Election Updates

Another important lesson that I learned during election-day precinct monitoring over the past few years is that there are many good things that occur during any particular election, the result of people thinking through past problems and issues and trying to devise innovative solutions to those problems.

I saw a number of examples of innovations and good thinking during California's special election, the highlights of which I thought I would present here.

1. Improving polling place access. I've already discussed the problems of parking and accessibility, especially at schools that were in session on election day. But there were also people actively trying to alleviate or solve those problems, for example at the Corona Fundamental Intermediate School (Corona, Riverside County, CA). The head precinct judge in this location had brought along his own traffic cones to mark off handicap parking as close as he could to the entrance of his polling location, and had worked with students in the school to develop directional signs to help voters figure out which school entrance to use to get to the precinct. Here was a person who recognized a problem with a polling place, and who worked to mitigate it (he is the guy in the cap in this picture).
   
   
2. Improving the use of voting technology. In Riverside County, a jurisdiction employing the Sequoia AVC Edge touchscreen voting device, the local county officials provided to each precinct a handful of "stylus" instruments for voters to use. The "stylus" was just a standard looking No. 2 pencil, but with an eraser at each end. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a photograph of this "stylus" on election day, nor have I been able to locate much information yet about where Riverside County got this idea from or where they procured the "stylus" from. But as a tool to help mitigate calibration issues with their touchscreen voting devices, and to help mitigate the build-up of residue on the touchscreens, this is a good idea. The "stylus" also can help improve voting system accessibility for certain voters who might have trouble touching the screen.
   
   But there was an interesting twist in the use of the "stylus" in Riverside County. I had never seen this employed before there, and it was clear that the precinct workers were not certain about how they were to deploy this voter aid. In some voting locations in Corona, precinct workers provided the "stylus" to every single voter who used a touchscreen voting device. In other locations in Corona, they provided the "stylus" to voters who the polling place workers thought might need the instrument (typically elderly voters).
   
   And there was at least one location in Corona where I noticed the polling place workers never gave out the "stylus", even though there was at least one elderly voter who I observed having great trouble with the touchscreen voting system; after observing the voter in distress, the polling place workers did say verbally to the voter that they could use a "stylus", but the workers made no effort to physically provide the "stylus" to the voter having difficulty with the touchscreen voting device and did not even get up from their chairs to help this particular voter.
   
   While an interesting innovation, clearly they need to figure out how to make sure precinct workers deploy it effectively in the future.
   
   
3. Improving the voter registration process. In all of my polling place observations over the years, I've never had the opportunity to witness the use of a voter registration database, on election day, in precinct voting. I did see, in Los Angeles County, the use of a laptop computer to access the voter registration database in one consolidated voting precinct in Pasadena. According to the precinct workers, it had been very helpful throughout the day, whenever there was a question about a voter's registration status. This of course is a reform that the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project called for in 2001, and is something that I suspect we will see more adoption of as statewide voter registration files become prevalent after January 1, 2006.
   
   
4. Improving openness and transparency. As I wrote about just before the special election, Orange County (CA) embarked upon a series of novel uses of new technology to improve openness and transparency of their election process. They used novel webcams, and allowed anyone to use their website to track ballot boxes. An interested individual could use those innovative webpages to see ballot boxes as they arrived in the election headquarters on election night.
   
   This is a great use of new technology to increase the openness and transparency of the election process. I'd advocate that election officials think seriously about using similar technologies in coming elections, including live coverage (through a webpage) of all stages of the pre- and post-election process. Why not webcast the pre-election logic and accuracy testing of voting devices? Webcast all election-night activities, including ballot box arrival, unsealing, sorting and examination of all material from voting locations, and tabulation? Use a webcam to cover any post-election activities, including examination and tabulation of provisional and absentee ballots, any recount activities (mandatory or not),and the final canvass. And post all of the videoclips of these activities on a website somewhere, so they can be downloaded by anyone in the future for any reasons. This is not a perfect substitute for allowing direct election observation by interested individuals, but it can allow those who for whatever reason could not make it to election headquarters to observe these activities in person.
   

The bottom line is that while we continue to find things happening on election day that are problematic, we also continue to see many innovations and examples of people working to solve problems. We all need to work to identify these innovations and solutions, and to get the word out when we see new ideas being implemented to solve old problems.

John Mark Hansen's presentation this morning in the National Academy workshop brought to the table some fundamental questions about election reform --- what are the basic normative or democratic principles we are trying to achieve with election reform? In his brief presentation, Mark mentioned three different basic normative principles: fairness, equity and legitimacy. Undoubtedly there are other basic principles we might consider when undertaking election reform.

This is an area that our colleagues in normative political theory can certainly help us with, but I'm not aware of any initiative to engage normative theorists in these discussions. What basic normative principles should we consider when we talk about election reform? Are fairness, equity and legitimacy the only core principles to focus on? Are there others to consider? How (and should) we order these principles? Are there trade-offs on these principles, or can we develop reforms that can achieve positive progress on all normative dimensions simultaneously? If there are trade-offs, how do we make these difficult choices? How can we measure and evaluate how various election reforms perform on any particular normative dimension? These questions about first principles are difficult to assess, but we should seek input from normative political theorists in the ongoing debates about election reform.

Since I am sitting across from Mike at the NAS conference, I too want to blog on the panel I was on, which discussed the role of intermediaries in elections. I am going to focus on the overview comments made by Michael Traugott (Professor, U. Michigan), Ted Selker (Professor, MIT) and then the presentation that I did.

Traugott noted that there are two issues in elections. First, how do candidates get access to the media, given its importance for informing voters? This is a major issue that has been discussed by campaign finance people, who often discuss issues of public financing of elections.

Second, how does the public learn about elections, especially problems in the implementation of an election? Traugott noted that the problems that occur with or in the electoral system are likely to be mediated by a third-party—especially the media—instead of being experienced directly. Consider this: an individual voter has a low probability that she will be affected personally by a problem in polling place. Instead, a voter is likely to experience problems through media reports about election issues and problems. Acknowledging that these problems are learned through a mediated setting increases the importance of the media and their describing the problem correctly. Also, there is good reason to believe that this mediated effort is related to trust in the system.

Traugott notes that there are causal relationships between news and trust, affecting by how the media frame the news. One issue is that reporters have very limited, general skills in dealing with issues of science. In the area of elections, we might ask, for example, what is an error in the election process? How do you explain the occurrence of a problem to the lay public? How do you do this without bias? Traugott argues that elections should be presented as a system, and reporters should be educated about voting, voting processes, and voting technologies. The risks of errors in reporting increase as elections become more complicated with the introduction of electronic voting. Finally, Traugott notes that the blogoshere creates new problems and risks as well. In blogs, information spreads rapidly, raising special issues like the need for fact checkers and truth squads during key times in the electoral process.

Ted Selker discussed the role of intermediaries in elections. For example, poll workers are key intermediaries, as noted in the first picture in his slides, where the poll worker is opening and interacting with the voter-verified paper trail. He also noted that different people spend different amount of time with different forms of media intermediaries: for instance, Asian American men spend 50 percent more time on the Internet compared to all men in the same age category, but spend much less time with radio compared to all men in the category. Ted notes that the intermediaries of the future are likely to be much different than those of today and may change the way people vote. In fact, it is easy to imagine a person today surfing the Internet on a wireless handheld devise to figure out which candidate to vote for in the dog catcher race; you just surf to your local newspaper and find the endorsements.

I focused my discussion on the role of election officials and poll workers as intermediaries (my slides are here). For those of you who read our blog regularly, my talk first focused on the role of information from the election official to the voter, using Larimer County as an example (see here for my blog on this topic). I then talked about how poll workers are critical to the voting process and directly affects the voter’s experience in the election and their trust in government (see this blog for my discussion of the study I have done on this issue). Interestingly, two election officials made comments directly supporting this point. One election official noted that most voter education goes on between the time the voter enters the polling place and the time the voter leaves. A second election official noted that poll workers are “street level lawyers” who interpret the entire election code on the fly for voters.

Clearly, there are a number of assumptions about the role of poll workers in elections and the role of voter education that need to be further tested and studied.

As Doug Chapin from electionline.org has noticed, I am blogging live from the National Academies workshop, "Developing a Sound Analytical Basis for Improving Public Participation and Confidence in 21st Century Elections." It's been quite an interesting morning, with a lot of informed and productive discussion.

My panel this morning was on "Fraud prevention and election audits in the new electoral environment." Fellow panelists were Dan Wallach, Gary Cox, Walter Mebane, and George Gilbert.

My slides are available here, in power point format and in pdf format. Thad's session is later on this afternoon, on the subject of "Intermediaries" in the election process --- and I suspect that once he is done with his session that he'll put his slides up here as well.

My discussion focused primarily on the issues of making sure that we talk about the entire voting system when we talk about fraud and auditing, to focus some attention on security and contingency planning, and to get us thinking about developing rigorous and thorough protocols for testing of voting systems. These comments parallel and build upon what I talked about last week in Sacramento at the California Secretary of State's "Voting System Testing Summit."

During our panel, Walter Mebane presented some interesting results, developing a new method for trying to detect voting device anomalies using data from two Florida counties in the 2004 election (Miami-Dade and Pasco Counties). What Walter does in this analysis is use ballot image data from these two counties, which apparently includes information on the precinct and voting device that recorded each ballot image. Walter than tests to see if the distribution of votes differs across the voting devices used in each precinct, under the assumption that the distribution of votes in a particular race (say the presidential vote distribution) should be the same for each voting device in a particular precinct. If a voting device is systematically malfunctioning, or has been manipulated, it should show up as a deviation from the other voting devices used in the precinct. I'll talk to Walter and see whether his draft analysis is ready for distribution.

Another interesting thought during the panel discussion came from Dan Wallach, who argued that one important change we could make in the existing testing and certification process would be to alter it from the simple binary "pass or fail" system we now have, to a categorical "grade" format. Of course, voting devices could get a failing grade under Dan's proposal, but we might get more information about just how close a voting device came to meet certain standards under such a scheme. It might be interesting to consider such a scheme, but where we don't just get back a single grade for the voting device, but grades for how close the device comes to meeting a whole range of testing standards (imagine a "report card" for the outcome of a particular voting device's certification process).

More soon ...

There is an interesting new research paper by David Kimball and Martha Kropf, recently published in Public Opinion Quarterly. Those of you with research university access can get the full text of the paper. Otherwise, here is the abstract of the paper:

The 2000 presidential election focused attention on the problem of unrecorded votes, in which a person casts a ballot but fails to record a valid vote for a particular contest. Although much recent research has evaluated voting technologies and their effects on unrecorded votes, there has been little research on the effects of ballot design. We argue that the same theories used to design and evaluate self-administered surveys can be used to analyze ballot features. We collect and code paper-based ballots used in the 2002 general election from 250 counties in 5 states. We code the ballots in terms of several graphic design elements, including the content and location of ballot instructions and the layout of candidate names and office titles. Our analysis suggests that several ballot features are associated with unrecorded votes (both overvotes and undervotes) in the gubernatorial contests. We also find that ballot design features exacerbate the racial disparity in unrecorded votes. Ballot design can be an important factor in determining whether voters are able to cast a ballot accurately, which can influence the legitimacy of elections.

Interesting research, and more on this general issue later after I've had a chance to digest this (and some other) new research that has just been published.