ELEC invites Mac, Firefox users to Trenton

"The essence of Democracy is an informed electorate," begins the mission statement of New Jersey's Election Law Enforcement Commission, but much of the information on ELEC's website has been off-limits to a significant portion of the electorate for years, and there are no plans to change that.

I'm not even talking about the clunky interface and seemingly random functionality. If you have that much access, consider yourself lucky.

Since at least 2005, ELEC has been aware that "Browsers such as Firefox and Netscape are not supported through our search engines."

In 2007, the only visible change to their help page was the inclusion of another unsupported platform: "At this time, the Macintosh platform and browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Netscape are not supported through our search engines."

Currently only the Internet Explorer browser is supported, and only on Windows (the old version of IE on Macs is not supported). The market share of IE, which has been declining since 2003, is now around 75 percent, which means that about one in four users would not be able to access the information they are searching for.

While trying to do some research, I called ELEC to explain that I am on a Macintosh computer and ask how I could access their information. According to the IT director, they don't have any plans to make the information available to those on the currently unsupported platforms.

To their credit, the person at the Help Desk was sympathetic and even offered to look up the reports for me, as long as there were only a handful of files I needed. Explaining that I needed more than just a few reports, I was told I could use the computers in their Trenton office.

If the Federal Election Commission and other states can do it, there's no technical reason why this information can't be made more easily accessible across all platforms, though apparently one bureaucratic hold-up is that the popular pdf format hasn't been approved for document storage yet.

This isn't 2003 when 95 percent of people were using Internet Explorer on Windows. If the current trend continues, the percentage of people using Web browsers other than IE and without access to all of ELEC's information will continue to increase, and their goal of an "informed electorate" will become increasingly elusive.