Election Updates

Earlier this week I wrote about allegations regarding voter registration fraud schemes in Orange County (CA). There is now word that the state is launching a formal investigation of these allegations, a joint effort of the Secretary of State and Attorney General offices. This joint effort is discussed in a story in this morning's Los Angeles Times. The allegations revolve around voter registration drives that are using private contractors who are being paid to collect new registrations (which according to this and earlier media reports run as high as $3 for each new registration gathered).

Here's a press release on the investigation:

ttorney General Lockyer and Secretary of State Bruce McPherson Announce Joint Investigation Into Allegations of Voter Registration Fraud

April 7, 2006


06-034

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(916) 324-5500

(SACRAMENTO) - Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Secretary of State Bruce McPherson today announced the formation of a joint investigation into allegations of voter registration irregularities in Riverside and Orange counties. Secretary McPherson had previously opened his own inquiry into the allegations and requested the Attorney General's assistance.

"The right to free and fair elections is fundamental to our democracy," Lockyer said. "The allegations of voter fraud not only involve serious crimes, they also strike at the heart of our constitutional form of government. We will aggressively investigate these claims and vigorously prosecute those who broke state laws."

"Ensuring that eligible voters have the ability to vote is my top priority," said Secretary McPherson. "This office has zero tolerance for fraud. I will continue to do everything within my power to make sure that the integrity of our democratic process is protected and the rights of our citizens are preserved."

As the state's chief elections officer, the Secretary of State is in charge of overseeing the elections process and partnering with local election officials to ensure fair and accurate elections. McPherson's Elections Fraud Investigation Unit vigorously responds to allegations of voter fraud and recommending for prosecution of those who would corrupt the people's basic right to a free and fair election.

Under state law and the state Constitution, the Attorney General has concurrent jurisdiction with county district attorneys to enforce criminal laws. The state Elections Code establishes criminal penalties for specified acts of voter registration fraud. Although district attorneys are primarily responsible for investigation criminal wrongdoing within their own county, the Attorney General often will get involved where related acts of criminal conduct allegedly occurred in multiple jurisdictions.

I'll keep posting updates regarding this investigation as they come in.

I received a series of interesting photographs from the recent Cook County primary election from Michelle Shafer (VP for Communications and External Affairs, Sequoia Voting Systems). Michelle is a long-time reader of Election Updates, and knows how much election geeks like Thad and I love election-day snapshots.

1. Polling place sign. There are a number of photos in this set that show the signs used by Cook County, utilizing interesting color and font combinations. This one is in three languages.
   
2. Ballot scanning device in precinct. Michelle explained in an email to me that the blue enclosure and bag were Cook County ideas; apparently the purpose of the blue bag is to capture ballots with write-in candidates so that the election judges can more easily figure out the number of write-in ballots when they do precinct tabulation.
   
3. This shows the election judge's table, and some of their materials (slightly blurred).
   
4. Here we see two election judges, stacks of ballots, and other materials being used by the election judges.
   
5. Voter's Bill of Rights. At one point Thad and I had signs like these from a visit we made to Cook County, but they are somewhere in deep VTP storage!
   
6. Additional signs.
   
7. Polling place exterior. Note the "Alternative entrance" sign.
   
8. This is a particularly nice photo showing the layout of voting devices in one precinct. Note the electronic voting device on the left for accessible voting, five booths for voters to use to fill out their optical scan ballots, and the precinct ballot scanner in it's snazzy blue booth on the right.
   
9. Here's a photo of the instruction sheet for use of the precinct electronic voting device. Note that it is in English and Spanish.
   

Thanks, Michelle for sharing these with us fellow election geeks.

Interestingly, it turns out that both Thad and I are going to be in Chicago attending a conference at the same time that there will be a meeting of the Illinois State Board of Elections in Chicago regarding their March 2006 primary. We are hoping to attend that meeting!

UPDATE: April 8, 2006.

The following is from Michelle Shafer, as it turned out that some of these photos were actually taken by Elaine Larson, Assistant Registrar of Voters in Santa Clara, California: "Michelle wanted to acknowledge that many of the pictures she passed along were taken by Elaine Larson, Assistant Registrar of Voters for Santa Clara County, California. Elaine was officially observing Cook County's election as Santa Clara will be using the same Sequoia touchscreen equipment with the VVPAT printer for the June 6th California primary that Chicago used in theirs. Elaine stated in an email that it is "important to show and tell how well the election was set up and worked" from her perspective."

Thanks again to Michelle --- and now to Elaine --- for providing these photos to us and letting us use them in our work!

There is a provocative opinion piece in today's New York Times by former presidential candidate John B. Anderson and EAC commissioner Ray Martinez, "Voters' Ed". They call for automatic voter registration for all high school seniors in the United States, and in the opinion piece deal with the pros and cons of their proposal.

In their piece, there's one sentence worth repeating here: "High schools, after all, are the ideal environments in which to introduce young Americans to voting and to impress upon them the importance of active participation in our democratic system." Indeed, and in my opinion, we can do more than just automatically register every high school student to vote. In an era where schools are focusing more on teaching basics like reading and math to try to teach to standardized testing, we should keep in mind that schools are also a place where we need to insure that civic values are taught and reinforced. Perhaps as part of automatically registering all high school students we should also have coursework that teaches and reinforces civic values. If schools need to cut back on social studies to teach reading and math, so be it; but how about making sure that the reading and math incorporate civic values?

Yesterday Thad and I participated in some interesting discussions and conversations with a number of folks regarding how to possibly improve on the survey research efforts of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). In informal remarks to the assembled individuals (including some election administrators, users of the EAC survey data, and representatives from the EAC), I addressed four questions.

1. What are the challenges in collecting election data? Here I said that there were five basic challenges that we have encountered in recent years trying to collect election data:
   
   
   
   1. Data availability --- all too often, important data is not available, even simple statistics like the number of ballots cast at the county level in some states.
      
   2. Inconsistent reporting --- as we are learning, many states have different definitions and conceptions for various procedures, for example, what it means to be a registered voter and how they treat different types of registration status when they report registration data.
      
   3. Errors in data --- sometimes data is reported incorrectly.
      
   4. Aggregation --- in most cases, important precinct-level data is not available.
      
   5. Election administration --- we have very little reliable data about basic administrative issues, like governance and cost.
      
   
   
   
2. What are the key data elements for social science research? Here I discussed three key data elements for current research:
   
   
   
   1. Election outcome statistics: registration, participation, votes on all candidates and measures.
      
   2. Data by voting mode (precinct voting, early voting, absentee voting, UOCAVA voting).
      
   3. Administrative data (costs, personnel, training, voting equipment, for example).
      
   
   
   
3. How are election survey used and abused? Here I primarily concentrated on some problems we have seen in the use of elections data:
   
   
   
   1. Aggregation and ecological inference --- the use of aggregate data to make inferences about individual-level behavior.
      
   2. Statistical abuses --- model overfitting and the ignorance of historical data.
      
   3. Incorrect use of demographic statistics --- in most cases, demographic statistics are reported for populations, not for the registered or voting electorate (for example, we rarely know the numbers of white or nonwhite registered voters in a jurisdiction, unless we try to estimate those quantitites).
      
   4. A lack of experimental data.
      
   
   
   
4. What possibilities exist for collaboration on survey data collection? Here I talked about a number of ideas. One idea is to simply note that election officials can and should reach out to the research community for help; as I noted, we often are quite interested in collecting data, and we sometimes have the financial support and personnel to support data collection. Another idea was to exploit possible collaborations between social science infrastructure for data collection, for example, the American National Election Studies or the General Social Studies. A third idea was to think outside the box about how we can use new technologies to collect data (there will be more discussion of this in our report).
   
   

The good news from these conversations yesterday is that the EAC is committed to continuing it's efforts to collect and distribute high-quality election and election administration data, in 2006 and 2008.

Thad and I also presented a draft report, "Improving the Election Day Survey". We will finalize and release the final report in the next few days, and will of course write more about our conclusions regarding the EAC Election Day Survey at that time.

I just received an email telling us of a new website for the Election Administration Research Center at UC Berkeley. The Center was established in January 2005 within the Institute of Governmental Studies. Visit earc.berkeley.edu.

While out in Washington in meetings about collecting election data, I received an email from a reporter about an interesting voter registration scheme that was allegedly undertaken recently in Orange County. The story is in the Orange County "Register, and it seems to involve a couple of different problems associated with paid voter registration efforts.

Here is more from the story about the schemes:

More than 100 Orange County residents who thought they were simply signing petitions to cure breast cancer, punish child molesters or build schools were duped into registering as Republicans, an Orange County Register investigation found.

The ruse took place over several days in December and January at shopping centers throughout Anaheim, Santa Ana, Buena Park, Westminster and Garden Grove, where paid petitioners begged, cajoled, lied and committed forgery to get so-called Republican converts. Petition circulators were paid as much as $7 for each GOP registration.

Orange County election officials have received complaints from 167 people who were flipped to the Republican Party without their permission. The Register found the problem was far wider, interviewing 112 others who were not only switched, they were tricked and deceived. Among the victims is a lifelong Democrat who was pressured to fill out forms even though she didn't have her glasses and couldn't see what she was signing.

The story also has an interesting graphic regarding the schemes alleged to have been used in Orange County. I hope to have more about these schemes once I'm back in town and have a chance to talk more with the reporters covering this story in the OC.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is rolling out a toll-free number and media campaign to help displaced New Orleans voters figure out how they can participate in upcoming New Orleans elections. The toll-free technology is the same as that used in recent elections, for example, the 1-866-MYVOTE1 toll-free number used in the 2004 presidential election, provided by InfoVoter Technologies.

Here is the release with additional information about the DNC New Orleans project:

DNC Unveils Toll Free Number and Radio Ad Campaign to Help Displaced New Orleanians Vote

3/30/2006 3:32:00 PM

To: National and State Desks

Contact: Karen Finney of Democratic National Committee, 202-863- 8184

WASHINGTON, March 30 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In an effort to help displaced New Orleanians exercise their right to vote, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean and DNC Voting Rights Institute Chair Donna Brazile today announced a Get-Out- The-Vote plan for the municipal elections on Saturday, April 22.

After Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents were displaced from their homes and they now live elsewhere in Louisiana and neighboring states. Due to the hurricane, more than 100 polling places were destroyed and consolidated into a smaller number of precincts. These problems could potentially prevent New Orleans residents the opportunity to vote in an election that will determine the future of their city.

The plan features a new toll free number, 1-888-DEM-VOTE or 1- 888-336-8683, which provides New Orleanians now living in Louisiana and neighboring states critical information about: 1) the process to request an absentee ballot application, 2) new polling locations in New Orleans, and 3) early voting satellite locations elsewhere in Louisiana.

To publicize the new toll free number, the DNC will start running advertisements and Public Service Announcements (PSAs) next week on African-American radio stations in Houston, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge. These ads, which will air during the next few weeks prior to the election, were recorded by New Orleans native Donna Brazile.

"The right to vote is one of the most fundamental and precious rights in any Democracy. This new toll free number will help all New Orleans voters cast their ballot and have their vote counted," said DNC Chairman Dean. "Democrats believe every effort must be made to provide all the necessary information about the elections to all Orleans Parish voters, whether they are currently in or out of the state."

DNC Voting Rights Institute Chair Brazile commended the work of the civil rights community, and many non-profit groups in helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina exercise their right to vote.

"These upcoming municipal elections are part of the rebuilding process and a key step in restoring these communities," said DNC Voting Rights Institute Chair Brazile. "We applaud the outstanding work of the civil rights community, the Congressional Black Caucus, fraternities, sororities, churches and our allies in labor who have been working endlessly for months to ensure that all displaced voters have the right
to vote."

Below is text of the radio ads and links to listen to audio of the ads:

Text of Radio Ad No. 1: Absentee Ballot

For audio of this ad, please insert the following link in your
browser: http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/democratic1.download.akamai.com/ 8082/audio/20060330_db_absentee.mp3

You may have lost your home. You may have even lost a loved one. But you have not lost your right to vote.

Hi, this is Donna Brazile.

If you are a displaced resident from New Orleans and were registered to vote before Hurricane Katrina, you have the right to vote in the April 22nd elections.

If you have not received an application for an absentee ballot please call our toll free number 1-888-D-E-M-VOTE to have one mailed to your current address.

In order to vote you must mail your application request before Tuesday April 18th. Again the number is 1-888-DEM-VOTE or 1-888- 336-8683. Don't give up your right to vote.

Paid for by the Democratic National Committee, www.democrats.org. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. The DNC is responsible for the content of this advertising.

---

Text of Radio Ad No. 2: Poll Locator

For audio of this ad, please insert the following link in your browser:
http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/democratic1.download.akamai.com/ 8082/audio/20060330_db_polllocation.mp3

You may have lost your home. You may have even lost a loved one. But you have not lost your right to vote.

Hi, this is Donna Brazile.

If you are a displaced resident from New Orleans and were registered to vote before Hurricane Katrina, you have the right to vote in the April 22nd elections.

If you plan to return to New Orleans on Saturday April 22nd, you can find your poll location by calling this toll free number, 1-888-DEM-VOTE.

It's time to return home and let your voice be heard. Please call 1-888-336-8683. That's 1-888-336-8683. Don't give up your right to vote.