Election Updates

The Washington Post reported that Hans von Spakovsky, who has been involved with election law in the Justice Department and has been an important part of the institutional memory in the Department related to HAVA, has been nominated to serve on the Federal Election Commission. It will be interesting to see how his moving there will affect the Justice Department's institutional memory and decision making in 2006, as HAVA litigation moves forward against the states who have failed to meet the law's requirements.

Today's USA Today notes that 1 in 20 Americans have such poor English skills that they cannot read simple documents, and an additional 30 million Americans have very low literacy skills. This report--the National Assessment of Adult Literacy--contains an array of interesting data, including the fact that many individuals who are elderly and also individuals with disabilities have low literacy.

In elections, there have been laws over the years to inhibit people with low literacy from voting. In New York, for instance, the state had literacy requirements until the passing of the Voting Rights Act. Given that you cannot discriminate against voters on the basis of literacy, this study raises interesting questions, such as:

• should ballots contain party symbols in addition to party labels?
• should we use candidate photos on ballots?
• will the move to electronic voting in many jurisdictions increase turnout among low literacy voters, given that these machines can facilitate voting among those who cannot read the ballot?
• should ballots be shorter and more simple?
  

Again, every once in a while I run across neat little ideas that election officials develop and implement, and I found one this morning. Warren Slocum, from San Mateo County in California, has put a neat little flash presentation on his website of the election administration cycle --- all of the little things that have to go on for an election to happen. Here is a link to the page and the demo. This is a helpful device to help show folks the complexity of election administration, and now whenever I am asked questions about the election administration cycle, I'll just send them the link to San Mateo County.

This opens the door for a lot of other interesting ideas, as to how election officials (or those interested in voter education) should think about new, and more interactive, ways to allow voters to learn more about their election process. Another example are the flash demos that were developed for the Buenos Aires e-voting pilot project, which are available at the site we have put together including documentation on the project. This of course brings me back to the general issue of voter education, and it is clear that there are lots of new and interactive ways to give voters the information they need for effective political participation.

We received a call for proposals (RFP) today, for a project run through the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, in association with the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Here is the letter we received:

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

I am writing with exciting news...

To build on the young voter turnout success of 2004 and 2005, promote new and creative approaches to get young people to register to vote, and keep the youth vote in the spotlight in 2006, The George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) announces a nonpartisan national competition to identify and support innovative and replicable strategies for registering young people ages 18 to 29. Funding for this competition is provided through a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

GSPM invites proposals from nonpartisan 501(c)3 organizations interested in testing voter registration efforts with young voters. We will award grants to a group of eight to ten organizations working with different subsets of the youth population and employing diverse, but strictly nonpartisan, registration methods. Winners of the award will receive grants ranging from $50,000 - $250,000.

Applications must be received by 5:00 pm on January 13th, 2006. Winners will be announced no later than March 1, 2006. Please see the attached RFP for details and pass it along to others that might be interested. Feel free to call with any questions.

Best wishes,
Heather

Heather Smith
Director, Young Voter Strategies
Graduate School of Political Management
The George Washington University
805 21st St, NW, Suite 401, Washington, DC 20052
202-994-5052 (ofc)
720-252-3932 (cell)
hsmith@gwu.edu

There are three documents associated with the RFP, which we have placed here:

1. The RFP itself.
   
2. Financial forms.
   
3. The cover sheet.
   

There are reports today that a tanker truck filled with completed ballots was stopped at the Iran-Iraq border. The New York Times reports that at least three other tanker trucks made it inside Iraq with their loads of ballots. As the paper notes,

The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.

The official, who did not attend the interrogation, said he did not know where the driver was headed, or what he intended to do with the ballots.

Clearly, this report undermines the confidence in the election outcome if there are reports in the voting of ballot box stuffing. It also illustrates the difficulty of stopping fraud when paper ballots are used. International elections often use clear ballot boxes, but if the box is stuffed--even knowingly--it is almost impossible to then sort the stuffed ballots from the properly cast ones. As a story in Slate.com noted in 2004, the reason many countries are moving to electronic voting is because it can deter this type of fraud. In India, bandits often take over polls and steal or stuff the ballot boxes. Electronic voting has greatly limited this activity.

The California Secretary of State's office has just released the presentation materials from the "Voting Systems Testing Summit", for those presenters who had electronic presentation materials.

Some highlights from my panel include:

1. Henry Brady's presentation, which began with a critique of the widespread focus on security problems with precinct voting systems. This is detailed in the first few slides from Henry's talk, where he pointed out that discussions of risk ought to include mention of both vulnerability and threat, not just vulnerability. But the main thrust of Henry's presentation was to talk about voting system accuracy in California, focusing on a variety of residual vote analyses. One of the methodological issues that arose during Henry's presentation was his use of data from the recent 2005 special election, and whether his use of that election (which involved only ballot measures on the statewide ballot, and no statewide candidates) to compute residual vote statistics using the lowest residual vote estimate across the eight ballot measures, produced a metric that is indeed comparable to other elections like the 2004 presidential election.
   
2. David Dill's discussion (he didn't use electronic props for his talk), in which he called upon Secretary of State McPherson to take a leadership role in security testing of voting machines.
   
3. Avi Rubin's discussion (he also didn't use electronic props), in which he had the interesting idea to develop a "DARPA" competition for testing the security of voting systems; the idea here would be to develop a contest, with a large monetary reward for the achievement of clearly specified ends, to get individuals and groups interested in thoroughly testing voting systems.
   
4. Michael Shamos's presentation, where he first argued that the existing "Independent Testing Authority" process was broken. But the most interesting part of Michael's presentation came in the second half of his slides (see slide 8 and beyond) where he developed an interesting typology of "voter verified paper audit trail" (VVPAT) systems. I found Michael's typology to be a very clever way to think about VVPAT systems.
   

Of course, there were just a few of the things I thought were of interest in our panel; each of the sessions had useful presentations and discussion. My understanding is the the Secretary of State's staff is preparing a report from this summit; it will be interesting to see what they took from this conference, and what recommendations they make for how California might move ahead into the brave new world of voting system testing.

A headline in today's electionline.org "Electionline Today" concerns a pact signed by the secretaries of state in four midwestern states --- Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska --- to create a task force to figure out how they can check voter registration lists across the four states in order to clean up their registration lists. There is a story in the Kansas City Star about this pact, including a few quotes from the relevant actors. The text of the pact is also available.

One obvious requirement for these four states to be able to engage in registration list comparison will be data exchange standards, something that Thad and I have been talking about for a few months now, based largely on the study that we recently published through the IBM Center for the Business of Government, "The Next Big Election Challenge." The work of these four states might be highly significant, if they are able to successfully develop data exchange standards for their voter registration files; they could provide an early test of the difficulties associated with registration data exchange and comparison --- and hopefully provide some guidelines for other states or regions to follow as they work to also exchange voter registration lists.

But there were also four other important components of the pact that have not received as much attention as the registration list exchange proposal. These are:

1. Cooperative training of election officials
   
2. Cooperative testing of election systems
   
3. Cooperative improvements for election security processes
   
4. Establishing uniform protocols for international observers
   

Given that the these four secretaries of state are trying to implement four reforms (registration list exchange, cross-state processes for testing voting systems, cross-state security planning and testing, and standards for election observers), it almost seems as if they are reading Election Updates!

But seriously, this memorandum of understanding between Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas might be a highly significant development in the long run, if they make it work. There is much to be gained if states can work together in these areas, especially voter registration data exchange, and the testing of voting systems. As the latter constitute much of the theme of the recent "Voting Systems Testing Summit" in California --- and was something that I speculated on in an earlier essay --- I would not be surprised to see other neighboring states in the near future try to develop similar cooperative ventures in these areas.

As attention has focused on election administration, and many outside observers have begun to routinely monitor the election process in the United States, one practice that has begun to receive some attention has been the "remarking" or "enhancement" of ballots by election workers. In some jurisdictions, this is a common practice; depending on the exact voting technology being employed, in some jurisdictions election workers will somehow act to try to insure that the voter's intention is easily read by a tabulation device.

One jurisdiction that has been proactive with this practice is the Los Angeles City Clerk's office, and their "remaking" of InkaVote ballots in 2005 raised a minor controversy during the Los Angeles mayoral election. In early observation of election-night activities back in the days the City Clerk was still using prescored punchcards, we observed election workers actively removing chads from the prescored punchcard ballots right after they were coming out of the sealed ballot boxes in their initial examination of the ballots.

There is an interesting story in the Seattle Times about this practice in recent Washington State elections. The story goes into great detail as to the problems that election workers are trying to fix, expecially with paper ballots:

Some mark their ballots with red pens, highlighters or hard-lead pencils the scanners can't read. Others circle candidates' names, or make "X's" or checkmarks next to them instead of darkening the ovals. Still more write in names not listed on the ballot, but they don't fill in the corresponding oval to identify it as a write-in vote.

Some write editorial comments on their ballots — Logan says the Seattle monorail was a popular topic this year — that can stray into ovals or the tracking marks along the ballots' edges that scanners must read to register votes correctly.

In Snohomish and other counties where voters mark their choices by drawing a line to connect two halves of an arrow, elections officials say they frequently must duplicate two-sided ballots on which voters have drawn lines so heavily that the ink bleeds through to the other side.

Wendy Mauch, Snohomish County's elections supervisor, says voters will be asked to use only pencils in future elections.

But one of the more interesting aspects of this particular story is the data provided about the extent to which ballot remarking goes on in Washington State. In a graphic associated with the story, the following counties are listed, with their respective rates of ballot remarking (County, number remarked, percent of ballots):

1. Clark: 14,000 (13.8%)
   
2. Whatcom: 8,479 (13.3%)
   
3. Kitsap: 9,218 (11.4%)
   
4. King: 45,468 (8.3%)
   
5. Snohomish: 14,085 (8.0%)
   
6. Thurston: 5,051 (6.6%)
   
7. Yakima: 2,872 (5.4%)
   
8. Pierce: 8,739 (4.7%)
   
9. Spokane: 5,000 (3.7%)
   

Both the Clark and Spokane numbers are estimates.

These percentages are surprising, and the first time I've seen estimates of the rates of ballot remarking. If remarking practices like these are widespread, it does indicate that we need to think about the implications of these administrative practices for our measures of voter error, because if numbers like these hold for other jurisdictions this indicates a much higher rate of voter error for paper ballots than has been found in recent research. But as a proximate matter, we clearly need to gather more information about the extent of such practices in jurisdictions using paper ballots, both the regulations surrounding these practices and how many ballots get remarked.