Election Updates

On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department gave clearance to a new law in Georgia that will require voters to show photo identification at the polls on Election Day. As the Associated Press noted in their story,

"Nineteen states require voters to show identification, but only five request photo ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Those states -- Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and South Dakota -- allow voters without a photo ID to use other forms of identification or sign an affidavit of identity. "The decision to clear the measure now gives Georgia the most draconian voter identification requirement in the nation," said Daniel Levitas of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project in Atlanta.".



The problem with the law is that many people don't have drivers licenses. A study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee estimated that

• approximately 20 percent of Wisconsin residents do not have a drivers license.
• 23 percent of individuals 65 or older do not have drivers licenses, and 70 percent of these people are women.
  
• only 45 percent of African American males and 51 percent of females have a drivers license.
  
• 54 percent of Hispanic males and 45 percent of females have a drivers license.

The numbers are even lower in Milwaukee, where public transportation makes it easier to be mobile without having a drivers license.

This is yet another example of a change being made to election laws to make it harder to vote in order to reduce fraud. These activities have ebbed and flowed over the past 100 years, and not just in places we think of as having a history of having poll taxes or literacy tests. Remember, New York state had literacy tests starting in 1922, a law later overturned by the Supreme Court. Alexander Keyssar wrote the definitive book on the history of these and other voting laws in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

There is a great need to study not only the affect of these laws on participation, but also ways of addressing this problem of so many Americans not having official identification. Studying the impact of the law in Georgia can happen now; they are running a special election on Tuesday.

Our second Election Updates podcast is available, on measuring election performance, a discussion of the UK's Electoral Commission's work, and some new research on early voting. You can download the mp3 file directly, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

In elections--heck, throughout both the public and private sectors--there are always people talking about "best practices." People are on the lookout for best practices, trying to emulate best practices, trying to win awards for best pratices. But what does this really mean? What is a best practice and why are they important?

If you want to answer any question about public policy, the first stop can always be the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO is perhaps the greatest evaluation tool in the nation and if you are remotely geeky--yes, you out there who watch CSPAN or read blogs about election reform--a leisurely surf around the GAO site yields many hidden nuggets of pure gold.

For example, the GAO not only evaluates everything from agriculture to the National Zoo, but they also issue reports on how to do things like best practices. In fact, they have a whole section of their website dedicated to best practices. And on the best practice site, there is a quite handy report: "Best Practices Methology: A New Approach for Improving Government Operations." This report is quite a fun read, and walks you step by step through how to perform a best management practice review.

How do you do one of these reviews? Here are the steps.

First, you have to define what process it is you want to review, and define it correctly. This means discussing the process and creating a detailed, step-by-step flow chart so that every single step is charted. This process alone may help you identify and solve problems with your process before you go any further!

Second, you have to do your homework. Look for studies, research industry trends, speak with consultants, your peers, academics, and trade groups to get good background information. As you do this work, identify 5 to 10 organizations who are generally recognized as being among the best in your industry.

Third, develop a survey to use when you visit potential best practice organizations. This will allow you to ask the right questions and to ask similar questions to each organization you visit.

Fourth, visit these best organizations and benchmark their practices against yours. Remember, their practices and situation may be somewhat different, so be flexible and think about how you can apply their practices to your organization.

Fifth, identify the barriers to implementing best practices. These barriers may be legal, but they may also be embedded in your organizational culture. The barriers may also be in your head; often, organizations perceive a barrier to change that is not really there, so try to push aside biases you have and determine what the real barriers are to implementing best practices in your organization.

What is needed is for there to be more and better research on best practices in the United States. Local and state election officials need to understand how to conduct best practice management reviews and how to implement the results of these reviews in their organizations. The EAC--congressional funding willing--is a perfect organization to push this agenda in the future.

There is much interest these days in what we call "convenience voting" methods --- vote-by-mail, early voting, and other approaches to absentee voting. Of these various forms of "convenience voting", the ones that have seen the most attention from social scientists are vote-by-mail techniques, as a number of states (especially California, Oregon and Washington) have had a relatively lengthy experience with voting-by-mail in the past few decades.

Of these procedures, the one that social scientists have studied the least is early voting. The conceptual distinction here between early and absentee voting is that the former is done in person, typically in a location that is under the direct administration of local election officials. "Absentee" voting (and generally voting-by-mail) is done by a voter in some location outside the control of local election officials, and where the voter's physical presence is not required to cast the ballot.

To date, there have been few published academic studies of early voting, primarily because few jurisdictions have used early voting until very recently. The academic expert in the area of early voting is Robert Stein, of Rice University, who has published two seminal studies on early voting in 1997 and 1998; Stein's testimony before the Carter-Baker commission on June 30, 2005 discussed some new research that he is doing on the use of early and election-day voting centers in Larimer County, Colorado (he has a working paper on this research that we received recently!).

Paul Gronke, whose blog "Early Vote" we link to, has been undertaking some very important new research on early and absentee voting, and is presenting some of this new and innovative work at the APSA conference next week. In a paper co-authored with Benjamin Bishin, Daniel Stevens, and Eva Galanes-Rosenbaum, titled "Early Voting in Florida, 2004", they present some analysis of an exit poll of voters in the 2004 presidential election in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

They summarize their results in the "Discussion" section of the paper:

"Older voters, Cuban Americans, and women voted earlier, ceteris paribus. Political information showed a curvilinear relationship with early voting, with respondents in the middle range of information showing the highest rates of early voting. Finally, party affiliation and party contacts did not operate as we expected, although reported contact by non-partisan groups did increase early voting rates.

"Finally and perhaps most importantly, we found that voters who trusted local government, and those who had confidence in the integrity of their ballot, were more likely to avail themselves of the opportunity to vote early."

These are intriguing results. One of the important debates about convenience voting reforms is the extent to which they increase turnout, or whether they simply make it easier for otherwise high propensity voters to participate. The Gronke et al. data can't solve this debate, but there are hints in this data that indicate the story is more complicated than either side in that debate might realize. On one hand, that older voters are more likely to cast early ballots seems to indicate that the early voting option in Miami-Dade County in this election might have simply made it easier for this high propensity group to vote. But also note that in their analysis income and education had no statistically significant effect on the likelihood of early voting, while other variables that might be seen as predictors of the propensity to vote (news exposure and strength of partisanship) had very weak and statistically insignificant effects in their analysis. On the other hand, we do not see strong evidence supporting the idea that early voting stimulates turnout by low propensity voters, as their results do not show that racial minorities (here Blacks and Haitians) were more likely to vote early, nor were younger voters more likely to vote early.

Another important debate about early voting is whether or not early voters are voting on the basis of different information than election day voters. Some have raised serious questions about this concern, noting that when late-breaking news or campaign events arise, those who have already voted may miss out on that information. Gronke et al. do not address this question in their paper, but it appears that their data might allow some testing of this question. They do have in their survey instrument measures of issue opinions, political knowledge and news exposure. Their analysis does show that the latter two variables do not significantly predict whether one is an early voter or not. However, I wonder if they could look whether early voters and election day voters have different issue preferences, and whether "early" early voters have different information, issue opinions, or knowledge than "late" early voters. Their survey responses span the period October 22, 2004 through November 2, 2004, so they might be able to exploit the temporal nature of their data in future work.

Last, the only major caveat regarding this paper is that despite the title ("Early Voting in Florida, 2004") the exit poll survey used here are really only for voters in Miami-Dade County. That clearly limits our abillity to generalize the results of this analysis to even other counties in Florida, not to mention the rest of the United States. (By way of disclosure, I've produced an analysis of absentee voting in Los Angeles County with Thad Hall and Betsy Sinclair ["Whose Absentee Votes Are Counted: The Variety and Use of Absentee Ballots in California"], which has "California" in the title, and so I am well aware of the problems of generalizing from one county to a state).

In conclusion, this is very good work. We need to know much more about early voting, ranging from studies like Gronke et al.'s to comparative studies across jurisdictions. There is much work to be done!

For those attending the upcoming APSA conference, there is a second interesting panel, scheduled for 8AM Thursday, in the Marriott conference hotel. This second election reform panel is titled "Rising to the Challenge of Election Reform, Research Priorities for the Social Sciences: Findings of the Social Science Research Council Commission." The panel is co-chaired by Ben Highton (UC-Davis) and Jeff Manza (Northwestern University). Participants include Walter Mebane (Cornell University), Martha Kropf (University of Missouri, Kansas City), Jane Junn (Rutgers University), Richard Pildes (New York University) and Michael Traugott (University of Michigan). We assume that this panel will discuss the work of the SSRC's "National Research Commission on Elections and Voting". This commission's final report was issued on March 1, 2005, "Challenges Facing the American Electoral System: Research Priorities for the Social Sciences."

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is planning a workshop on threats to voting systems. Currently they are accepting proposals for those wishing to participate through September 16, 2005. The goal of the workshop is to "develop and disseminate an analysis of threats to voting systems. Examples of such voting systems include Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems, systems using voter verified audit trail technology, optical scan voting systems, and ballot marking devices." Might be an interesting event to attend, especially as it appears that NIST is planning on using input from this workshop for future development of security and usability voting system standards.

First off, remember that the United States has had two major debacles in national elections in recent years --- the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. These two debacles have spawned some significant research, and some significant legislation (especially the Help America Vote Act). But the UK has not experienced similar debacles in national elections, and yet their Electoral Commission is engaged in a sweeping and informative research-based policy development process. This is evident in the Pippa Norris paper that Thad discussed yesterday. The UK's Electoral Commission got started in 2000, and it is clear they are well ahead of their US counterparts in generating electoral reforms that are backed by evidence, data and research.

Why has the US lagged so far behind the UK in serious scientific research on our electoral process? Compare the Electoral Commission's page on election reform research to the US's Election Assistance Commission , which to date has issued only two research contracts that we know of (one being the 2004 post-election administrative survey and the other being a provisional balloting study) and is only now beginning to request proposals for the many other research projects it is supposed to spearhead as required by HAVA (most recently a "Request for Proposals" for a study on free postage for absentee ballots). While we are happy to see the US EAC initiate some research projects, it is unclear what the EAC's research strategy is based on the limited number of projects they have supported.

The only other federal research entity that has stepped up to the plate to provide research funding for election issues in the US is the National Science Foundation. Until recently, the NSF has had a limited role in funding research in this area, only providing small grants for very discrete projects (funding the IPI's Internet voting report in 2001, and more recently an effort by the National Academy of Sciences on e-voting). However, the NSF last week issued one major grant to Johns Hopkins University for studying voting technology (we'll have more to say about this specific grant later). It is great to see the NSF engaging in these issues, but again, we need a greater investment in resources for basic social science research and technology development on election issues, and for this investment to be focused on high priority areas of concern.

In our book on Internet voting, "Point, Click and Vote", we argued that the US needs a strong research-based program to provide a solid foundation for the development of public policy on election reform. To date, we have yet to see the federal goverment develop a coherent research plan for understanding our election process. Why the UK has developed a strong research-based policy process, and the US has not, we leave as a question for future research.

Pippa Norris examines postal voting (what we call by-mail absentee voting) in the UK in a paper for the upcoming APSA conference (see yesterday's blog for a discussion of Charles Stewart's paper on the same panel). "Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic?" wades into the debate over whether no-excuse absentee voting increases turnout, but does so from a refreshing, international perspective.

Norris reminds us of the theoretical pros and cons of no-excuse absentee voting. The pros are easy: this procedure makes voting less costly, which should boost turnout. The cons are that no-excuse absentee voting can undermine public confidence in elections and actually discourage voting. So which is it? Is no-excuse absentee voting a panacea or a pandora's box?

Norris uses the 2005 British Election Survey, which is a panel survey conducted before and after the election to gain leverage on this question. She first notes the macro finding: absentee voting was up from 4 percent in 2001 to 15 percent in 2005. This finding begs the question of whether this increase consists of new voters who were drawn to vote by the low cost of voting via mail, or whether it consists of habitual voters who just decided to use the post instead of the polls to cast their ballot.

Analyzing the British Election Survey, Norris finds that familiarity breeds love, and contempt (or at least concern). First, she finds that voters who were in areas that had conducted postal voting trials in 2004 elections were more likely to use postal voting in 2005. Also, special needs voters, the retired, and the elderly all were more likely to use postal voting. People who used postal voting said that they did so because it was convenient, their health limited their getting out, or they had used the post to vote before and liked it. However, postal voting also raises fraud concerns, which are reflected in survey data. About 3 percent of polling place voters thought their ballot succeptable to fraud, compared to 24 percent of postal voters.

Norris concludes that "But beyond specific populations, the initiative failed to generate much greater turnout overall and nor did it generate greater social equality in the voting population." However, one might question whether helping the disabled and the elderly--as well as conveniencing others--might not be worthwhile in itself. The findings and other studies by the U.K.'s Electoral Commission do suggest that postal voting, over time, might habituate more voters to cast ballots, especially in off-year elections. As we will blog later in the week, the British model of experimentation in election reforms will continue to produce great data on how well various reforms work.

Charles Stewart's paper for the upcoming APSA conference, "Measuring the Improvement (or Lack of Improvement) in Voting since 2000 in the US" is a work that all interested in election reform should read. Stewart has been in the election reform trenches since 2000, and there are few scholars who know as much as Stewart about what data is and is not available to study election performance --- and how good (or bad) that data is.

In his recent paper, Stewart first provides an analytic structure of the election process, which he uses to talk about what data is (and is not) available for studying the performance of the American electoral process. Second, he gives some useful principles to guide data collection. And last, he talks about some of the constraints on our ability to collect large amounts of high quality data to better understand the performance of our voting system.

His analytic structure is summarized in Table 1 of his paper --- he focuses on registration, voter authentication at the polls, how voters cast their ballots, and how the votes are counted. The only minor issue here is that two other aspects of the electoral process that I argue are also very important are not well covered here. One is the growing incidence of voting outside the traditional polling place, either through absentee, early or voting by mail. As perhaps as many as 25% of voters in 2004 were cast before election day, and as these procedures likely result in different voting experiences and different potential performance issues, it would be good in future work to see more discussion of performance measures for this relatively new and clearly increasing alternative channel of voting. The other area that is neglected is the broader set of behind the scenes election administration procedures, that likely have a strong impact on the quality of elections in a particular jurisdiction: personnel, training, quality control, data on the chain of custody of voting equipment, detailed expenditure information, and so on. Having performance measures for election administration is also important for future studies of the quality of the American electoral process.

Stewart then moves to a discussion of four basic principles to guide how we might think about data collection in the future: uniformity, transparency, expedition, and multiple sources. The only of these principles that is not immediately apparent is expedition, by which Stewart simply means that election data should be made available as quickly as possible.

After talking about these principles, Stewart turns to three obstacles he sees that stand in the way of better election data gathering; federalism, state and local election officials, and disagreements over the nature of elections. To these I would add what might be immediately apparent --- resources. We simply lack necessary resources for the collection, cleaning, analysis, and distribution of detailed election data.

In his conclusion, Stewart provides an overview of the major categories of election performance data: election returns, "systematic" surveys of voters, "systematic" observation of election processes, and "systematic" surveys of election officials. Stewart spends considerable time talking about how we can do better in terms of collecting each type of election performance data. One very interesting twist here is the use of the term "systematic" in three of these categories --- while Stewart does not have the space in his paper to go into great detail how one might really undertake a high quality survey of voter satisfaction (for example), it would be interesting for others to fill in these important methodological questions in the future, and thus build upon Stewart's work. Those of us who have tried to survey voters regarding their opinions about election administration (for example, see "Public Attitudes About Election Governance" or "American Attitudes About Electronic Voting"), or for that matter election officials, know that we need to know much more about ways to improve these measurement tools.

Stewart's paper is interesting, informative and provocative. Scholars will find it of interest, and so will advocates, election officials and policymakers. By writing about these issues, hopefully Stewart has helped us all move toward a better common undertanding of what measurement strategies we should now put in place to better understand the 2006 and 2008 elections. In addition to listing what data sources are really necessary to understand the performance of election processes (for example, see the VTP report "Insuring the Integrity of the Electoral Process: Recommendations for Consistent and Complete Reporting of Election Data") we need more analysis, like Stewart's, into how we can develop better methods of collecting such detailed data.

The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting is next week in Washington, DC, September 1-4, 2005. For those interested in new research on election reform (and who are located in the Washington, DC area over what I'm sure will be a hot and humid Labor Day weekend!), there are some very interesting panels and papers slated for the conference.

One panel will take place on Friday, September 2, at the lovely hour of 8AM, in the Omni Shoreham (unfortunately, until the final conference program is issued we won't know the exact location of the panel). This panel is "T-21: Mobilizing Voters at Home and Abroad: The Impact of Innovations in Voting Technology." Papers will be presented by:

• Henry E. Brady (University of California, Berkeley): "Voting Systems and Voting Rights: Legal Arguments and Empirical Research Since Florida 2000 and Bush v. Gore".
  
• Pippa Norris (Harvard University): "Rearranging the Deckchairs on the Titanic?: Evaluating the Initiatives for Voter Mobilization and Electoral Reform Introduced by the UK Electoral Commission".
  
• R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech) and Thad E. Hall (University of Utah): "Lessons and Trends in E-Voting: Initiatives in the U.S. and Abroad".
  
• Charles Stewart (MIT): "Measuring the Improvement (or Lack of Improvement) in Voting Since 2000 in the US."
  

The panel will be chaired by Robert Pastor (American University).

Participants in this panel are some of the leading scholars studying election reform and voting technology, and this should be an interesting and informative panel to attend. As of today, we have received papers from Stewart and Norris, and will discuss those as we have time over the next few days ... we, of course, are still struggling to finish our own paper, but we should have it done by the end of the week and will then discuss it at length here!

Our podcasting feed now works (at least it does for us, if you have trouble let us know). We will continue to post the mp3 files on our blog here, but you can make your life more easy by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, it is very simple. Just open iTunes, click on "Advanced", then "Subscribe to Podcast", then give the following url: http://electionupdates.caltech.edu/ipod/podcast.xml. That should do it! We hope to provide weekly podcasts, and if things heat up on any of the topics we are covering or events merit, we might publish them more often.