Absentee ballots

[mtbc]

The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a website through which one can check the progress of absentee ballots for elections. It confirms that they are in receipt of mine and mst3kmoxie's. In general I find that American government tends to be good at providing useful information and services online.

Comments

[mindstalk]

"I find that American government tends to be good at providing useful information and services online."

I expect that varies a lot. IRS still barely lets you file taxes online, I think, compared to UK taxes. MA might be advanced in IT but transparence of its legislative or city council votes is said to be abysmal, and while the Romneycare site was good, they fucked up their Obamacare one. OTOH California's was sweet.

[mtbc]

Yes, I think the UK has some XML-based submission scheme for taxes, but it's been a long time since I even had to file here. The IRS is as horrifying in implementation as the tax code is in specification though: I think of them as being quite exceptional, especially as with unremarkable tax affairs I've now had to get my Representative involved on multiple occasions to sort out stupid mistakes at the IRS' end: the poor front-line telephone people sounded as bewildered as I.

I'd been thinking of some of the Federal information services stuff like the TIGER/Line files and some of the state- and county-level stuff, like the property and court records searches, crime reports, and how in Ohio there was even an online database that would let me look up the details of the well dug on my property. But, things like local elected officials' voting records I'd probably not tried to investigate, indeed.