Election Updates

The funny thing about election reform and the debates we have today about elections is that they are not new. Consider, for example, the debate over corporate involvement in elections and whether corporations are doing nefarious things to tamper will ballots. Our friend Charles Stewart at MIT recently forwarded us an article from 1884, where the Western Union Corporation felt the need to defend itself from claims that it had tampered with election returns. (In the 1884 election, the Democrat, Grover Cleveland, defeated Republican James Blaine). The article--actually, an open letter to the public--was published in the Boston Globe and states in part:

Now since the presidential election is settled, and the excitement incident to a close political contest is abated, it is proper to say that we are prepared to show most conclusively the utter groundlessness of all charges against the Western Union Telegraph Company of partiality in reporting or withholding the election returns of the State of New York.... I deny in the most emphatic manner that the Western Union company delayed, altered or withheld the election returns of the State, or any other State, or tampered with them in any way....

What is interesting here too is that Green had a history in partisan politics, having served in the Kentucky State legislature.

The Wisconsin State Legislative Audit Bureau just issued a report documenting the findings of an evaluation of voter registration practices in Wisconsin. This audit evaluated voter registration requirements, address verification procedures, and practices used for updating voter registration lists. Wisconsin allows voter registration before election day in person, by mail, or with the assistance of an election official; eligible citizens can also register at poll sites on election day.

We've only begun to examine this report, but there are some interesting results to highlight.

First, their evaluation of eight election jurisdictions (Table 11) found that of the 348,176 registration records reviewed, 3,116 were identified by the audit team as being duplicates (0.9%). Across the eight jurisdictions, there was substantial variance: the City of Eu Clare had 2.6% of records reviewed identified as duplicates, while the Town of Minocqua had only 8 of 4,619 duplicates identified (0.2%).

Second, in six election jurisdictions reviewed, the audit team found 783 registrants who they identified as deceased (including 388 in the City of Madison); see Table 12.

Third, in six election jurisdictions studied, the audit team identified 453 registrants who were also identified as convicted felons (Table 13).

Fourth, in the six election jurisdictions examined, the audit team found 105 cases of "potentially improper or fraudulent voting in the November 2004 elections" (page 6):

• 98 ineligible felons who might have voted.
  
• 2 who may have voted twice
  
• 1 underage voter
  
• 4 absentee ballots cast by individuals who died before election day.
  

For more details of the potentially illegal votes, see pages 50-51 of this report.

The audit report also contains a series of recommendations to improve the voter registration process in Wisconsin, especially as that state moves to implement the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requirements for voter registration.

There is much here for further study, as undoubtedly we will hear much more about voter registration practices throughout the nation as states rush to implement the HAVA requirements by January 1, 2006.

The Center for Policy Alternatives, Demos and Common Cause are hosting an election reform conference in Columbus, Ohio, on election reform. The conference is targeted mainly at state legislators interested in election reform issues. Topics to be covered in this conference include voting technology, election day voter registration, provisional balloting, vote centers, to name a few. The conference agenda is available here, and other conference information is also available.

According to a U.S. Newswire release just out, the Carter-Baker Commission report will be released on Monday (1:30pm EDT). As the press release stated, "On Monday, Sept. 19, former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker and other members of the Commission will be on Capitol Hill to meet with members of Congress and present the Commissions findings. After Former President Carter and Former Secretary Baker meet with members of Congress to notify them of the Commissions findings, the two leaders will hold a press availability announcing the contents and recommendations of the final report."

The press release gives the following url for the Commission (and I assume this is where the final report will be posted on Monday).

The NAS e-voting report, "Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting" has now been out long enough for thorough reading, and a number of folks have had the opportunity to work through what is a very lengthy and detailed report. For example, Dan Tokaji wrote recently in his Equal Vote blog that "it appears to be a careful and comprehensive evaluation of the the difficult questions raised by electronic voting technology."

As the report itself summarizes, "The primary intent of this report is to describe some of the important questions and issues that election officials, policy makers, and informed citizens should ask about the use of computers and information technology in the entire electoral process, thus focusing the debate on technical and policy issues that need resolving." This is an admirable goal, and we need to work to answer these questions and issues with rigorous research, exactly the sort of approach to the debate about voting technology that organizations like the National Academies of Science can help facilitate.

This report covers a lot of ground, and ranges from discussions of voting technology to questions about the processes used to develop, test, and certify voting systems for use. Furthermore, the report focuses on a broad definition of voting system, including not just the technologies used by voters to cast ballots, but also the electronic technologies used increasingly for voter registration.

Importantly, the NAS report raises the right questions about issues that are currently the focus of much public debate, like the security of voting systems (Section 4.2.2). But it also asks many new questions about issues that should be part of the research and public debate:

• Trying to develop a better framework to understand fundamental problems like usability and human factors (Section 4.2.3).
  
• The acquisition of voting systems (Section 4.2.1).
  
• Poll worker training and new voting systems (Section 5.2).
  
• The need for a better understanding of public confidence and public evaluation of voting systems (Section 6.3).
  
• The role of the private sector in election administration (Section 6.7).
  

These broad issues --- and the specific research questions raised about each in the NAS report --- deserve careful reading by those interested in the electronic voting debate.

There is a lot to chew on in this report. Hopefully it will help stimulate additional interest throughout the sciences, and among both private and public sector organizations that can provide the financial resources necessary to undertake the sweeping research agenda called for in this report. Clearly, this report helps frame a research agenda, and we need to insure that this research agenda is undertaken. In particular, towards the end of the report (Box 6.1, pages 6-16 and 6-17) there is a brief presentation of "Possible Components of an Institutional Infrastructure to Support Electronic Voting", of which a very large component of this infrastructure is research and development, as well as field investigations and testing.

Last, the report had a positive conclusion, one that folks from all sides of the voting technology debate should take note of:

In developing this report, the committee took note of the significant emotion and passion felt by all participants in the public debate about electronic voting. Although such passion and emotion are often regarded as impediments to a reasoned and and thoughtful public debate, the committee believes that these passions reflect --- at heart --- a very emotional and gut-level commitment to the notion of democracy. One can --- and people do --- take issue with various arguments about technology or organization, but on balance, the committee believes that the nation is much better served by passionate engagement than by dispassionate apathy, and so the passions expressed by the various participants on all sides of the debate are to be commended rather than disparaged ...

Hear, hear!

Our fourth podcast is now available (you can download the mp3 here), or you can subscribe to our podcast.

There is an interesting debate ongoing about polling places, specifically centered on voting centers. What is probably most interesting is that there is no real debate going on--a growing concensus has emerged among practitioners regarding the benefits of voting centers.

The champion and most effective example of vote centers is Larimer County. In Larimer County, a person can vote anywhere in the County because the county uses electronic poll books that are connected to a secure central server that updates voter registration data in real time, which keeps voters from voting at multiple voting centers. The twist is that Larimer County radically downsized the number of polling places from 143 locations to just 22. These 22 polling places are in centrally located cites that have large parking facilities and are very accessible to the disabled. In many ways, the County stole a page from the big box retailers, who have fewer "mega" locations but that are centrally located so they draw large numbers of voters. The results were also successful; Larimer County reports higher turnout after the switch.

So where is the debate? Well, several studies of polling places have found that reducing the number of polling place reduces turnout. For example, Henry Brady conducted a study examining the effects of consolidating precincts in Los Angeles County for the 2003 recall election. As the paper notes:

...consolidation in Los Angeles County reduced turnout by a substantial 1.88% in the precincts in which the polling location was changed. We also find that voting at the polling place decreases even more, by 3.05% but that an increase of absentee voting of 1.19% makes up for some of this reduction. In addition, we find that the substitution of absentee voting for a reduction in polling place voting is greatest among people of middle age and older whereas younger people are more inclined to simply not vote at all. We also find that the change in polling place location has two effects: a transportation effect resulting from the change in distance to the polling place and a
disruption effect resulting from the information required to find the new polling place and the risk aversion that people feel about going into a new neighborhood. The disruption effect is about five times larger than the transportation effect for the average person who experienced an increased distance to the polling place of about a sixth of a mile, but the effects were roughly equal for someone who had an increased distance of about a mile.

This study is consistent with work done by James Gimpel at the University of Maryland. In his article Distance, Turnout, and the Convenience of Voting he finds that:

Greater distance to election-day precinct sites also increases nonvoting, at least to a point, but the effect is nonlinear. Voters in the very outermost reaches of the metro area use absentee votes in very high proportions. At extremes of distance, voters are sufficiently conditioned to its effects on so much of their daily routine that it plays less of a role in their calculations about voting. These citizens have often already taken steps to cast absentee ballots through the mail as our findings suggest the vast majority of them do so.

Similarly, the abstract for his article Political Participation and the Accessibility Of The Ballot Box notes that:

Commuting to and from precinct locations can be burdensome, particularly on a busy weekday in congested metropolitan areas when many voters are pressed by the demands of everyday living: work, family and school. Some precinct locations are more accessible than others, and for the less accessible ones, at least some people will feel that the cost to get there outweighs any benefit they may reap in terms of personal satisfaction from having fulfilled a civic obligation. Even after controlling for variables that account for the motivation, information and resource levels of local precinct populations, we find that accessibility does make a significant difference to turnout. The evidence points to a non-linear relationship. Distance imposes its heaviest burden on turnout in suburban precincts in the middle ranges of distance (2–5 miles). In the most rural precincts, where in spite of the distance (6–10 miles), travel routes are direct and relatively unimpeded, turnout rates are higher.

There is actually a reason why the Colorado experience has been so successful, even in light of research that suggests it would not be: voter education. The Larimer County clerk engaged in a very strong voter education program before this change was implemented. At the recent APSA meeting, Bob Stein mentioned that the clerk sent each voter four (4) notifications that the change would occur. It may therefore be that the turnout success in Larimer County is partially the voting centers but also partially the increased communication between election official and voter.

The problems with vote centers will likely come when counties start importing the vote center model without adopting the vote center voter education campaign that accompanied it in Larimer County.

There is an interesting conference starting tomorrow in Italy, which MIT colleague Ron Rivest helped to organize, called "Frontiers in Electronic Elections (FEE 2005)". The preliminary program is now available, and many of the presentations look interesting to those who follow this highly technical area of research on voting technology. We will work to see if we can't obtain copies of the papers and/or presentation materials, and if so, will try to make them available to interested readers.

The FEE 2005 conference follows in the wake of the "Workshop on Trustworthy Elections" (WOTE 1) and the "DIMACS Workshop on Electronic Voting --- Theory and Practice" (WOTE 2) conferences, held in 2001 and 2004, respectively. The crypto community is making much progress in basic research on improving voting system security, and we look forward to hearing more about the proceedings from FEE 2005. It will be important to see how research in this area is cumulating, and where the gaps are for future research.

The National Academies of Sciences released a report on electronic voting today, "Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting." One of us (Alvarez) was on this panel, and we will comment more extensively on this report soon.

The full report is available here.

• The "A Framework for Understanding Electronic Voting" website.
  
• A short summary of the report (from Herb Lin, Study Director).
  
• The press release for the report:
  
  Electronic Voting Systems Show Promise, But Require Bigger Commitment by
  Federal Government and States
  
  WASHINGTON -- While electronic voting systems have improved, federal and state governments have not made the commitment necessary for e-voting to be widely used in future elections, says a new report from the National Academies' National Research Council. To become viable, more funding, research, and public education on e-voting are required, said the report's authoring committee, which was co-chaired by two former governors. And because electronic voting systems, like all complex computer systems, are fallible and may be compromised -- either deliberately or by accident -- backup systems will be needed in the event that allegations of fraud or malfunction arise.
  
  "Electronic systems are expected to improve election administration, but this will happen only if more resources are dedicated to understanding how these systems work and to educating election officials and the public on their use, " said committee co-chair Dick Thornburgh, former Pennsylvania governor and U.S. attorney general, and now counsel to
  Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP, Washington, D.C. "In an election environment with great variability in state electoral law and in the qualifications of local election officials and poll workers, such an effort will be critical to realizing the full potential of electronic systems."
  
  Election officials are concerned that the voting controversy in Florida during the 2000 presidential contest and other real or perceived voting mishaps have shaken the public's confidence in the election process, and more locales are turning to e-voting as a presumably more-foolproof alternative. The report, however, emphasizes that decisions about using e-voting systems need to based on whether they will significantly improve the reliability and efficiency of elections, an obvious
  consideration, but one that often is overlooked in the public debate. Decisions about the ultimate desirability of e-voting systems should not be limited to assessments of their performance to date, the committeewarned, noting that e-voting technologies are improving over time. Election officials should ensure that these systems are reliable, user-friendly, and comply with election laws. In the end, elections that are trusted by the public should be considered the gold standard of
  election administration, the committee added.
  
  To help election officials gauge the robustness of an e-voting system, the committee posed a series of questions on matters such ascomputersecurity and voter privacy, system usability, and the life cycle of software and availability of upgrades. The answers should be made widely and easily available to officials and the public, who will need them to make sound decisions about when and if to adopt e-voting.
  
  Thornburgh's co-chair on the committee was Richard F. Celeste, former governor of Ohio and U.S. ambassador to India, and current president of Colorado College, Colorado Springs. "The issues associated with electronic voting are not partisan issues," Celeste said. "We're asking questions that should be part of a rational and systematic investigation of the unresolved issues and ramifications of electronic voting. The public should be involved in asking these questions, and should pay heed
  to the answers. Our democracy demands nothing less."
  
  The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. It is a private, nonprofit institution that provides science and technology advice under a congressional charter. A committee roster follows.
  
  

It turns out here are additional street address standards, in addition to the URISA proposal that we discussed earlier. Joe Hall (UC Berkeley) emailed the following tip:

"... there is [xAL], the Extensible Address Language... for which a US-specific subset of the elements in that standard could be used (as a basis or as the standard itself)."

Joe also gave the url for xAL.

Thanks to Joe for the tip, and if there are others out there, please pass them along.

Anyone who has worked with real voter registration databases, voter history files, absentee voter files --- or any sort of database that has street address information for voters --- knows that working with street addresses can be messy and complicated. Streets have names, and sometimes they have typographical errors in them; sometimes numbered streets will be identified by number, sometimes by character strings ("7th Street" can sometimes be "Seventh Street"); there are apartment numbers and fractional street address numbers; and then there are lots of descriptive elements used for street addresses, that take different forms ("North" or "N", "Drive" or "Dr", etc.). These complexities make it difficult to use this data an any particular voter file, and certainly are going to cause headaches when folks start to try to compare data in new statewide voter registration files relative to other government databases (Department of Moter Vehicle files, for example).

An organization possibly unfamiliar to those in the elections arena ( the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association [URISA]) has initiated the development of draft street address data standards. These standards, while not being formulated for election administration, are of interest to those of use who are concerned about the need for election data transactions standards. The URISA documentation for their draft standards justifies the need as follows:

Street addresses are the location identifiers most widely-used by state and local government and the public. Street addresses are critical information for administrative, emergency response, research, marketing, mapping, GIS, routing and navigation, and many other purposes. Because they have evolved over many decades, under the control of thousands of local jurisdictions, in many different record and database formats, and to serve many purposes, different address formats and types pose a number of complex geoprocessing and modeling issues. As a consequence, government agencies struggle with these issues as they seek to integrate large, mission-critical files into master address repositories."

Sound familiar?

We have only just begun to review the URISA draft standards, which are available for public comment until October 3, 2005. Like most folks in the elections area, our attention has been on the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, which are also open for public comment until September 30. But based on our initial read, the URISA street address standards seem like a very good idea, and should be reviewed carefully by those thinking about election data transactions standards. There are points of overlap here between the URISA draft standards and what others are doing in this space, but specifically on elections:

• Hart InterCivic has proposed their "Election Data eXchange (EDX)" as a standard for the secure exchange of election data (recently submitted to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE] for possible use in formulating such a standard [IEEE 1622]).
  
• The OASIS group has proposed "Election Markup Language" (EML)) as another data transaction standard.
  

Having street address standards clearly are necessary to implement the type of data transaction standards we recently proposed in our report, "The Next Big Election Challenge." Standards for statewide voter registration databases are likely to be a hot topic in the near future, as more and more states come on line with their new systems, and the URISA approach to develop standards for street addresses might be helpful for those thinking about voter registration or general data transaction standards.

The Los Angeles Times on Sunday ran an interesting story that raises issues that Mike and I have discussed for much of the past week: what does Katrina mean for voting and elections? Consider the following questions:

First, Louisiana is scheduled to hold open primary elections on October 15 and a General Election on November 12. Where will the displaced New Orleans residents vote? Displaced residents who are still within the state of Louisiana should be able to re-register in their new place of residence and vote in these elections, according to state voter registation rules. This could have a dramatic effect on the outcome of elections across the state.

Second, will displaced New Orleans residents who are in Houston, San Antonio, or other places likewise be registered and vote? Most states have simple 30 day residency requirements, making these new voters a targeted population for the next elections.

Third, what does all of this mean for 2006 and the elections in Louisiana? New Orleans was a stronghold for Mary Landreau, and a very large percentage of her voters have gone off in a disapora. What will this mean for politics in the state? And as the previous item suggests, what does this mean for politics in surrounding states as well? As the LA Times reported,


The hurricane ruined so many people's lives, and much of their suffering is because of failures of government--failures to act, failures to plan, failures to invest, failures to prepare--that we need to ensure that these people can vote so they can express to the government know exactly how they feel.