Over the next few weeks, I hope to be featuring on this blog postings from students who are in a new course being offered at Reed College: Data Sciences / Election Sciences.
The course is a collaborative effort with Andrew Bray, a statistics professor at Reed College, and is partially supported by a Student Digital Research grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation (more information about the grant and the projects it has supported at Reed is contained at this website.)
What better question to have these young scientists answer than the impact of Oregon’s innovative automatic registration system, aptly named “Oregon Motor Voter”? We hope to go beyond the reports provided by the Oregon Secretary of State to understand not just who is being registered via OMV, but who votes as a result of the law, and how the electorate has changed, and may change in the future, as a consequence of this reform.
Step one is going to be a set of pretty data visualizations to whet the appetite. Expect more very soon!
