Election Updates

Over the next week, we will be blogging on some issues associated with electronic voting. For example, we will be doing a post on why we have electronic tabulation in the first place (long ballots) and on some new voting technologies for verification. First, however, I am going to discuss secret ballots.

I am spurred to do this by an interesting article that came up in my google news alert on Friday. Lynn Landes, who writes about election reform for the alternative media, wrote an article entitled "Scrap the 'Secret' Ballot -- Return to Open Voting." Her premise is as follows:

From the Ukraine to the United States, many voters no longer believe that their votes are counted correctly. And that's regardless of whether paper ballots or voting machines are used. The problem is the "secret" ballot.

Secret ballots are anonymous ballots. They can be easily replaced, altered or destroyed, particularly if voting machines are used. Even if voters 'verify' their ballots and even if audits are performed, widespread vote tampering can still occur with relative ease and little risk of discovery because there still remains no effective method to 'certify' the authenticity of ballots, no way to identify an individual ballot and link it to an individual voter.

If the secret ballot is the problem, what is her solution? Simple:

The entire voting process should be 100% transparent. To that end, I am proposing a protocol for Open Voting with Total Transparency (OVTT):

"Voting shall take place only on Election Day. All ballots and counting shall comply with the following criteria: paper-only, voter-certified, duplicate-provided, and hand-counted. Certification shall require voters to include their name, address, and signature on the ballots. Election officials shall provide the voter with a copy of the voter's ballot. After the election, all ballots shall be available for public inspection at the Board of Elections office. Not permitted are the following: absentee or early voting, Internet voting, voting machines or optical scanners, and secret ballots.

Landes dismisses the idea that secret ballots discourage coersion. She argues that most voters are registered by party--which is only true in the 27 states offer voters the option to affiliate with a party--so voters already disclose their preferences publicly. Of course, as we have learned recently in the indictment of Scooter Libby, some individuals like federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald have a very strong incentive to have their votes cast anonymously to avoid being seen as a crony by the other side.

The bigger reason historically for having a secret ballot is to keep voters from selling their vote. As Richard Bensel wrote in his wonderful book, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, the lack of a secret ballot used to create quite an open economic market in ballots. Voters used to be able to get a wide variety of products, from shoes to scotch--for casting their ballot for one party or another. In Landes proposal, votes would have a receipt they could provide to the candidate or party official in exchange for goods or cash. Of course, the voter might not be able to trade their ballot receipt for stuff from a party official. Instead, their manager at their job might require submitting their ballot receipt as a condition of employment (and voted "correctly" as specified by the employer, as a condition of continued employment).

Now there is good that would come from this proposal; it would likely boost turnout, since voters would very likely be able to trade their vote for stuff. The introduction of the secret ballot in the late 1800s did result in voter turnout declining, as the benefits of voting for the voter declined. However, this is only true if you live in a battleground state. Voters in the Republican South and plain states and in the Democratic New England states will likely get little for their votes, since their vote is worth little. For example, a vote in Utah--for either party--is worthless for sale. The market for votes in battleground states would be huge, however. Parties would have every incentive to literally pour money into these states to turn out the vote.

By Kelly Alvarez Mace

On October 22nd, in the early afternoon I went to the Temecula Promenade Mall to cast my early vote. I went in the early afternoon, and there were few people at the voting station. The station was very well organized, first you were asked to fill out a form, with that form you would move to the next station where your information was located on a laptop. Then, you would be given a small, plastic card (similar to a card you would get at a hotel to open the door to your room) and you would vote electronically. Quick and organized process.

I did take a couple of pictures, and upon asking to fill out the form to start the process, I was immediately asked why I was taking pictures. I did respond that I have a family member who is involved in politics, the political process and electronic voting who told me that I should come and vote at this particular locale. I also told her that I felt that I was simply documenting the democratic process and that it was important for my children to view and understand that process as well (I had my children with me, ages 10 and 6). I did ask the person if it was an issue, that I had no problem with putting my camera away and she stated that she did not think it was an issue, as long as I did not take pictures of individuals voting.

I must say that it did appear to be an issue, however, as it became apparent that I was being highly scrutinized. Several other people watched the woman who entered my information from the first form to find my registration information. Also, a couple of gentlemen who were first seated, did stand and take positions around the electronic voting booths. Everyone was very kind, positive, helpful. I did not intend to set anyone on edge, but I am sure that they wanted to protect the process, protect the identities of the people voting, and ensure that I was there with the intentions that I stated.

Unfortunately, my registration information was not found in their computers. I had mentioned that I did it at the DMV when I registered my car after relocating from Seattle, Washington. At this news, a few people nodded, one gentleman even made a comment about "Oh...the DMV registrations" (?). As she asked me a couple of different questions (for example, my full name is Kelly Alvarez Mace, I believe that she was trying to see if I was under Alvarez, under Mace, possibly under some hyphenated combination of the two names...) another woman sat next to her and said in a rather large stage whiisper, "You know, she is the one with the camera"!

Again, in the most professional, pleasant and positive manner possible, I was asked to fill out the voter registration form. I was told that the deadline was Monday, October 24th, and that she would personally bring it to the offices and ensure that it was taken care of. I was invited to come back on Tuesday, October 25th as I would be registered and ready to continue the process.

I did return, on Sunday, October 30th. This time, however, there was a line of people and the mall was not even technically open yet. I got the form again, filled it out. I waited a short while for the next station, and indeed my information was pulled up quickly and I was ready for the elecronic voting station. As I went into that line, one of the women greeted me and told me that she was happy that I returned. So, while I obviously made a great impression, these were also people who cared enough to remember me and welcome me back.

The electronic voting was so slick. Easy to understand instructions, the touch screen was easy to use, and I tried to "trick" the system a bit to see what would happen. I "forgot" to vote on one of the initiatives, and I also only voted for one member of the school board when I had the opportunity to vote for no more than two candidates. The prompt was easy to understand and I was easily guided back to the issues that were still outstanding.

My favorite part: the nice gentleman who gave me my "I voted electronically" sticker to wear for the rest of my day! Overall, high rating for the process--the fact that I could vote early was great and very user-friendly. Everyone staffing the entire process was professional and polite and very helpful. Except for the fact that my voter registration form was clearly not handled correctly at the DMV, the process was really flawless.

What was also very interesting for me were the number of families I saw voting, with kids waiting by the side. To allow early voting in the ubiquitous shopping mall is actually quite amazing. It is a place with flexible hours for those with hectic, busy and overscheduled lives. The mall is a social event, is is our new town hall, if you will and somehow I saw the democratic process being impacted by that in an interesting way. We show our children how important it is to vote, this huge voting area is a great reminder for people to vote (it is not just one day, not just a few hours of that one day, and while an absentee ballot is great, mine routinely get thown out with what I typically perceive to be junk mail, sad but true), and we allow people to vote when it is convenient and easy for them. Many people in line had bags with them, others were discussing their shopping or lunch plans. Vote first, then shop til you drop!

Editorial Note: Kelly Alvarez Mace is my sister, who currently lives in Riverside County. She also provided three photographs along with her account:

• Signs for early voting in the mall.
  
• The early voting site, with poll workers.
  
• More signs for early voting.
  

I just learned of a project from IFES on election standards. Here is a short description of the project:

The Electoral Challenges and Standards Project encompasses a comparative study of five critical issues facing election administrators world-wide: refugee and external voting; boundary delimitation; political finance; election technology, and EMBs’ use of the Internet.

The project engaged five experts to develop framework documents that examine standards for these topics from the perspective of human rights conventions as well as those standards that are included in regional initiatives such as those by the Association of Central and Eastern European Election Officials, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Southern African Development Community, and the Council of Europe.

In order to receive comments from election administration practitioners, the frameworks will be discussed with EMBs through the regional associations of election officials. After comments have been received from EMBs, the Challenge project will develop five assistance packages to support EMBs in their administration of these new responsibilities under the standards frameworks.

Interestingly, they have five draft papers on this website, covering each of the critical issue areas:

• Steven Clift, Standards for EMB's Use of the Internet.
  
• Jeremy Grace, Standards for External and Abstentee Voting.
  
• Lisa Handley, Boundary Delimitation Standards.
  
• Roy Saltman, Standards for U.S. Voting Systems.
  
• Marcin Walecki, Political Finance Standards.
  

I've not had a chance yet to read these five papers, but they look of interest to those who are thinking about election administration standards.

I'd also like to second Paul Gronke's questions about the constitution of the Maryland committee. Paul noted that it is unclear that this commission has the capacity to really look at the academic research regarding the various areas they identified as being within the commission's mission, and asked why none of the very capable academic scholars who have studied issues like early and absentee voting, registration, voter identification, and provisional voting, were included in this commission.

Here's a quote from Paul's evaluation of the commission:

It's not clear what sort of academic research the commission will draw upon. The appointees seem well chosen, but the list mainly consists of lawyers and elections officials. Not sure why it doesn't include, for instance, Jim Gimpel or Paul Herrnson of University of Maryland, both of are well-known and well-published scholars of election reform.

I had same questions when I saw the announcement of this commission.

An article in Government Technology notes that:

Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., established the Governor's Commission on the Administration of Elections, a bipartisan commission to study and make recommendations to improve voting procedures in Maryland's local, state and federal elections. The Commission will submit recommendations to the Governor in January 2006.

"The citizens of Maryland deserve a safe, fair and accurate election system," said Governor Ehrlich. "This eminently qualified, bipartisan commission can help strike an important balance between voter access and voter integrity in Maryland elections. I look forward to reviewing their recommendations in January and working with the General Assembly to provide Marylanders the most reliable election system in the nation."

The Commission will focus on best practices, legislation and regulatory efforts in five key areas: early voting, absentee voting, provisional voting, and voter identification and voter verification systems. The Commission will also review election reform reports published by other states, commissions and task forces, including the recently released Carter-Baker Commission's election reform report.

One can only imagine that, after failing to gain partisan control over the state's election board, this is Ehrlich's way of attempting to pass election reforms that benefit his view of the election world. Given that Maryland has one of the most innovative and expert election directors in the country, one has to wonder what the commission will produce that could not be produced by the existing board.

I went to one early voting location in Los Angeles County this morning, to both observe the early voting process there and to cast my own vote in the special election.

I arrrived at the early voting location in Pasadena (at the Jackie Robinson Center), 1020 North Fair Oaks Avenue, at a few minutes before 8:30am. Unless you are very familiar with this part of Pasadena, or have had other business at the Jackie Robinson Center, this can be a difficult early voting location to find. Here is a view from curbside showing the relatively small, "real estate" type signs, that are in place to help voters find the location. Once you've parked (and by the way, parking is not a problem at this voting site!), the entrances are marked, though again with very small signs. Coming down the main hallway in the Jackie Robinson Center, there is a directional sign pointing voters to the early voting site, which is tucked into a small room.

A voter approaches the early voting site, and is greeted by a poll worker who directs voters to a sign-in table, where the voter provides his or her name, address, birthdate, and driver's license number on a small form. The voter signs the form and dates it, and then that form is given to a worker at a table at the entrance to the voting location. She gives voters a number, while she takes the information to a set of poll workers within the voting site who have access to the voter registration list for Los Angeles County. Provided that your name is in the list, and that you have not already voted or requested an absentee ballot, your number is called and you are given a smartcard that has the ballot style information on it. The voter is then allowed into the early voting site.

Here are three perspectives showing the early voting site ( a picture showing the device set up for accessible voting, a picture of the left side of the poll site, and the other side of the poll site.) They have managed to place a large number of voting devices into a very small space, and the only problem with this arrangement is that it is possible from some perspectives within the room to get a line-of-sight view of the screens of other voting machines, though given the number of poll workers and traffic flow in the voting site, I suspect that if anyone were trying to watch others vote it would be quickly noticed and effectively dealt with.

The voter then uses the smart card to active the voting device, and to get their correct ballot style. Here is a picture of the demonstration voting device (Diebold). The voter inserts her smartcard into the reader on the right, until a very loud "click" is heard, and then the screen activates and requests the voter to select a language. The voter eventually gets to the ballot (in my case just a handful of propositions). Once the voter is done, the smartcard ejects itself with an audible "click". The voter then deposits the smartcard in a box on the way out, gets her sticker, and is done voting.

I arrived just as the poll site opened for voting, and there were four people waiting ahead of me. It took less than two minutes for my authentication to be processed and for me to obtain a smartcard. While I was there (for about 45 minutes), approximately 35 people voted, and I noticed no obvious or pressing problems during that time.

A number of minor issues did crop up, some while I was voting, others that I observed and discussed with the poll site workers:

• Some voters had trouble with their smartcards. The primary issue was just not knowing to insert them fully and firmly into the reader. But one voter appeared to insert her card correctly, only to have it pop right back out; only after the assistance of a poll worker were they able to get the card to insert correctly and for the device to generate a ballot.
  
• The touchscreen on my voting device was a bit "flaky". Sometimes I had to push repeatedly, or very firmly, to get a choice to register; and in some situations there was a bit of a delay (seconds?) between my push on the screen and the decision to be rendered.
  
• There was substantial glare on the screen, most likely caused by the lighting in the room. This was an issue that the poll workers said had been experienced by other voters as well.
  
• The method by which a voter could check and correct her ballot, upon completion of voting, was not intuitive (it was documented in the initial instructions, though!). From the summary screen, the voter could back up into her original choices. However, to change the choice, the voter did not just push in the appropriate location on the screen to make the change; rather, the voter deactivates the current choice by pushing on it, then is able to make the change to the other choice. Again, I found this non-intuitive and it took me a few tries to figure it out.
  
• The font size on the ballot measure descriptions was quite small, especially on the summary screen; while I could read it, I suspect that some voters may have difficult reading it.
  
• The California voter "bill of rights" was not well-displayed in this location. The poll workers admitted that they did not have the bill of rights poster in their materials; instead, they had simply torn the bill of rights from a sample ballot and taped it to the door. So it was there, but not very prominently displayed.
  

These were relatively minor issues, and again, there were no major problems that arose during my time in this early voting location. I've early voting in this same location in all of the recent major elections, and have consistently found it to be a relatively quick, simple, and satisfactory voting experience.

That said, based on the number of people who were coming in to vote on the last morning of early voting, I have to admit that I think some of the projections of voter turnout in the special election might be quite optimistic. I was seeing something less than a voter a minute, for the first 45 minutes of poll site operation. The poll workers all felt that turnout at this location was relatively slight, not nearing levels they had seen in the recent major elections at that same site. This to me indicates, qualitatively, that turnout here might be something like the 2003 recall election or lower, perhaps in the range of past special elections, and that it really does not look like it is going to be as great as seen in recent presidential elections. I'd be happy to be wrong -- and there is still plenty of time for California voters to prove me wrong!

Recently the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project released a voter assistance guide for the statewide special election, "Steps to Make Sure Your Vote is Counted in the California Special Election." The site contains some helpful information for voters as they prepare to go vote absentee or early, or as they get ready to go to polls on November 8. These tips and suggestions can also be downloaded and distributed, if there are groups or organizations that would like to pass these hints on to people on their distribution lists.

Here is the press release from Caltech on this voter assistance guide:

Voting Experts Say Californians Should Make Sure Their November 8 Votes Are Counted

PASADENA, Calif.--The November 8 special election will allow California voters to decide on a number of initiatives rather than elect new people to statewide offices. But even though votes for a candidate will not be counted this time, the possibility of "lost" votes still exists, says an authority on voting at the California Institute of Technology.

"The experiences of recent elections have shown us all that we should continue expending some effort to make sure our votes count," says Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at Caltech and codirector of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. The VTP researchers determined after the 2000 presidential election that up to six million votes had been lost.

Alvarez and his colleagues, who have devised seven steps for voters to take to ensure that their votes are counted, say these steps will be effective for the upcoming initiative election.

The announcement of the seven steps is being made as part of the ongoing voting project, which was initiated in December 2000 by Caltech president David Baltimore and former MIT president Charles Vest following the election debacle the previous month. The Caltech-MIT group, composed of both political scientists and engineers, is charged with evaluating the current state of reliability and uniformity of U.S. voting systems, establishing uniform attributes and quantitative guidelines for performance and reliability of voting systems, and proposing specific uniform guidelines and requirements for reliable voting systems.

The seven steps the group recommends are as follows:

1. Check that you are correctly registered to vote if you have recently moved, changed your name, or recently have filled out a voter registration form. If you are unable to check this on the Internet, call your local election office to make sure you are registered, that you are on your precinct's list of registered voters, and whether you need to bring a form of identification with you in order to vote. If you have any doubt, you should call as soon as possible. The telephone number for your local election office is available from directory assistance.

2. If for any reason there is a chance you cannot get to your local polling place on November 8, request an absentee ballot today or check with your county election official to see if early voting is being offered in your area.

3. Check your ballot. If you vote by mail, make sure to check for errors on your ballot before putting it into the envelope. Also, make certain you provide all required information, (especially your signature) on the envelope, and return your ballot early enough to ensure that your county election official receives it before polls close at 8 p.m. on November 8. You can return it by mailing it to your county election official, by dropping it off at any polling place or the county election office on election day, or by authorizing a legally allowed third person to return it for you.

4. Get a sample ballot from your local elections office if one hasn't been mailed to you, read it carefully, and bring it with you to vote. If you have received a sample ballot in the mail, this is a good time to make sure that your name and address are correct and that you know the location of your polling place. Your sample ballot contains a wealth of information and also provides a convenient way to double-check your registration information as well as consider your choices on the initiatives, which are complicated and require some study. You can mark your choices in your sample ballot and use it for reference when voting.

5. If your name does not appear on the list of registered voters at your polling place, and you believe you are registered to vote and are in the right precinct, you have the right to cast a provisional ballot.

6. Get informed. Read your voter information booklet and sample ballot. If you did not receive one or both, contact your election office immediately, as this might indicate a problem with your registration status.

7. Contact your election office with questions or for help. If you have easy Internet access, you can find the telephone number of your county election office at http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_d.htm. Or you can call the California Secretary of State's office at 1-800-345-VOTE for information on how to contact your county election office.


Contacts: Robert Tindol Caltech Media Relations (626) 395-3631 tindol@caltech.edu

GovExec.com, a website devoted to covering government policy issues, has a column today on lean six sigma that is quite applicable to the world of election administration.

Six sigma is a management approach that has been around in one form or another since the 1940s, when Edward Deming promoted total quality management. Specifically, six sigma focuses on reducing errors in any given process to almost zero. Lean six sigma focuses on how to reduce waste—especially wasteful processes and procedures in an organization. The article outlines the six sigma principles as:

defining a problem area, mapping out the current process, measuring inputs and outputs, analyzing the impact of particular steps in the process on output, and experimenting with possible solutions, such as eliminating steps and making sure all participants follow the same steps.

Many of the nation’s successful and best-run corporations use six sigma as a bible for their operations. And bible is the correct term; six sigma adherents tend to be almost fanatical in their belief in the process and in the benefits that come from making it the center of a corporation’s culture.

One key to implementing six sigma reforms is to have a strong data collection model for the processes and procedures within the organization. As we saw last month, the EAC’s post-election survey has the potential to be a critical vehicle for measuring the performance of local election officials (LEOs). The survey also brought to the fore the problems inherent to implementing six sigma in many LEOs: many surveys were not complete because LEOs are not capturing the necessary data.

Additionally, the survey also illustrated the need for uniform definitions of various election processes and procedures. Without this uniformity, it is difficult to compare the performance of different LEOs and for LEOs to benchmark their operations against others for the purpose of identifying and implementing best practices.

Six sigma also emphasizes the need for training and for changing the culture of an organization. States and local governments have historically attempted to run elections on the cheap, often against the recommendation of the election officials. Investing in the training of election officials and election judges/poll workers is needed to improve election processes and is a baseline requirement for improving election processes systematically.

Improving the process of elections will also likely require election officials to be effective lobbyists. Nothing can screw up operations in a LEO faster than a poorly considered piece of legislation in the state capitol. LEOs need to be diligent in ensuring that new legislation is designed to mesh with existing operations and that poorly designed laws already on the books are altered so that election law in the states works in harmony.

Underlying six sigma is the idea that errors need to be almost zero in any operation. It is a methodology, a process, for moving an organization to perfection. Given that the public, candidates, and the media already expect perfection in elections, implementing a process that moves in that direction probably makes sense. It certainly cannot hurt.

I've received a few notices recently of a new agreement that the State of Georgia struck with Diebold Election Systems to buy 6000 "ExpressPoll" electronic poll books, along with a service contract, for what has been quoted as costing the state $15 million. A story from WTOC in Savannah, Georgia provided details about how the electronic poll book will work:

The ExpressPoll-4000 will provide poll workers with immediate access to voter information at each voting precinct. Voters are quickly and accurately verified by poll workers who simply touch a few characters of the person's first or last name and/or date of birth on the unit's intuitive touch-screen interface.

The functionality of the ExpressPoll-4000 enables poll workers to immediately identify if a voter is not in the correct voting location, and can quickly provide the address of the voter's designated precinct. A detailed street map may also be presented on the ExpressPoll-4000, providing visual instructions to the location of the voter's designated precinct. The ability to rapidly verify whether a person is registered will reduce the number of provisional ballots issued in precincts.

...

Registration information for all voters within a jurisdiction can be stored on the ExpressPoll-4000 to dramatically reduce the number of calls placed by poll workers to voter registration offices on Election Day. A poll worker can quickly and easily locate the name of any registered voter along with their appropriate precinct location, increasing voter convenience.

The ExpressPoll-4000 can also eliminate the need for costly printed voter registration books because the names of all voters in a jurisdiction are duplicated from the official voter registration roll for the respective election and stored within the memory of the unit. In addition, the ExpressPoll-4000 will be used in Georgia precincts to create voter access cards used by each voter to activate the Diebold touch-screen voting stations. The ExpressPoll-4000 will identify the correct ballot style for each voter based on stored information from voter registration files, further automating and refining the voter check-in process.

It'll be interesting to figure out methodologies to evaluate how electronic poll books work in practice, as this a concept that many have endorsed. In fact, in 2001 the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended "putting the complete registration database for a county on a compact disk and leasing a laptop computer for each polling place. Where this has been done it has reportedly eliminated a majority of registration problems and reduced polling place bottlenecks" (page 29).

On Monday, MIT colleagues Ted Selker and Tomer Posner gave a talk at MIT on what they call "Lean Voting". Monday's discussion on "Lean Voting" is archived here, where you can see slides from the talk. This talk comes from Posner's thesis, which I hope to get a copy of soon!

The basic principles of "Lean Voting" are given in the fourth slide, and are borrowed from work on management:

• Specify value (needs of the customer)
  
• Identify the "value-stream" (the processes used to create value)
  
• Make value creating steps "flow" (removal of waste from the value stream)
  
• Ensure that the process is driven by customer "pull"
  
• Strive for "perfection" (a process of continuous improvement)
  

Selker and Posner go on to talk about how these principles can be applied to the election administration context, and use as an example Brazil's transition to electronic voting.

One of the other interesting tidbits in this intriguing presentation is the reference to "Six Sigma" (slide 13) to election administration ... something that at various points in the past I've heard references to in the context of improving election administration, but have never actually seen discussed seriously.

These are some interesting new ideas for application to election administration. After all, one way to think about election administration is along the lines of the sort of logistical enterprise that large organizations routinely undertake (Conny McCormack of Los Angeles County in the past has compared the logistical arrangements of conducting an election in her enormous jurisdiction to a major military mobilization!). It might be interesting to see ideas like these developed more fully, by colleagues like Selker and Posner who know about process and by others who know about organizational management.

I look forward to reading Posner's complete thesis soon, and will provide additional details about these innovative ideas when they are available.

California's special election is just a week away (November 8th) and election officials here are struggling with a growing problem: recruiting sufficient numbers of qualified poll workers to staff precinct voting locations for the election. A very specific, and growing, problem in Southern California is recruiting bilingual (and even in some cases multilingual) poll workers. A story in this morning's Los Angeles Times puts some numbers on this pressing problem. This is a subject that Thad has written about in two publication (2003 and 2004) on language minority voters, as well as something we have written about in "Why Everything That Can Go Wrong Often Does: An Analysis of Election Administration Problems."

The story this morning states that in Los Angeles County, 11,200 poll workers will be needed in the upcoming special election, with 2,186 of them bilingual (in the six required languages, in addition to English). The needs in other Southern California counties are equally pressing, especially in Orange County where they have 4 required languages (in addition to English), and need 601 bilingual poll workers of the estimated 3,400 poll workers for the upcoming special election.

In Los Angeles County, the majority of these bilingual poll workers will be Spanish-speakers (at least 60%), but as Thad and I have found in recent poll site observation in Los Angeles County, there are many bilingual and multilingual poll workers in Chinatown (downtown), Koreatown, Little Tokyo and in the San Gabriel Valley. One of the important constraints on recruiting poll workers, including bilingual or multilingual ones, is that they are only reimbursed somewhere between $50 to $150 for their efforts; this makes it difficult to recruit poll workers, and as Thad and I have noted in "Why Everything That Can Go Wrong Often Does", can make the control problem for election administrators especially severe.

As an aside, the article this morning also has links and contact information for how to become a poll worker in Southern California counties ...

The recent SMS pilot test in Bulach, Switzerland, has been called a "success" in at least one recent media report of the project. The story doesn't provide much data to back this claim up, other than providing some participation statistics by voting method, noting that 11.6% of citizens used the SMS system to cast a ballot in the trial, 25.7% voted over the Internet, and the remainder (62.7%) voted either in person of by mail. The only major problems reported during the trial were difficulties with the use of PIN numbers, which apparently were sent to voters in the mail.

There is another piece out that gives some additional details of the features of the SMS voting system, noting that the system used in this test required the use of not only a user id and a PIN, but also that the user provide his or her birthdate. Note also that this story says that "Unisys supplied the programming to set up the SMS voting platform."

There is some additional information that I have found put out by the Swiss government on the e-voting initiative, though what I've been able to find is in German, French and Italian. If any readers know of material like this in English, I'd appreciate the reference.