Election Updates

There was an interesting clip in the most recent email newsletter from Neal Kelley, Orange County's (California) innovative election administrator (one sign of his innovations is sending out this informative electronic newsletter!). Here is the clip quoted from his newsletter, and below it is a link to a photo that shows how they are adapting the Hart eSlate for addition of the paper audit trail device for the June primary:

Holes to be Cut in 9,000 eSlate Booths in Order to be Ready for the June Primary Election

Shown at right is wiring and the hole that will need to be added to each eSlate booth over the next several weeks. Work on this considerable retrofit effort will be begin as the April 11th election concludes. Over 100 people will be working on this project in multiple shifts as we work to prepare each booth for the June Primary election.

Here is the link referenced in the clip.

In response to the reports of a high rejection rate for California's statewide voter registration database, California Secretary of State McPherson is now proposing legislative changes to ease the matching problem now seen with the existing database and procedures. This is according to a story in this morning's Los Angeles Times, which only gives the following details of the proposed procedural changes: "The changes McPherson proposes would allow people onto election rolls even if they did not provide a driver's license number, as long as the statewide database could locate the number through the Department of Motor Vehicles."

Today's Sacramento Bee also has brief mention of McPherson's legislative idea: "McPherson says he wants to change the current law so voters who forget to include their license number don't have to be contacted by the local elections office as long as the rest of the information is valid and complete." What is unclear is whether this change is consistent with the Department of Justice's agreement with California over the existing statewide voter registration process, and we'll have to wait and see what happens.

The Sacramento Bee story today also had data from other counties in the state regarding the extent of matching problems in some counties:

Sacramento County election officials say 2,100 of roughly 600,000 registrations have been affected by the new requirement.

El Dorado County officials say 127 out of an estimated 100,000 registrations are pending.

And while Yolo County uploaded its estimated 90,000 voter registrations with the state in January, it's unclear how many cases weren't accepted.

...

A sampling of submissions from the beginning of the year showed that 74 percent were verified, 25 percent required verification - either because the person didn't include a license or Social Security number or because the numbers didn't match what the state had on record - and 1 percent was due to system errors.

In response to the rejections, Sacramento County has been mailing letters to affected voters telling them they will be able to vote provisionally in the upcoming June primary, while El Dorado County has been working to contact affected voters by telephone.

Another detail that was reported in the Sacramento Bee story was that Sacramento County has had to hire two temporary employees to deal with problem registration requests.

Clearly, California will be a state to watch in early June, as it is unclear how the statewide voter registration process is going to perform when it is stressed before what might be a highly competitive statewide primary election.

There are a few things that were at the top of my head this morning, all of which I'll incorporate into this single essay.

1. Voter registration problems in California. There is more in the press today about what appears to be a high rejection rate with new registration requests (or re-registration requests) under California's new statewide voter registration system. A story in the San Francisco Chronicle claimed: "More than 25 percent of the new registration forms sent to the state since Jan. 1 have been returned to the counties, most because they lack the driver's license, state identification or Social Security numbers now required by federal law." The story then notes that the rejection rate has been about 30% in San Mateo County, and is at 43% in Los Angeles County. This raises three concerns:
   
   
   
   • What is going to happen when we get closer to the June primary and there are tens of thousands of new requests in the larger counties every day? Will election officials have the ability to process all of the rejections?
     
   • Will there be large number of voters who think they have been registered in states like California that require exact matches, but who then show up on election day to find they are not registered at all?
     
   • What is happening in other states that require exact matching, as well as states that do not require exact matching, and why don't we have federal standards for voter registration systems?
     
   
   
   
2. More on the humidity, op-scan, and the SAT's woes. Many high school students will be taking the SAT this weekend, and there are still questions about why there were so many tests that were incorrectly scored recently (now reportedly 5,000) --- and whether those problems have been fixed. In this morning's Los Angeles Times there is a report that the contractor who scores the test is convinced the problem before relates to humidity, and they will undertake steps to fix the problem:
   

   
   Officials of the College Board, which owns the SAT, and its test-scanning contractor, Pearson Educational Management, blamed the incorrect grading largely on answer sheets that passed through scanning machines while still moist from humid weather.
   
   The dampness, officials said, slightly stretched the answer sheets. That, combined with answer "bubbles" that were lightly filled in, caused Pearson's scanners to miss some correct answers, officials said.
   
   One of the main changes for this Saturday's SAT: Answer sheets will sit at least eight hours — to dry out, if necessary — before being scanned at Pearson's facility in Austin, Texas. The tests also will be re-scanned 24 hours later.
   
   Other fixes could come after a consulting firm hired by the College Board, Booz Allen Hamilton, concludes its 90-day review of the handling of the SAT answer sheets.
   

   
   But MIT VTP colleague Ted Selker is also quoted in this same story: "Although many testing experts say Pearson's humidity explanation is plausible, some suspect that human error played a role. Ted Selker, an MIT computer scientist who has studied optical scanning, said it "is obvious" that a scanning system operator missed the problem." Ted's right.
   
   This issue leads to questions about how optical scan ballots are handled immediately after elections, and to what extent these same humidity issues may affect initial counts of ballots. We'll learn more about ballot handling procedures when Thad is done with his on-going study of ballot counting and recounting procedures, and it will be important to ascertain then to what extent election officials have procedures for optical scan ballots that address the types of issues that the SAT and it's test-scoring contractor are facing.
   
   
3. Student protests and mobilization in Los Angeles. The student walk-outs and protests continue throughout the Los Angeles area, and according to reports I heard this morning are also continuing in other cities throughout the nation. These student protests follow the large protest this past weekend in downtown Los Angeles, there at least a half million are thought to have marched to protest immigration reform legislation pending in the U.S. Congress.
   
   The interesting question about the student protests is how they are coordinating their actions, and what the methodology is that is being used to pass the word about upcoming protests and walk-outs. It seems that the students are using the Internet, and primarily the MySpace website, to coordinate and announce their protest efforts, according to a story in this morning's Los Angeles Times. Here's what this story said specifically about the use of MySpace:
   

   
   They had heard about the March 24 walkouts at several high schools in Los Angeles, and decided to launch a protest of their own. On Sunday afternoon, they posted a bulletin on MySpace — since discovered by school administrators, who were not pleased — announcing that anyone wishing to participate should stand up at the 8 a.m. tardy bell Monday and "meet in front of the school."
   
   In the scattered, rapid-fire text typical of students' MySpace missives, the bulletin continued: "dOnt b scared…. All these politic officials are trying to make their dreams come true by destroying ours, AND THEY WILL, unless we do something about it!!"
   
   On the Internet site, which serves as a free-of-charge, virtual gathering place, users can send bulletins to all of their MySpace "friends." The lists can include dozens of people and the bulletins can be passed along in seconds.
   
   It didn't take long before most of Garden Grove High's roughly 2,200 students knew what was coming, without the knowledge or involvement of teachers or parents.
   
   Soon, the bulletin crossed over an invisible but critical line between teens who were friends but attended different schools. Students began posting their telephone numbers, and soon dozens more pledges to participate were obtained through phone calls and instant text messages.
   

   
   Again, an interesting use of new information technologies to rapidly mobilize and coordinate political activity --- much like the use of text messaging and SMS that we have written about previously here on Election Updates. We certainly need more research as to how these new technologies can, and are, changing the dynamics of political mobilization efforts, especially for the younger generations who use these new technologies so widely.
   

There are reports of problems with early use of California's new statewide voter registration system. According to one of these reports, in this morning's Los Angeles Times, the problems may make it difficult or impossible for some voters to cast ballots in upcoming local elections, and perhaps even the upcoming statewide primary election in early June.

For example, the report this morning notes that there were 14,629 people in Los Angeles County alone whose registration attempts were rejected by the new statewide system, forcing the local officials in LA County to work to resolve all of those application problems. Forty-three percent of these rejections came from people trying to register between January 1 and March 15. Think how pressing this problem may become as we get closer and closer to the June primary, when tens of thousands of registration or re-registration applications can be received in large California counties in the days before the close of registration.

According to information provided by Los Angeles County these rejections are arising for a number of reasons:

1. 4.7% were rejected because of database errors --- interruptions in transmission, for example.
   
2. 7% or more contained all of the necessary information but there were rejections due to a lack of a perfect match between the application materials and existing information the state has on the individual.
   

California is one of the few states that requires an exact matching of registration application materials with state databases, and this is apparently producing this rejection rate.

A representative of the Secretary of State was quoted in the report as stating that the new system has a 74% acceptance rate, which of course means there are a lot of rejected applications, which are then examined by the appropriate local county official as to why they were rejected. Again, when we get close to the June primary and this system is stressed, hopefully it will not pose an overwhelming burden on county election officials who will be swamped with other issues associated with both setting up a complicated and competitive primary election and who are working to implement other provisions of HAVA.

Ted Selker and I wrote a memorandum to our VTP colleague Ron Rivest, requesting that the Technical Guidelines Development Committee's Subcommitee on Computer Security and Transparency (Ron chairs this subcommitee) consider the development of federal standards for statewide voter registration database. Readers of Election Updates know this is an issue that I've been talking about in many different forums recently.

Here is the most relevant section from our short memorandum:

We wanted to draw your attention to an issue that has been a subject of our concern since the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002: the lack of federal standards for the Statewide Voter Registration Databases (SVRD) required in most states under Section 303 of HAVA. We request that the TGDC and the TGDC Subcommittee
on Computer Security and Transparency initiate the development of federal standards for these important voting systems.

Our understanding is that the scope of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) covers standards for “voting systems”, and in our opinion SVRD’s are indeed “voting systems”. We refer you to section 221(e)(2)(A) of HAVA, which states that among the areas the TGDC should develop guidelines includes “the computerized list required under section 303(a).”

Of course if readers want to raise this issue with NIST and the EAC, we welcome the help!

I received email today from folks at the Advancement Project, regarding their efforts to collect data on the experiences of Louisiana's displaced voters. Here's the email message they sent to me:

he Louisiana State Legislature, a federal district court judge, and the U.S. Department of Justice have all, to date, rejected reasonable requests to establish out of state satellite polling places for the displaced voters of New Orleans Parish, who have been temporarily scattered around the nation yet hope to participate in the important upcoming elections. We are collecting hard facts on the experiences of displaced voters who have little choice except to navigate the little-used LA absentee ballot process. We are recommending that voter protection advocates use the attached procedures and tracking form to collect these facts and forward them to Advancement Project so that we can compile, analyze, and distribute them for legal and other advocacy purposes. Time is of the essence. We need your help in order to ensure fair elections! Thanks.

And here are the two files that were attached, one a set of guidelines for collecting data on the experiences of displaced voters, the other a a form that can be used to document their experiences.

We've gotten word of an interesting event next week relating to HAVA; unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts neither Thad nor Mike will be able to attend this meeting. But here are the details for those interested:

Princeton University will host a Colloquium on Election Reform Legislation on April 6-7, 2006. The event will focus on HAVA, the Voting Rights Act and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. For more information visit their webpage.

We look forward to hearing more after this event about what was discussed!

We received word that the Election Assistance Commission, Office of the Chairman currently has two paid internship positions available: a research specialist position and a legal research specialist position. Both positions are for Summer or Fall 2006.

Recently we wrote here about an innovative grant competition being initiated by the Pew Charitable Trusts, working with George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. Recently they announced the winners of the competition. Here's a sampling quoted from the announcement:

Mobile Voter and Music for America will register 18- to 29-year-olds nationwide using creative text-messaging and Internet technology in conjunction with concerts and celebrity outreach.

Redeem the Vote and the Center for Civic Participation will register religious youth in Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Michigan using both peer outreach and innovative email and Internet strategies.

The Close Up Foundation will partner with high school teachers to register seniors in class.

The American Association of State College and Universities, the state Public Interest Research Groups, and Allegheny College’s Center for Political Participation will register college students through peer-to-peer outreach at state colleges, private universities and community colleges.

The National Council of La Raza will register young Latinos through its network of community-based organizations and service centers in 10 states.

Black Youth Vote will register young African-Americans, focusing on those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Registration will occur in six southern states and at historically black colleges and universities.

The League of Young Voters will register young voters in four states, including two with election day registration, where the League will hold “parties at the polls” to register youth on Election Day.

Women’s Voices, Women Vote will register single women through a direct marketing campaign.

Building Blocks, Building Votes will register young renters by recruiting apartment and block captains to register their neighbors in Oregon’s densest, youngest neighborhoods.

My understanding was that they received many dozens of proposals as part of this innovative competition, and that there will be some effort to undertake a meta-analysis of the effects of the various projects upon completion. This will be a very interesting initiative to follow.