Election Updates

A new one for my friend Thad: Early votes “determine” outcome

Thad Hall, my fellow blogger, regularly pillories this election-line lede: “Election outcome will be decided by turnout.” What matters, Thad delights in pointing out, is not IF citizens turn out to vote but WHO they vote for.

I have a new annoyance for my good friend: elections that are “won” or “lost” by the early and absentee votes. Today’s story from the Bradenton County, FL Patch has the provocative title: “Early and Absentee Voting Could Determine Bradenton Results”.

Early votes are, perhaps, distinct from Election Day votes because of the day the ballots are cast. They may, perhaps, provide some insight into last minute campaign effects. But early voters are also traditionally more resistant to campaigns.

Early votes no more “determine” the outcome than does turnout. Early and absentee votes are just slices of the same electoral pie.

¶ Posted 01 February 2012 † gronke § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

More voting by mode in FL: Still the odd Cain result

Another county’s results are plotted below, and while it’s too soon to assume a lot from just two counties, there is still a lot of election day votes cast for Cain, as a proportion of his total. Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman look more like I’d have expected.

Miami Dade votes by mode

¶ Posted 31 January 2012 † gronke § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Florida votes by mode starting to come in

Some Florida results by county: http://www.earlyvoting.net/blog

Takeaways: At least in Duval County, Romney showed no substantial early and absentee margin. And Herman Cain got far more election day votes!

¶ Posted 31 January 2012 † gronke § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Time for the Ohio Primary?

Yes, Tuesday is primary Election Day in Florida. On the same day, early in person voting opens in Ohio.

Here is a sample ballot from Cuyahoga. Perry and Huntsman remain on the ballot.

CLEVE01A1_R

¶ Posted 30 January 2012 † gronke § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Personalized Voting

Yesterday and today I am attending an Accessible Voting conference and we have had an interesting experience. We were broken into 4 groups, discussing different aspects of the voting process — from the pre-voting registration and voter information component through voting modes (remote and in-person) and ballot design.

The fascinating part of the experience was this: several groups independently agreed on the need for two things in the voting process. First, there should be more options for voting — early, absentee, and vote centers — because it provides individuals with special needs options for voting that can accommodate their needs. Second, and more interesting, several groups wondered why each of us do not have the ability to create a voter profile that specifies the voting experience we want to have.

Imagine that, when you registered to vote that, after you registered, there was a survey you were given. (Something similar could be done at a kiosk for in-person voting or be included as a scannable document in an absentee voting packet). The survey asked you your preferences for voting. The survey would ask you several things, such as:

1. I would like to receive a voter guide before the election. (by mail, via email)
2. I would like to receive a voter guide in large print.
3. I would like to receive a ballot in large print. (in-person or absentee)
4. I would like to be a permanent absentee voter.
5. I would like to receive a list of early voting locations.
6. I have a Handicap Parking permit and will need that parking at my polling place.
7. I will be using the accessible voting machine at my polling place.
8. I would like an email reminder of my polling location.
9. I would like an email notification that my absentee ballot was received.

The idea here is simple: people should be able to express their needs and wants (not assumption-based because a person is identified as blind or disabled) and the system would provide voters with a preference-enhanced experience. Some people don’t need a sample ballot but others need one in large print or an audio version. Some people may want to be permanent absentee voters and others may want to get a list of early voting centers in a text message.

This system should be dynamic — I can update my preferences easily using the Internet, the phone, or some other mechanism — and should reflect my needs.

I realize that there are a million details here: cost, state laws, etc. However, the interesting thing here is that it could be scalable: states could provide this service across local jurisdictions and utilize new services like print on demand for helping make this all work.

¶ Posted 26 January 2012 † thadhall § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Statement on dead voters in South Carolina

H/t to Sean Greene for pointing out this very excellent statement from the South Carolina election commission that provides a nice analysis of how charges of dead people voting come about.

¶ Posted 25 January 2012 † cstewart § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

How Jackson County, MO expanded their elections infrastructure

I’ve blogged a few times about the unanticipated infrastructure demands created by early voting. Most elections offices are designed to handle a few hundred citizens with questions about registration or disabled citizens needing use special access machines, not thousands or tens of thousands of voters showing up to cast a ballot. thousands of in-person voters.

This story from Jackson County, MO, just outside of Kansas City, illustrates the problem.

five election dates, new legislative districts thanks to the 2010 census and even seemingly simple things like generating new notification cards for every registered voter. And the November ballot – with a presidential race, several statewide races and initiatives, state legislative contests and possibly local ballot issues – is expected to be long.

The Democratic director of the board, Bob Nichols, noted “We had people lined up outside and in our office.” Tammy Brown, Nichols’s Republican counterpart, added “It is a crazy year.”

Adapt or die, as my colleague Doug Chapin often notes, and in this case, adaptation was easy. The story doesn’t note who saw the empty storefront across the street, but the Board has rented it, and just like that, more space for voting, shorter lines, and less stress on the elections staff.

¶ Posted 20 January 2012 † gronke § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Some Lessons from Iowa

Several people have written recently about the Iowa caucus results, including our good friend Doug Chapin. I am going to pile on here but make a couple of broader points.

First, the Iowa results and the subsequent recertification of the results make a point that Lonna Atkeson, Mike Alvarez, and I make in our upcoming book on election audits: election results are only meaningful if there is a chain of custody for the ballots. You can audit, recount, and certify ballots after an election, but unless you can prove with a chain of custody that the ballots are not tampered with and are the same ballots that were cast on election day, any counting is rather pointless. Elections are an end to end process, not a “count at the end of the night” process. If people are not following procedures for handling ballots and there is not documentation of how ballots were handled — with signatures on forms documenting the hand off of ballots from location to location, for example, — then it is not possible to know what is being counted, let alone if the ballots are counted correctly.

Second, the process in Iowa also illustrates the problems associated with pure paper-based voting. With either DRE electronic voting or voting with paper ballots that are scanned, there is a second, computer-based set of tabulated results. If one set of results is lost, there is a backup.

¶ Posted 20 January 2012 † thadhall § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Sample Ballot from Duval County, FL

duvalsampleballot

¶ Posted 19 January 2012 † gronke § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

How many votes have been cast in Florida?

A little mathematics and some web browsing skills, and it looks like somewhere between 8% and 17% of the ballots in Florida have already been cast.

Keep in mind that, as of today, four candidates (Bachmann, Cain, Huntsman, and Perry) were on these ballots, and three (Bachmann, Huntsman, and Perry) were still actively competing well into the absentee balloting period.

We’ll use Miami Dade County to make our calculations, but this same exercise can be done throughout Florida (and you can bet the Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum forces are making these calculations daily).

Miami Dade County, reports 42,149 absentee ballots returned as of close of business yesterday, totaling 32% of the 130,491 ballots mailed out. The Miami Herald reports 143,000 ballots voted statewide, just over 30% of absentee ballot request.

According to GOP registration for the primary (the county code for Miami is “DAD”), 35% of Republicans requested an absentee ballot.

That gives us the turnout so far, and the percent of registered Republicans who requested an absentee ballot. Now we need to estimate overall turnout. In the 2008 presidential primary, turnout statewide was 38%, and in Miami Dade, turnout among Republicans in the 2008 primary was 40%. Among Republicans in Miami Dade in 2008, 20.8% (33,548) of all ballots were cast absentee (another 24,744 were cast early in person).

Now we have almost all the pieces of our puzzle: registration, percent requesting an absentee ballot, percent voting overall, and percent voting absentee.

But wait! We already have 42,149 absentee ballots returned in Miami-Dade, almost 10,000 more than the 2008 total. What’s going on?

Maybe there are more Republicans? No–according to the state, there are 7000 more GOP registrants in Miami-Dade in 2012 than in 2008. Maybe Republican turnout will be higher? Possibly, although the 2008 primary was still quite competitive on the Republican side.

But what if Republicans are voting absentee at a higher rate than in the past? State party leaders said that absentee ballot requests are double the 2008 rate! The ground has shifted in Florida.

Now the final piece of the puzzle: we need to take into account absentee ballots that are never returned. Charles Stewart, in his recent Election Law Journal article “Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Vote By Mail” has coined the term “ballot leakage” to describe absentee ballots that are but not counted, either because they are not returned (20% nationwide) or otherwise spoiled. We’ll try to account for “leakage” below.

Let’s do the math:

32% of absentee ballots already returned x 1.25 (assuming only 80% of absentee ballots are actually voted) = 40% of all absentee ballots that will be voted have already been voted.

40% x 20.8% (percent of all ballots in Miami Dade that were absentee in 2008) = 8.32% of the GOP primary vote in Miami Dade has already been cast.

And if the state GOP if correct, and twice as many GOP primary ballots will be cast absentee, then almost 17% of the ballots are already in. That’s an awful lot of votes cast on a ballot containing four names of candidates who are no longer in the race.