Election Updates

In an intriguing paper presented by Mary Fitzgerald (Harvard University) at the recent APSA conference, "The Triggering Effects of Election Day Registration on Partisan Mobilization Activities in U.S. Elections", we have some evidence for why voter turnout is consistently greater in the six states currently using election day voter registration. As noted by Fitzgerald, there are a series of published studies that have systematically documented that voter turnout is consistently higher in states employing election day voter registration, a result that Stephen Ansolabehere, Catherine H. Wilson and I have documented as well in our research paper; we estimated that had all states used election day voter registration procedures in the 2000 presidential election "that voter turnout could have increased by 8.1%, from almost 63% to almost 71%."

Fitzgerald's innovation is to look at partisan mobilization strategies, in effect comparing these strategies across states using individual-level survey data from the American National Election Study [ANES] (she uses all of the survey data from 1972 through 2002). In the ANES data, a question is systematically asked of respondents as to whether they were contacted by one of the major political parties regarding voting in the upcoming election. In the terminology of social science research, she uses whether or not each survey respondent reported a party contact as the "dependent variable" --- what she is trying to explain. She knows whether the respondent is in a state using election day voter registration (and other aspects of the state's election procedures), and she knows other information about the respondent and their local political context that she can use as "control variables.'

Based on her statistical analysis, Fitzgerald is able to show that respondents in states using election day voter registration were consistently (and statistically!) more likely to report being contacted by a major political party, in both presidential and midterm elections, and by both Democratic and Republican parties. Fitzgerald summarizes her results:

"...EDR increases the estimated likelihood that an individual will be contacted by 12 percentage points in presidential elections, and by 14 percentage points in midterm congressional elections. Interestingly, when comparing the contact efforts of the Democratic and Republican Parties, individuals are slightly more likely to be contacted by the Democratic Party during both presidential and midterm congressional elections."

But Fitzgerald finds that while the parties do contact a larger number of potential voters in EDR states, the parties are not clearly clearly targeting specific demographic groups in their EDR mobilization efforts (at least given her data).

In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest by social scientists and practitioners in non-partisan "get-out-the-vote" (GOTV) efforts; most significant has been the work of Donald Green and Alan Gerber in this area. Fitzgerald's work pushes in a different direction, turning attention to how partisan mobilization efforts may be tailored to take advantage of electoral procedures like EDR. To the extent that these partisan mobilization efforts in EDR states have indirect effects on the friends and family members of those contacted to vote, and the efforts can be better targeted in the future at lower-turnout populations, it is also possible that partisan mobilization efforts may have even stronger effects than Fitzgerald finds in her paper.

This is a clever new take on the question of EDR and voter turnout. While I could complain at the margins about some aspects of the statistical model specification (for example, some of the specification and methodological issues raised by my NYU colleague, Jonathan Nagler in his 1991 and 1994 papers on voter turnout might need consideration here) and other methodological issues, I am not sure that those complaints necessarily would alter the central point of this paper. It will be interesting to see how Fitzgerald's analysis may provoke some new studies of EDR, and perhaps some examination of partisan mobilization efforts.

Okay, when is enough enough? Today the EAC issued another two new RFP's:

• RFP 05-08: Voter Information Public Access Portal Design Conference
  
• RFP 05-09: Voter Hotline Project
  

Developing voter hotlines we understand, especially given the success of some of those projects in the 2004 election (like 1-866-MYVOTE1). For those inquiring minds that just have to know, the EAC defines a voter information public access portal as "a Web site that disseminates voter education information."

Why a design conference? Well, ... "In June of 2005, staff at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) undertook a survey of public access portals ... The EAC found that there were several public access portals in operation for the 2004 Presidential election, and that their sponsorship ranged from locally-based, to independent sector and private corporations. many of the portals performed the same functions for voters, and efforts were found to be duplicative, disorganized, and oftentimes erroneous." And the idea here is that whoever gets this contract is going to set up a conference to bring interested parties together to figure out strategies to solve these problems.

So if you are looking for some fun weekend projects, add these to your list. You can guess what election geeks like us are going to be doing this weekend!

In addition to the two "Requests for Proposals" (RFP) that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued earlier this week on poll worker programs, four more have come out:

1. RFP 05-04: Develop and Build a Legal Resources Clearinghouse
   
2. RFP 05-07: Best Practices on Vote Count and Recount Procedures
   
3. RFP 05-10: Improvement of Election Data Collection
   
4. RFP 05-11: Information Management Analysis and Records Management Policies and Procedures
   

Details are on the EAC RFP website. There may even be a few more issued shortly, they are coming out at a very fast pace!

For anyone interested in these RFP's, read the fine print --- these RFP's all have very, very short deadlines: next week! Sharpen those proposal pencils!

In an op-ed piece in this morning's San Jose Mercury News, California's Secretary of State Bruce McPherson faulted current California legislation (SB 370):

My biggest objection in using the paper trail to check voting machine performance is that it denies many in the disabled community the ability to have the same level of confidence in the process that all other voters enjoy.

Secretary McPherson then went on to state:

Using paper receipts as secondary ballots at this point is too risky. They are designed for the voter's review and are not printed on ballot-quality paper and might not retain their quality during the often-lengthy recount and legal challenge periods.

Additionally, to ensure voter confidence in California's elections, manual recounts and paper audit trails should not be the only ways of verifying the accuracy of vote tallies.

Therefore, I have directed my staff to conduct parallel monitoring programs on Election Day in which we randomly select ``live'' voting machines, take them out of production, cast predetermined voting scripts on them, and check them against the totals produced by the machines.

Indeed, the issue of how California conducts the 1% manual recount needs examination and research, a subject that Jonathan N. Katz, Sarah A. Hill, and I recently studied in a working paper, "Machines Versus Humans: The Counting and Recounting of Pre-Scored Punchcard Ballots." Not to sound like a broken record, but how recounts are conducted (both those that are mandatory and those that are initiated upon demand), needs much more study. The research here is very thin, consisting in only a few working papers that we know of, for example, Ansolabehere and Reeves' study of New Hamphsire recounts (1946-2002), and the Herron and Wand paper on the 2004 New Hampshire Recount. This a woefully understudied area, and we hope that perhaps some new research might be spawned by research efforts like that of the Election Assistance Commission, under RFP 05-07, "Best Practices on Vote Count and Recount Procedures."

Secretary McPherson also noted:

Before we hastily start treating the paper trail as a secondary ballot, we need to explore other, more inclusive avenues to reach the goal of voting verification. I am working with other states' election officials on a national research and development effort to develop voting technology that assures independence and secrecy of the vote for disabled citizens.

This is a very good development, but other than this off-hand comment, we haven't heard anything about this national research and development effort. If readers have any information about which states are participating and what the effort involves, we would appreciate the information!

At APSA, we presented some draft material from our upcoming book on the e-voting controversy. The paper was titled, "Policy Framing, Risk Amplification, and the Debate Over Electronic Voting." We are planning on including this as chapter 4 of our book.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Scholars of the policy process have long studied how language and stories shape the policy process. More recently, scholars of the sociology of risk have focused on the study of policy framing in the context of risk and the "risk society". We employ these theoretical works to an analysis of the debate over election reform. In the aftermath of the 2000 election, there were strong claims made about the need for electronic voting. After all, the 2000 election debacle was occurred primarily on paper-based systems. However, over the last four years, opponents of electronic voting have been able to reframe the debate over electronic voting, creating a new "story" about elections to support their claims that an election can be "stolen" by DREs. Doubts about electronic voting are exacerbated by the strongly polarized political environment. America is evenly divided across "red" and "blue" states and across political institutions and many people thought that the outcome of the 2000 election was unfairly decided. Using a unique dataset examining media coverage of electronic voting, we present an analysis of the media coverage of electronic voting that shows how the critics of have instigated a dramatic shift in the way in which the media covers this issue. There has been a strong amplification through the media of the possible risks associated with electronic voting, with little consideration given to the other side of the equation. This shift has resulted in the media adopting an almost common view that electronic voting is problematic.


Comments welcome!

First off, the National Academies of Sciences project, "A Framework for Understanding Electronic Voting", is likely to issue a report soon (the project had an approximate start date of 9/01/2004, and according to the NAS website "A final report will be issued at the end of the project in approximately 12 months from the start date") ... we will keep readers of our blog posted about the release of this report as we learn more!

Secondly, the current "Commission on Federal Election Reform" (better known as the "Carter-Baker Commission") is poised to release their final report soon. According to the FAQ on their website, "The final report is scheduled for release in September 2005"). We will also keep Election Updates readers posted about this upcoming report. Based on comments made by Commission Executive Director Robert Pastor at the American Political Science conference last week, the Commission's final report is likely to contain a series of specific, and possibly provocative, recommendations on voting technologies and election procedures.

Last, as discussed in our third podcast, our evaluation of the current situation in Congress is that the prospects for "opening up HAVA" are slim. Based on discussions with some Congressional staff last week, and with a wide variety of folks in Washington who routinely monitor election reform efforts, there does not seem to be much interest in Congress in revisiting or amending HAVA, at least until there is a stronger consensus that there has been sufficient time learn what does and does not work in the HAVA.

The ongoing trauma of hurricane Katrina is raising numerous issues regarding how we manage and coordinate services in the wake of a natural disaster. Being an election geek, one thought I had before the levies broke and Katrina flooded New Orleans was this: what would have happened if Tuesday had been election day in Louisiana? Or, what if one of the tornados that were spawned by Katrina had hit a polling place in Georgia or Alabama? In short, what do states do in the case of natural disasters that occur during an election?

The key here, obviously, is to plan ahead for what to do in case of a disaster and to think through the plans you develop. The National Association of Secretaries of State developed a simple document to give some basic guidance on how to start the planning process, although this document focuses more specifically on terrorist threats.

Some states, in response to specific events, have developed state plans for what to do in the case of a general disaster or election disruption. In Utah for instance, Salt Lake County had to have a bomb scare on election day before the state developed a plan for how to address disasters and crises on election day. Most innovative, however, may be the recent draft rules issued on August 4, 2005 by the Secretary of State in Colorado. According to Draft Rule 43, all counties must file an emergency and security plan with the state. The Rule states:

Included in the security procedures filed with the secretary of state shall be a section entitled “contingency plan.” The contingency plan shall include:

(a) Evacuation procedures for emergency situations including fire, bomb threat, civil unrest, and any other emergency situations identified by the designated election official;

(b) Back up plans for emergency situations including fire, severe weather, bomb threat, civil unrest, electrical blackout, equipment failure, and any other emergency situations identified by the designated election official;

(c) An emergency checklist for election judges; and

(d) A list of emergency contact numbers provided to election judges.

Election officials are receiving training on the new rule in Colorado and are being encouraged to poke holes in existing plans. For example, if you have to evaculate, what do you do with the voted and unvoted ballots? With the voter registration rolls? Other supplies? Can poll workers allow people to vote outside the polling place while the potential disaster is addressed? The requirement in Colorado to even have a plan, and to get training on this important issue, is something other states might want to examine closely.

Our third podcast is available. You can download the mp3, or go to the following page to subscribe. Thanks for listening!

Most of the attention that is being paid to nonpartisan election reform is focused on nonpartisan redistricting commissions, especially the Proposition 77 effort in California (see our earlier post on this), and on Ohio's State Issue 4 (which would establish a five member appointed redistricting commission). But, Ohio voters are also likely to be called upon to decide State Issue 5, which would remove from the Ohio Secretary of State's office the authority to administer elections, instead developing a nine member election board.

The wording of State Issue 5 is:

To create a newly appointed board to administer elections, this amendment would:

Eliminate responsibility of the elected Ohio Secretary of State to oversee elections.

Create an appointed board of nine members to administer statewide elections and oversee the existing county boards of elections.

Provide that the members of the board are appointed as follows: four by the governor, four by the members of the general assembly affiliated with the political party that is not the same as that of the governor, and one by a unanimous vote of the chief justice and justices of the Ohio Supreme Court. The member appointed by the Supreme Court may not be affiliated with a political party. The governor and members of the general assembly must appoint equal numbers of men and women and take into consideration the geographic regions and racial diversity of the state. Members would serve staggered nine-year terms. Members may not hold any elective or other appointive public office, be a candidate for public office, hold a position with a political party, or be a registered lobbyist, and would be prohibited from making or soliciting political contributions and being involved in a candidate or ballot issue campaign.

Require the state board of elections supervisors to hire an administrative director, to prescribe uniform procedures to be followed by the county boards of elections, to appoint and remove members of the county boards of elections in accordance with statutory provisions, to certify the petitions of candidates for statewide offices and petitions for statewide ballot issues, to certify all equipment and systems used for voting and counting of votes, to approve ballot language for all statewide issues, and to maintain a statewide voter registration file.

Require the General Assembly to set a reasonable level of compensation for the members of the state board of elections supervisors and to appropriate sufficient funds for the board to be able to fully perform it duties and to compensate such staff and to acquire such equipment, supplies and office space as necessary for such performance.

An interesting initiative effort to follow, and an even more interesting process to watch if Ohio voters pass this initiative this fall.

In the past few days, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has issued three new "Requests for Proposals", which can be viewed on their website. One (RFP 05-04) deals with mainly technical assistance to the EAC on using web-based tools to develop a clearinghouse for legal resources for election officials. The other two proposals (RFP 05-05 and RFP 05-06) are focused on polling place workers, with the latter specifically dealing with college polling place workers.

While both polling place worker projects do clearly call for basic research into methods of recruitment, retention and training of polling place workers, the eventual products the EAC is seeking are largely best practice guides. For example, in the RFP 05-05 statement of work, it states: "The main product of this effort will consist of a manual that encompasses both a collection of identified best practices in the area of pollworker recruitment, training, and retention, as well as specific steps required to implement such programs in various jurisdictions." The wording in RFP 05-06 is virtually identical, with the primary difference being the insertion of the phrase "college poll worker" for "poll worker."

In 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project found:

We lost between 500,000 and 1.2 million votes because of polling place operations. According to the U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, 2.8 percent of the forty million registered voters who did not vote in 2000 stated that they did not vote because of problems with polling place operations such as lines, hours, or locations. The figure was 1.2 percent in 1996."

Unfortunately, it is not clear that things improved at all in 2004, as preliminary data from the U.S. Census indicates that 3.0% of registered voters who did not vote pointed to inconveniences in polling places as the reason. Note that these problems have slightly increased after 2000, and have almost doubled in magnitude since 1996.

While best practice manuals clearly are a good idea, we also need to undertake basic research to understand what exactly is causing problems in polling places, and why those problems might be getting worse in recent presidential elections.

Recently I was the guest on a segment of KCET's "Life and Times" show, talking with host Val Zavala about the upcoming campaign over California's Proposition 77, a ballot measure that would dramatically alter California's redistricting process. You can read the transcript of the show, or watch it in RealAudio. One of the most significant things that Proposition 77 would do is move California's redistricting process out of the hands of state legislators, to an appointed, nonpartisan panel of retired judges.

While it is unclear at this point how Proposition 77 will do in this fall's special election (it currently is trailing in the polls), the argument for nonpartisan election administration --- in all areas of administration, including both state and local election officials --- is gaining momentum.

Recently Thad and I wrote a report based on a national poll we conducted in March 2005. Currently a majority of states have chief election officers who are elected and partisan, and an untold number of county and municipal election officials are partisan and elected. However, our poll found that:

• Election should be run by nonpartisan, not partisan, officials.
  
• Elections should be run by election boards, nto by a single election official.
  
• These election officials should be elected, no oppointed.
  

As we concluded in our report, "the public supports having elections run by nonpartisan boards. Most importantly, less than one percent of Americans support the current combination of having elections governed by a single partisan elected official." We applied these ideas earlier this year to the specific context of California's election administration, in an opinion piece published by the Sacramento Bee , where we called for turning California's election administration over to an independent state Electoral Commission.

Rick Hasen has also written about this problem. In a paper titled "Beyond the Margin of Litigation; Reforming U.S. Election Administration to Avoid Electoral Meltdown", he notes that "The kind of mistrust we saw in the 2004 election is likely to continue unabated, with partisan election officials (and their discretionary decisionamking) a lightning rod for criticism and litigation. After the 2004 election ended, California's elected Democratic Secretary of State resigned while under investigation for, among other things, routing HAVA funds to support Democratic Party causes and supporting his own campaign coffers" (page 62). Hasen's proposal focuses on developing appointed, executive state election officials (nominated by a governor and approved by some large legislative supermajority), who are insulated in various ways from direct partisan pressures. Hasen draws heavily on the cases of Australia and Canada, both examples of nonpartisan election administration (though the Australian case relies upon an election commission and the Canadian case relies upon an appointed executive official; both have handy organizational charts, see the Australian model and the Canadian model.)

Soon the Moritz School of Law is having a conference on this issue, so this is a subject we will keep readers posted on as additional research and reports come along in the future. This is an issue that we doubt will disappear, and much research is needed on the current situation regarding the structure of election administration in the United States --- and how these various structures in turn influence a wide variety of "output" measures, like voter satisfaction and voting system performance.