Long Form: The Real Crisis of US Election Security

As part of my Web Traffic Project: TrustTheVote.org project, I’ve been posting new articles on TrustTheVote.org to increase traffic to this non-profit’s website.

I just posted my longest article yet, The Real Crisis of US Election Security, where I examine the long-standing problems with the US voting system’s security and integrity, our vulnerabilities to cyberattack, and some remedies we can pursue to preserve the integrity of our elections.

I worked hard to keep the article non-partisan, since I think that the security and integrity of our election systems is the most non-partisan issue I can imagine these days. I’d like to hear what you think! Please check out  The Real Crisis of US Election Security, or any of the other articles I’ve posted to TrustTheVote.org recently, and leave a comment if you like.

 

Web Traffic Project: Register to vote for the U.S. 2018 Midterm elections

Yesterday, in my post Web Traffic Project: TrustTheVote.org, I described my plans to increase traffic to the site I manage for the Open Source Election Technologies non-profit, TrustTheVote.org.

Last night, I finished the work on the first post in this series, Register to Vote For U.S. Midterms 2018. I also discovered that the custom theme that I inherited doesn’t handle WordPress featured images very well. I’ll have to fix that after this sprint to the election deadline. In the meantime, I just embedded the image into the post.

Since I inherited the TrustTheVote.org webmaster job by volunteering, I’m still learning about the ins and outs of the site configuration. The site already uses the somewhat obscure WP-SEO plugin. I’m still learning how to make the best use of that tool.

The plan is to promote the post on the OSET and TrustTheVote Project Twitter feeds. I’d like to see if I can revitalize the TrustTheVote Project Facebook page, as well. Right now it looks like Twitter is going to be the best source of traffic for new visitors.

Web Traffic Project: TrustTheVote.org

Experiment time! Over the next 60 days, I’m going to focus my efforts on building traffic to one of the sites I run, TrustTheVote.org. This site is dedicated to reaching out to citizens and election officials to share the work of the Open Source Election Technology Institute (OSET), a non-profit organization developing open source voting software and related technologies for secure and reliable elections.

Although OSET’s work is targeted at democracies all over the world, right now there’s a lot of interest in the upcoming US midterm elections taking place this Tuesday, November 6th (I hope you’re registered to vote!).

I’m going to focus on this site this month (October) as we approach these midterm elections, and then in November as we learn more about how the election went in the US.

We are interested in more than just the results. How did election polling go across the country? Were the results reported quickly, accurately, and reliably? Are there questions about election security, especially related to cyber-security?

It’s an exciting time and there’s a lot of interest in election security and voting software. Now’s the time to build our audience.

I’m going to be checking in regularly with updates on what’s working (and what’s not working) to increase traffic to the TrustTheVote.org site. I’m going to be doing a lot of writing for this project, with the goal of developing an email list of interested citizens.

I’m going to be implementing the traffic strategy I described in this post on Cadent.com, Publish every day to send a flood of traffic to your site. Essentially, by writing and posting regularly, I’ll increase the visibility of the site to search engines and then drive more organic traffic to the site.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.