who contacted me via e-mail to let them know how I conducted this in more detail and what I feel could be done better with their Web sites.
Thanks for reading.
