CSci 110 Voting Technologies Project


		School of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Computer Science CSci 110 -- Technology and Society http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/csci110/summer08 Prof. Michael B. Feldman, course instructor mfeldman@gwu.edu

The Social Impact Analysis Project on Voting Technologies -- 32% of grade, due in Stages

As we all know, 2008 is an important election year in the United States. Accordingly, in this course on technology and society, the semester project will focus on the impact of technology on citizen voting.

Your assignment is to research the topic as individuals, discuss it as a class, and design a survey to examine public attitudes about voting technologies. Each student will be assigned to one of several groups; each group will develop its own survey, and deploy it on the zoomerang.com survey website. You will collate and analyze the data, and each group will write a report of its findings. ONE final project paper per group is expected.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

All assignments for this course must be completed under the George Washington University Code for Academic Integrity. Read the section there on plagiarism!
You may use the Internet as a source of information, but others' work must be acknowledged! A quotation from the Internet is just like a quotation from a book, and be written in quotation marks, with a citation (in-line or footnote) to the URL of the site you used.
If you include material from other sources, including the Internet, in your own work, and fail to cite your sources properly, you are risking an Academic Integrity charge of plagiarism!

PROJECT STAGES:

Week 2 -- Research report (8%, due Sunday, 7/20): Each student will gain some background in the subject and write an individual report (approximately 5 pages) that will answer these questions:

Briefly describe the voting system in the voting district of your permanent home (city, county, state, etc.). In what year was the system most recently changed? Include this in your report, and also post it in the discussion thread, for comparison with other students' home districts.
Briefly describe the Help America Vote Act and discuss whether you think it really helps America vote.
Briefly introduce each of the most common voting technologies and discuss each one's strengths and weaknesses.

In addition to obvious Internet sources like Wikipedia, here are a few non-obvious sources you may find helpful:

Week 3 -- Draft survey instruments (8%, due Sunday, 7/27): Each group will develop the questions for its survey instrument based upon the group members' research. Questions should generally focus on the respondents' demographics, and on respondents' attitudes toward voting and the technologies that support it. Before writing your questions, be sure to visit Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) to get a sense of the types of questions that site supports.

Week 4 -- Survey Instruments due and deployed (due Sunday, 8/3): Each group will deploy its survey on Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com). Each group will designate one person on the team to create a FREE account (good for ten days) and enter the survey questions, etc. EMAIL INSTRUCTOR THE URL FOR YOUR SURVEY so I can help "advertise" your need for data. Be sure you also recruit your own family, friends, etc. to take your survey! :)

Week 5 -- Preliminary Report on Survey Results (8%, due Sunday, 8/10): Each group will collate, examine, and analyze its survey data and submit a report providing preliminary results.

Week 6 -- Final Social Impact Analysis Report (8%, due Saturday, 8/16): Each group will write a report based upon the data that contains an abstract, introduction to the subject, discussion of the research protocol, presentation of the findings, conclusions and bibliography.

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