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Utah New ID Check-In

Utah is creating a new cool check in process for voters. The State’s voter registration data base will be able to read the bar codes on a voter’s driver’s license. So when a voter goes to check in to vote, a poll worker will be able to scan the bar code on the back of the State driver’s license and that person will be pulled up in the state database. The voter will be authenticated on a laptop in the polling place, credited with voting, and will help with problems that often arise with poll workers having trouble hearing names, spelling names, and the like.

Posted 19 November 2009 † Thad Hall § Uncategorized °

Analysis of the Connecticut November 2008 post-election audit

The University of Connecticut’s Voting Technology Research Center has recently made available the results of their analysis of the State of Connecticut’s post-election audit of the November 2008 election. The report “Statistical Analysis of the Post Election Audit Data 2008 November Elections” is available here.

Here’s the report’s summary:

The University of Connecticut Voting Technology Research (VoTeR) Center received the data gathered in the post-election audit performed in the State of Connecticut following the November 2008 election. The audits involved the randomly selected 10% of the districts and the audit returns were conveyed by the Office of the Secretary of the State (SOTS) to the VoTeR Center on December 3rd, 4th and 18th of 2008. The original audit data contained 1311 records, where each record represents information about a given candidate: date, district, machine seal number, office, candidate, machine counted total, hand counted total of the votes considered unquestionable by the auditors, hand counted total of the votes considered questionable by the auditors, and the hand counted total, that is, the sum of undisputed and questionable ballots.

The VoTeR Center’s initial review of audit reports prepared by the towns revealed a number of returns with unacceptably high unexplained differences between hand and machine counts and also revealed substantial discrepancies in cases of cross-endorsed candidates (i.e., candidates whose names appear twice on the ballot because they are endorsed by a minor party). As a result, the SOTS Office performed additional information-gathering and investigation and, in some cases, conducted independent hand-counting of ballots. The resulting information was conveyed to the VoTeR Center on February 18, 2009. Further information gathering was conducted by the SOTS Office to identify the cause of the moderately large discrepancies, and more importantly, to identify a cause of substantial discrepancies for cross-party endorsed candidates. The resulting information was conveyed to the VoTeR Center on April 3, 2009.

This report presents the results in three parts: (i) the analysis of the original audit records that did not involve cross-party endorsed candidates, (ii) the analysis of the audit records for cross-party endorsed candidates, and (iii) the analysis of the records that were revised based on the SOTS Office follow ups. The analysis does not include 43 records (3.3%) that were found to be incomplete, unusable, or obviously incorrect. In more detail, part (i) deals with 776 (63%) records that were complete and contained no obvious audit errors. Among these, 776 records (94%) show a discrepancy of 5 votes or lower, with 583 records (71%) showing discrepancy of 0 or 1 vote between the machine counts and audit hand counts. There are 49 records that have the discrepancy of more than 5 votes and the largest discrepancy is 9. Part (ii) deals with 301 records (23%) involving cross-party endorsed candidates. As a result of the second SOTS Office follow up, it was confirmed that large discrepancies reported for the cross-party endorsed candidates were due to the fact that the auditors did not correctly assign hand counted votes to the specific party endorsements. We present the analysis of the original 240 (18%) cross-party endorsed records, and 61 (5%) records that were revised by the SOTS Office. Part (iii) deals with the revised audit returns gathered by the SOTS Office. Part (iii) discusses the records that were the subject of the last investigation by the SOTS Office. This analysis was performed on request of the Office of the Secretary of the State.

The main conclusion in this report is that for all cases where non-trivial discrepancies were originally reported, it was determined that hand counting errors or vote misallocation were the causes. No discrepancies in these cases were reported to be attributable to machine tabulation. For the original data where no follow up investigation was performed, the discrepancies were small, in particular, the average reported discrepancy is lower than the number of the votes that were determined to be questionable. For the cross party endorsement, it is important for the auditors to perform hand counting of the votes that precisely documents for which party endorsement the votes were cast, and to note all cases where more than one bubble was marked for the same candidate. The SOTS follow up confirmed that in almost all examined problematic instances the discrepancies were a result of an incorrect hand counting. Therefore, the auditors should be better trained to follow the correct process of hand count audit.

The analysis does not include 42 records (3.2% of 1311) that were found to be incomplete, unusable, or obviously incorrect. This is an improvement relative to the November 2007 elections, where we reported 18% of the records that were unusable.

Posted 17 November 2009 † Michael Alvarez § Uncategorized °

New research on the consequences of election fraud

My colleague, Peter Ordeshook, passed along to me this reference to a new research paper, “Democracy’s Achilles Heel or How to Win an Election without Really Trying”, by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler. Here is a summary of some of their results, from a briefing paper:

- Using dirty tactics during elections helps politicians that are already in office. If they use illegal practices to win elections, they can expect to be in office around 2.5 times longer than if they participated in fair elections;

- Dirty elections are bad for economic growth by skewing politicians’ incentives towards pursuing bad policies rather than good ones;

- Checks and balances are effective in reducing the incentives to cheat and implement bad policies.

- International aid has no clear effect on the quality of elections, unless there are effective checks and balances.

- Small, poor but resource-rich countries are more prone to dirty elections.

I’ve not read the research paper closely yet, but this is an interesting idea — studying the consequences of election fraud. That’s not been the focus of a lot of the political science research on electoral fraud in recent years, but does open the door for some very interesting and important new work.

Posted 16 November 2009 † Michael Alvarez § Uncategorized °

More on differential turnout by mode and the implications for ballot measures

Doug Chapin of the Pew Center on the States sent me this story from Nebraska. Like yesterday’s posting of DiCamillo’s article, the Nebraska pieces notes the dramatically different turnout rates for low level contests (in this case, non candidate ballot measures) when using vote by mail.

Interestingly, the story tries to cite a quasi-experimental demonstration of the effect.  A local school board bond issue was voted on in three counties without voting by mail, and turnout was 35% (the bond lost with 81% voting no).  A prison bond issue in a neighboring county was conducted fully by mail, and turnout was 49% (the percent voting no was not reported).

Of course, the problem with this comparison is that the issue on the ballot varied, not just the method of voting.

What we need to find in Nebraska is a multi-county issue where some voted by mail and others in person.  Any ambitious graduate students out there at Lincoln?

Posted 16 November 2009 † Paul Gronke § Uncategorized °

DiCamillo on “The Rapid Growth of Permanent Mail Ballot Registration in California and its Impact”

Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, published a piece in Survey Impacts on the growth of permanent absentee balloting in California and how it has changed the composition of the California electorate.

He shows that nearly one-third of California’s registered voters now opt for permanent by-mail status, and the higher probability of turnout among this segment of the registered voters, particularly in state and local contests, may have a significant impact on California elections and California politics.

For instance, DiCamillo shows that turnout in the 2006 gubernatorial contest among voters overall was 56.2%, while it was nearly 78%–a gap of more than 20 points–among permanent absentee voters.

This wouldn’t matter much if permanent absentee voters looked like the electorate at large, but they don’t.  As we’ve long known, these voters are older, whiter, wealthier, and somewhat unique to California, more likely to live in the Bay Area than in LA.  California registration data indicates that permanent absentee voters are nine points more Republican.

What does this mean?  DiCamillo has to be non-partisan in his comments, but the political implications seem pretty clear.  California general elections will be less affected by the skew in permanent absentee voting (the gap in the 2008 election, for instance, was only 7%), but in special elections, the skew can exceed 20 points.

This may translate into a solidly Democratic legislature, congressional delegation, and governorship, but with a special electorate that is significantly more conservative, Republican, and anti-tax.  Fiscal crisis, anyone?

Posted 15 November 2009 † Paul Gronke § Uncategorized °

Why Data ARE good for Democracy (and for the EAC)

There has been a fairly active set of threads on Rick Hasen’s Election Law listserv about the newly released EAC reports on UOCAVA and the Election Day Survey (full disclosure: I worked as a subcontractor on both of those reports).

Ned Foley of the Moritz School at the Ohio State University expressed some concern about the level of absentee ballots accepted and rejected in different states.  Bev Harris of Black Box voting chimed in with broader concerns about voting by mail in Oregon and Washington.   Nate Persily of the Brennan Center at New York University chimed in about the way the EAC calculates turnout, compared to others, such as Michael McDonald of George Mason.

The EAC might view all of these postings as problematic, because they could be read as criticisms of the quality of the data collection.  I hope they don’t read it this way.  It is good news for the EAC that lawyers, political scientists, and advocates are not only reading their reports, but more importantly, almost instantaneously doing their own analyses of the data.

This not only makes the EAC relevant, it creates another set of stakeholders in the continued existence of the Agency (contrast with election officials, who seem decidedly ambivalent about the Agency).  And to the degree these are real problems with the election system, the EAC data provides us all tools with which we can try to identify, diagnose, and perhaps even cure those problems.

Finally, this gives me a chance to pump my own work!  As Doug Chapin put it in the “data for democracy” compendium (full disclosure, I oversaw this conference and edited the wonderful compendium),

Data is [sic] not valuable in and of itself; its value resides in what it makes possible in the hands of thoughtful and creative analysts and decision makers.  It gives us a sixth sense, another way to view the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Posted 11 November 2009 † Paul Gronke § Uncategorized °

Gregoire pushes to make WA election results more timely

Governor Christine Gregoire (WA) has publicly announced (as reported in this story) that she is meeting with SoS Sam Reed to figure out ways to speed up the reporting of election results in WA.

The current race that is causing controversy is the Seattle mayor’s race, which still has not been announced.  King County is still counting the absentee ballots, and because WA has a “post mark” deadline (your ballot must not be delivered by election day, but only postmarked on election day), the ballots are still likely arriving at the county office.

The key issue, of course, is the postmark deadline, but I’m hard pressed to see WA changing that law.  Until they do, citizens and politicians are just going to have to put up with slow election returns.

Posted 09 November 2009 † Paul Gronke § Uncategorized °

Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators Conference

I just came across a reference to the “Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators” conference that is co-sponsored by the American Political Science Association and the Goldman School at Berkeley.  This came across the search results as I was probing around, looking at other implementations (planned or otherwise) of the Democracy Index idea (this search itself inspired by Steve Israel’s legislative proposal).

I had a schizophrenic reaction when I reviewed the conference.  On the one hand, it brings together some of the national and international experts on measuring democratic performance (sort of a POLITY writ large for those of you who understand the reference, though it looks like the ambitions here are larger).

On the other hand, there was nary an elected politician, bureaucrat, or party official at the meeting (though I was very impressed to see representatives from the World Bank, Freedom House, and IDEA).

I can’t tell if this was academics talking about more data for academics, which was my initial fear, or something more.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Great website, by the way, and concept memoes freely available.  Kudos to the organizers for that.

Posted 06 November 2009 † Paul Gronke § Uncategorized °

EAC Election Day Survey Data Released

The full report and the data are here:

http://www.eac.gov/program-areas/research-resources-and-reports/completed-research-and-reports/election-day-survey-results

Posted 05 November 2009 † Paul Gronke § Uncategorized °

Thad on NPR: Voter registration modernization

Here is the URL.

Posted 03 November 2009 † Michael Alvarez § Uncategorized °