The Super Bowl Post Has Been Preempted!

I was going to do this post on the upcoming Super Bowl XLVIII when I learned my sister, Tammy will be giving the opening keynote for the Voting and Elections Summit 2014 in Washington, DC tomorrow. The Super Bowl will just have to wait. After all, it is not every day a member of my family gets invited to the White House and meets the leader of the free world.

If you have been following my blog for some time, you know I have discussed Tammy's appointment by President Obama to serve as a Commissioner on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. I have placed her bio here as it appears in the program for tomorrow's Summit:

Opening Keynote - Morning Session - Tammy Patrick

Federal Compliance Officer for Maricopa County Elections Department, Ms. Patrick is tasked with serving the 1.9 million registered voters in the greater Phoenix Valley. She collaborates with community and political organizations to create a productive working relationship with the goal of voter participation. In May of 2013 she was selected by President Obama to serve as a Commissioner on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, the pinnacle of her career thus far. Her efforts in supporting good stewardship via sound data collection and analysis has afforded her inclusion in The Democracy Index by Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken, and a position on the Pew Advisory Board for an Elections Performance Index. Ms. Patrick was honored to represent Maricopa County by testifying in Congress in 2007 on the role of election audits.

Working to provide access to all voters, including those serving our country in the military or residing overseas, her analysis of UOCAVA voting populations was presented to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee at NIST in 2011; UOCAVA Voter Trend Analysis and Risk Assessment reviews what characteristics of the UOCAVA voter make them most susceptible to casting ineffective ballots, and if access to online information and process aid in mitigating those vulnerabilities. Her experiences are further shared with the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) working group on electronic voting. In 2012 Ms. Patrick was asked to join the IEEE P1622 group developing standards for a common data format for election results reporting.

Ms. Patrick has a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Purdue University and has attained accreditation as a Certified Election Voter Registration Administrator through the Election Center and Auburn University. She has worked in the elections field since 2003 bringing a background in corporate sales and customer service.

If I may say so myself, understand this is coming from a very biased opinion since she is still my baby sister, she has a pretty impressive bio, and has achieved a lot in these last few years.

These last months since she was appointed to this bi-partisan commission, they have crisscrossed the country several times listened to testimony and made recommendations to federal, state and local elections commissions on improving voter access so everyone's votes are counted, made sure military and overseas ballots were disseminated, processed and counted, and making sure no one has to wait more than one half hour to vote. Those are just a few of the high points in the commission's report.

The work of the commission was finalized and presented to the president last week and will be implemented in the upcoming elections. Here is a photograph taken from C-SPAN2's live broadcast last week when they made their results known to the press after the president had signed them:

I am attaching two more photographs taken in the Roosevelt Room earlier that day:

Click on the images to make them larger:

The top picture is the entire commission along with the Vice President and President. You know who the bottom two are, and look who they are addressing. If you look in the lower right-hand corner, you can see Tammy's name placard.

After this meeting, President Obama took the entire commission into the Oval Office and they had a group photograph taken. Tammy has assured us when she gets her copy of that picture she will let us see it. There may be another post in the making.

One more note, the President acknowledged the work of the Commission in last night's State of the Union Address. That was pretty cool!

Needless to say, I am a pretty proud, big brother today! My mother and other siblings are also extremely proud of the accomplishments and national work Tammy is doing on behalf of election reform in the United States.

I look forward to your comments.

Later,

Mike