Election Updates

The strange stories surrounding the recent Vernon election continue. This story, out this morning, is about alleged intimidation of candidates running in the Vernon election, and their advisors.

What is particularily distressing here is that the Vernon problems are getting close to home --- the trail of intimidation is now reaching to South Pasadena, a nice and quiet town just south of Pasadena:

The woman drove out of her driveway in South Pasadena, and without knowing it, straight into Vernon's election-related surveillance of people.

The two cars with tinted windows and no license plates followed her as she weaved along streets and zipped through yellow lights to shake them. At stops, men in the cars videotaped her, she said. Panicked, she called police as she drove.

....

The Feb. 13 incident marks another twist in the increasingly bizarre municipal elections in Vernon, a small industrial town south of downtown Los Angeles.

South Pasadena police accuse private detectives working for Vernon of drawing their weapons, harassment and reckless driving as they followed people challenging the incumbents. The department called Vernon officials to complain about the investigators' conduct and to tell them they are not welcome in the city, Sgt. Mike Neff said.

I was wondering who those crazy people were swerving around the other day when I was driving through South Pas ...

The Election Assistance Commission is holding a public meeting this upcoming week in Seattle on vote counting and recounting. Here is the public notice of the meeting, with location information. The meeting will have two parts, the first getting perspective on vote counting and recounting from election officials, and the second focusing on research on vote counting and recounting.

The second session will feature presentations by Doug Chapin, and by our very own Thad Hall! Of course, we should get a first-hand report of the proceedings after the event is concluded.

Ah, springtime in Rome. The tulips in Vatican City. The smell off coffee in cafes. The sight of a box of ballots laying in a rubbish pile. Ah, elections, Italian style.

As everyone knows, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi lost his bid for re-election to Romano Prodi. However, charges of fraud -- and worries of a Florida-style recount -- have been rampant. (Did all of the American political spin people go to Rome for the election?) Here are some snippets from the world media on the counting, the recounting, and the juicy charges of rampant fraud. Oh, and there are overseas ballots too!

As BBC news explains:

Some 43,000 indistinct ballots that had not been added to the count are being examined by judges in an effort to determine the voters' intention. Their check is due to be complete by Friday. But this is no recount: under Italian law, only "contested" votes can be reviewed. Typically these are votes where the pencil cross on the ballot paper is so faint that it can be confused with some imperfection on the paper itself. Mr Berlusconi did not order this review, which is compulsory under Italian law. The law says any other election disputes have to be reviewed by the new parliament.

Following the review of contested ballots, the provincial courts will routinely double-check the official written reports from all 60,000 polling stations, to ensure that their vote tally corresponds to the results that local election officials reported to the interior ministry. This second checking phase must be over by the end of next week. The heads of polling stations gave their final count to local officials, who passed on the results by phone to the interior ministry, so the written records should tally with these verbal reports.

Reuters reported that:

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi looked isolated on Thursday as allies cast doubt on his claims Italy's general election had been rigged and initial scrutiny of contested ballots suggested they could not overturn the result...Berlusconi has said that the result of the April 9-10 vote, which handed Prodi a tiny majority, should be overturned because of "widespread" fraud. Newspapers reported on Thursday that the prime minister wanted a recount of more than one million votes, but a political source said President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi had refused to grant the necessary permission. On Thursday results of the recount of some 43,000 contested ballots trickled in. In theory these could change the election result because Prodi won a majority of just 24,000 votes in the lower house out of some 38 million votes cast. However, preliminary results showed the number of votes being re-assigned were minimal and were being divided between the two coalitions. There was no evidence of the large-scale fraud that Berlusconi referred to. The recount process, which is being overseen by appeal court judges around the country, is not expected to end for several days, officials said.

I know, I know, you want the dirt. Here it is from The Seattle Times (via a Chicago Tribune report:

Italy's hotly disputed election is fast turning into a rerun of the Florida 2000 fiasco, with the discovery of a pile of ballots dumped in the garbage on the outskirts of Rome and the politicians continuing to bicker over who won the photo-finish poll.

Rome's authorities immediately ordered an inquiry into the circumstances under which 18 ballot boxes were found by a passer-by stacked beside municipal garbage cans near a school that had served as a polling station.

They also said the 608 valid, marked ballots, contained in boxes clearly inscribed with the words "Ministry of Interior," would not have changed the election result and probably had been mistaken by the school's cleaners for trash.

Rome Procurator Giovanni Ferrara told reporters the discarded votes already had been counted and would have no effect on the still uncertain outcome of the election, which left-of-center leader Romano Prodi says he won by a wafer-thin margin of 0.6 percent.

A recount of the trashed ballots, however, found that the tally for the center-right coalition led by incumbent Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is alleging widespread fraud, had been undercounted by one vote, according to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

Finally, CBC News World reports on the overseas vote, which occurred in Italy for the first time.

The vote from Italians abroad proved decisive - and divisive - in Italy's confused parliamentary elections, giving Romano Prodi the critical four Senate seats he needed to win but prompting Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to claim "irregularities" that he said could nullify the vote.

The first vote ever from overseas Italians in a national election also shed some light on the constituencies of what will certainly be viewed in the future as a critical voting bloc in Italian politics.

"There's a majority, thanks to the turnout from abroad," said Piero Fassino, leader of the Democrats of the Left, the largest bloc in Prodi's coalition.

The Interior Ministry on Tuesday assigned Prodi's centre-left coalition four of the six seats up for grabs by Italians who live overseas, giving him 158 Senate seats to 156 for Berlusconi - the minimum necessary to have a majority.

But Berlusconi said late Tuesday that the overseas vote was far from decided, saying there were "many irregularities and it's possible that we won't be able to confirm that it has been a valid vote."

Oddly enough, Berlusconi's conservative forces had pushed through the law giving the overseas Italians the right to vote in 2001 in one of its first pieces of legislation. Berlusconi created a whole ministry to look after overseas interests.

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the issues that had arisen in the small municipality of Vernon, California --- in Los Angeles County. After much pressure, Vernon did have their first contested election in decades earlier this week, but two oddities have become apparent in the days after the election.

The first oddity was discussed in a story in this morning's Los Angeles Times. It turns out that the Vernon city clerk has decided to not count any ballots, pending the outcome of existing litigation. This is a very odd turn of events, as clerks in California routinely work to count ballots immediately following any election.

The second oddity involves how the balloting was done, and here is more from another story in the Los Angeles Times:

The challengers' lawyer, Albert Robles, said there was evidence that the election will be fraudulent and said it could not be fair as long as Vernon City Clerk Bruce Malkenhorst Jr. counted the ballots.

Robles pulled out a ballot envelope and alleged that the way it was sent, and the way the city was asking for it to be mailed, made it likely that balloting would not be secret.

The envelope in which the ballot was sent had a window in the back that showed the ballot number ascribed to each resident voter. There were no instructions to tear out the stub with the identifying ballot number before mailing it back.

Thus the possibility arises for voter intimidation and coercion, if ballots have identifying information on them.

I've been asked recently by colleagues and students (and interviewed today on KPCC, the Southern California NPR affiliate, with a link here to the audio) about how people estimate the size of mass protests and mobilizations. Obviously this is coming up due to the protests and mobilizations that have been occurring throughout the nation recently, focused on the immigration reform issue being debated in Congress.

This is an interesting problem, something that many years ago I talked about with a number of statisticians and political methodologists at a conference; not only did we then talk about the basic mathematics of estimating crowd sizes, but also about how new technologies might be brought to bear to produce these estimates in a more precise and automatic way, using for example digital photographs and image processing software.

In any case, how does the basic math work for the estimation of crowd size?

First off, there are some sources in the literature for the use (and abuse) of statistics in such situations that I know of, though I have not read either recently: one is by Clark McPhail ("The Myth of the Madding Crowd"), and the other by Joel Best ("Damned Lies and Statistics"). I'd refer interested readers to their work for more discussion of statistical estimates in these situations, and how they are interpreted. If readers have other citations for work in this area, please pass them along and I'll post them. There is a nice short summary in salon.com of this estimation problem, including a discussion of how McPhail estimated the crowd size during an anti-war protest in Washington in 2003.

But the basic approach involves only two simple numbers: and estimate of the square footage of the space occupied by the protesters and the density of the protesters. The first can be easy to obtain, either before or after the fact, but the latter is difficult to estimate. But if you have these two number, you just divide the square footage by the density and you have an estimate (without any confidence intervals!) of the size of the protest.

As I've said, the trick is estimating the density. As I understand McPhail's approach, there are some common estimates that are used: for densely packed crowds, an estimated that each person occupies about 2.5 square feet; in moderately-dense crowds that each person occupies 5 square feet; and in very loosely packed crowds that each person occupies 10 square feet.

So, let's start simple and think of how the math works in a small and well-defined space. There is a roughly 20 by 20 foot lounge outside my office: assume that this was occupied by students protesting their grades in one of my classes. Here are the estimates, based on whether or not the protest was dense, moderately dense, or diffuse:

• Densely-packed protesters: 400/2.5 = 160 protesters.
  
• Moderatedly densely-packed protesters: 400/5 = 80 protesters.
  
• Diffuse protest: 400/10 = 40 protesters.
  

I hope it would be the latter, but that is still a lot of protesters!

But how would we do a bigger area, say the area outside my office building where Caltech holds commencement? Let's assume we had a standing-room only protest in this space. What we would do is start by measuring the dimensions of the space, which is a large rectangle; or we could break the space into known grids. My guess is that the space is about 100 by 200 feet, or 20,000 square feet. Again, we can estimate the size of the protest depending on the density:

• Dense: 20,000/2.5 = 8,000 protesters.
  
• Moderately dense: 20,000/5 = 4,000 protesters.
  
• Diffuse: 20,000/10 = 2,000 protesters.
  

I didn't realize how many people could protest there!

Now here is where some additional assumptions come to play. One important one is the spatial distribution of the protesters. Note that in my examples, I've assumed the protesters are uniformly distributed. But in any real protest, that is unlikely to be the case, and there will be pockets that are densely packed, pockets that are less dense, and pockets that are diffuse. Also, geography is not uniform, and if we are using a photograph (for example) to estimate density we need to be cautious about slopes, hills, and other obstacles that can distort our estimate of the density. Last, protests and mobilizations are not static, so again if we rely upon observations at any point in time we have to be careful to note when they occur and whether the crowd itself shifts somehow before we make a different observation at a different geographic location.

All of these factors make this a tricky estimation process.

But as applied to a mass mobilization, like the Los Angeles demonstration recently where it is said that 500,000 people demonstrated, it is unclear how that number was derived. If there were aerial photographs of the crowd taken at the height of the protest, it might be possible to use the square footage and density calcuation to estimate the size of the crowd. I've not seen that type of aerial photograph, so I don't know how we could estimate the density at this point.

There are of course other ways to try to estimate crowd size, ranging from less analytical (asking someone to stand in the crowd and try to count as many as they can see, then extrapolate from there) to more analytical (using digital images and getting an estimate of the density from the digital image). My guess is that the Los Angeles demonstration estimate was obtained from participant observation, which probably has produced an estimate that has a lot of uncertainty associated with it (in more precise terms, it is likely to have a broad 95% confidence interval).

There's an interesting new report out from the IBM Center for The Business of Government, "Effectively Managing Professional Services Contracts: 12 Best Practices." The authors of this new report break down the professional contract acquisition process into five phases, with a series of best practices identified for each of the phases:

1. Phase 1: Obtaining contract support:
   
   
   
   • Clearly define expectations of success for the contract
     
   • Use a contracting approach that supports a partnership with the contractor
     
   • Define and follow a fair bidding and awarding process
     
   
   
2. Phase 2: Orienting team members:
   
   
   
   • Provide orientation for contractors
     
   
   
3. Phase 3: Executing the contract:
   
   
   
   • Develop an integrated project team to enhance productivity and the ability to
     adapt to changes
     
   • Clearly define roles and expectations for government and contractor staff
     
   • Actively manage staff and contractor turnover
     
   • Motivate and reward contractors to increase commitment and decrease
     turnover
     
   • Regularly monitor performance and provide feedback
     
   • Establish clear communication processes among project team members
     
   
   
4. Phase 4: Documenting new knowledge:
   
   
   
   • Use knowledge management practices to enhance project performance in
     spite of short-term costs
     
   
   
5. Phase 5: Capturing lessons learned:
   
   
   
   • Use After Action Reports to help managers apply lessons learned to other
     projects and contexts
     
   
   

This report should be of interest to all those who are involved with government professional service contracts, including election officials.

Dan Tokaji has a provocative essay on Equal Vote, "A Remarkable Turn in the Paper Trail Debate." Dan writes about an op-ed recently written by Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting. The bottom line is that in this op-ed, Harris comes out against Congressman Rush Holt's H.B. 550: "Black Box Voting believes that H.B. 550 is unwise. It will not be effective to improve citizen oversight or election integrity. It is dangerous, because the weakness of the antibiotic will create a more resistant strain of election manipulation." She concludes by arguing that " H.B. 550 doesn't do much of anything to get at the core problem, which is secrecy." Holt's bill would require that electronic voting machines produce a paper record that voters could view before casting their ballot.

Importantly, Dan concludes his essay on a pretty optimistic note:

One of the things that's most remarkable to me about Black Box Voting piece is that it suggests some convergence of views among electronic voting skeptics and those of us who've been skeptical of the VVPAT. I've noticed that e-voting skeptics have become increasingly aware of the problems that exist with at least some of the VVPAT devices now being marketed -- and in fact being used in some jurisdictions in this year's election. On the other hand, at least some longtime VVPAT skeptics, myself included, have increasingly come to appreciate the security and transparency concerns that really do exist with the present generation of voting technology.
Although some continue desperately cling to the idea that the VVPAT is the answer, the debate appears to be moving beyond the simplistic "PAPER=SECURITY" slogans that have mostly dominated the public discourse. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I take this to be an encouraging sign.

Perhaps Dan is right, and perhaps the paper trail debate may move beyond the equation of paper and security.

For those of you who haven't already heard, U.S. Election Assistance Commissioner Ray Martinez announced his resignation today, effective June 30. According to the public announcement of his resignation, he is leaving to return home to Texas and to spend more time with his family. In the past two and a half years, Commissioner Martinez has played an important role at the EAC, and has been a participant in a number of events and public forums where his contributions were outstanding. For example, see his comments at the recent Princeton University event on election reform, where he called for state audits of election administration practices, and for state election officials and vendors to take conflict of interest oaths.

He has been a strong supporter of research on election administration, has always been enthusiastic about the involvement of researchers and academics in the election reform debate, and has been interested in a variety of complex issues of concern (for example, interoperability of statewide voter registration systems). Thad and I will be sorry to see Commissioner Martinez depart the EAC at this important moment in the election reform process, but we will also look forward to working whomever replaces him on the EAC.