The Next John Washburn?
If you've read this blog before, you know John Washburn. He's the software developer in Wisconsin who also thinks it's mighty important for the public to be able to see the process by which its elected officials make decisions.
So he challenged the Governor's office policy of deleting emails from its server every seven days, and continues to fight for a change to this policy. (Stiles tells me the City of Houston, as an example, backs up all their city emails for two years, which Washburn has argued is a more appropriate time frame than seven days.)
Anyway, I think I've found another John Washburn, if you will.
Mike Conwell is another computer whiz, a database expert who lives and works in Austin. He volunteers his time as an election judge in a small precinct, and discovered a few years ago a lot of complaints about active registered voters in Travis County being randomly deleted from the rolls for one reason or the other.
As a result, he took on a four-year-long project of identifying voters in Travis County who were randomly purged from the rolls due to clerical error. He says the problems are as simple as careless data entry, mishandling registration or proof of residency forms, or not checking and double checking records before deleting what looks like a duplicate record, but is not.
Conwell told us today that he found 1,800 voters deleted from the rolls since 2004, who are still in Travis County and should still be registered. Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector, Nelda Wells-Spears, says he can't be right.
"Mr. Conwell doesn't know what he's talking about," Spears said. (See the video story here.)
But Conwell has all these people in one of his trusty databases. In fact, he sent a spreadsheet to Spears' office in December, which contained 231 voters who he believes were accidentally deleted. He was asking that they check and see what was going on there.
Click here to see the spreadsheet and make sure you're not on it. If you are, RE-REGISTER ASAP.
Why go through all this trouble? Conwell says it really irks him when the fundamental right to vote is stripped from someone because of sloppiness within a bureaucracy. He wants to make sure everyone who wants to vote can vote, especially in light of so many close elections he's seen in recent years.
So, Washburn and Conwell have a lot in common. It's about government accountability, for both of them.
One computer whiz uses his talents and spare time to fight for the public's right to see the process by which decisions are made in the Texas Governor's office, another computer whiz is using his talents to preserve the fundamental right to vote of people in Travis County. Where would the world be without freedom-fightin' computer geeks?
