Day 43: Judges, Voter Turnout

In the wake of the State of the Union address I am once again hit by the importance of my thesis. Political divisions and pettiness were both mentioned by the President last night, and I hope to reduce both of these through my ideas.
I have one judge that should be able to come. I just have to confirm once the schedule comes out.
The other judges are the tricky part, since I have to find past campaign volunteers. That is not a permanent job so I can't just find them on certain websites (for example, with my first mentor I searched for educators working with UTD and SMU).
Currently refining the outline so that I can start writing the final paper.
Another product that I want to do would either be a website for reforms or a flyer/pamphlet that would focus on the best reforms and what the common person can do to help push them through.
I will probably be researching other reform campaigns that I can tell people to join. Those movements probably have websites, which is why I'm leaning towards a informative document that has infographics in it.
The TED talk I watched over the weekend had a really cool idea: it involved the use of "encrypted" ballots that were perforated so the voter could take it home. The code on it could then be used to track the vote on a computer. Essentially all the codes would be put on a database and voters could check their votes and verify the election results themselves. Since the ballots are encoded, the voters' identities and choices would still be secret, yet the process would become much more transparent. Aside from being a creative and novel idea, this concept could help increase voter confidence significantly, especially since the aftermath of the 2000 election. Additionally, since the inventor is British, the encryption is suitable for instant runoff voting (meaning the candidates can be ranked).

A huge part of thesis is increasing voter turnout, along with increasing the amount of knowledge people have of the candidates at election time.

This study by the Pew Research Center has some insights into the voter turnout problem:

Six-in-ten intermittent voters say they sometimes don’t know enough about candidates to vote compared with 44% of regular voters ­ the single most important attitudinal difference between intermittent and regular voters identified in the survey.

Regular voters are more likely than intermittent voters to say they have been contacted by a candidate or political group encouraging them to vote. They also admit to being bored with politics.

People who are not registered to vote say they are not confident in the process and are more likely to say they are too busy to vote than regular voters. Most of them also say they have moved recently.

Notes for today:
I did everything that was on my to-do list so that's a good sign.
I think I should look at more TED talks for ideas revolving around election reforms and technology, they've given pretty good ideas so far. Plus the older ones may have already been implemented in other countries so I can then look at the results.