Election Updates

Mike, Paul Gronke, and I are at the meeting at the State of Illinois Board of Elections. There is Commissioner here chewing a cigar, so we really are in Chicago! What is below represents the discussion that occurred at the meeting.

The elections commission chair noted that this was the first election in the state with early voting, with disability accessible voting systems in every precinct statewide, and the first in recent memory without punch cards. The equipment problems that occurred were not unique, this happens in every election. There were problems with polling places and problems with the wrong ballot styles. In actuality, there were fewer telephone calls to the state than they expected. Voter participation was down throughout the state. Most election administrators recognize that switching systems does not immediately solve all problems, but causes some new unique problems.

There were some interesting problems. Not surprisingly, there were printer issues scattered across the state. More interestingly, in some southern counties, DRE machines were not closed out in some precincts where the machines were not used because there were no voters with disabilities.

The state elections director reiterated that there were fewer equipment-related problems than they expected. Instead, the problems were routine and similar to the problems that generally occur. The voting system director's report noted that the new voting equipment resulted in counting errors and some machines broke down and had to be replaced.

The underlying problem with the voting equipment was with the printers. There were some memory card problems and judges not being well trained and knowing what to do. They did not close them out well; they did not close down the machines and bring back the memory cards. When the memory card was problematic, they were able to use the paper trail to address the problem.

They discussed the fact that different voting machines performed differently in the election. For example, the Hart InterCivic machines had a problem with their printers and with some screen problems. There were also support problems from some of the vendors, where the technical support people were not completely knowledgeable and could not fully support county needs.

They then had testimony from three individuals. First, the President of Sequoia talked and he stated that the primary election in Chicago had unique challenges because of the use of multiple voting devices within every precinct. There were 19,000 voting devices introduced into the City and County and the primary problem that arose in the election was a delay in tabulation. All total, 95 percent of ballots and 88 percent of precincts were reported on election night. Sequoia will be providing additional training and making changes to their system between now and the 2006 election to improve user friendliness, especially in the area of the controllers. Chicago and Cook County were using leased machines in this election; they will be purchasing the newest line of machines for the 2006 general elections.

Second, the director of election in Cook County spoke. He noted that Cook County is the first jurisdiction nationally that has combined two distinct voting systems in a precinct and tabulated and reported the results in the precincts. He said that the voters liked the new system, no voters were disenfranchised by the transition, and there were no reports of fraud in the election. Again, the problem was that the results were reported later than expected. There are no problems in the election identified in the 5 percent recount or in the discovery recounts. The county will be hiring independent experts to examine the equipment and will also be placing a voting equipment manager in every precinct. In November, they will not share equipment across precincts within the same polling place and will have an expedited process in place to get results if transmission from precinct electronically is problematic. Shockingly, the county also wants more money from the state to improve the election process!

The City thanked the state for their work in certification and testing the equipment, which led to improvements in the systems. In 1975, people didn’t worry about elections but now elections are more complex. There is a huge bureaucracy and expanded elections. For example, early voting went from 1 site to 21 sites and 14,000 people voted early. They did have problems on Election Day and this was one of the most difficult elections they have had. They did get the votes counted accurately, but the transition to the new equipment was difficult.
Questions:

Were the problems in the election concentrated in certain parts of Chicago, especially the inner city?

The tabulation system works this way: poll workers take the memory pack from optical scan and DRE and combine them together. There were 900 precincts transmitted without a problem. Most of the problems occurred from two instances of sharing equipment in a consolidated precinct. First, there was the problem where there was shared touch screen equipment used in polling places with consolidated precincts. This created problems for poll workers who were unsure how to accumulate votes from one DRE into their own precincts. Second, there were problems associated with two precincts sharing one vote accumulator and transmission equipment system; here the problem was the one precinct had to wait (often up to one hour) for the other precinct to finish their work. Printing the tapes was very slow and it gave a large amount of data that was not needed for tabulation but for auditing purposes. The city did conduct hands-on training but the process for accumulating votes was problematic. There were jamming problems with the some equipment but they were able to feed all the ballots through. Simplifying the task of transmission will make things easier. They will not share equipment in November to address this problem.

The human error side of this is important and is exacerbated by people wanting data immediately on the election results. One state commissioner noted the following (I am paraphrasing here mostly):

election equipment problems occur whenever there are system transitions. The voting equipment is getting more sophisticated and the poll workers are getting less sophisticated. The manual for some of this equipment requires being an electrical engineer. You need a person in every precinct that understands the details and the equipment who are more permanent and know what to do and how to manage things. You have to get a hire quality of election judge and to pay them more. Do you need to vote from 6 am to 7 pm, especially in early voting? Even if you fix the equipment, you are still going to have human problems. For low pay they have to deal with rude voters and colleagues falling asleep on the job. They are hard working people but they can only do so much.

One final issue that was discussed was associated with the security of early voting ballots. The discussion centered on the fact that early voting centers were all located in municipal localities. However, voted ballots were stored in a banker’s box, sealed with tape and signed, in a secured place in the offices. The concern expressed centered on the chain of custody of the ballots, and whether this system achieves that custody.

This is our 300th essay on Election Updates, another milestone for us!

As I write this 300th essay, I'm happy to announce that after a long and hard negotiation this morning over soda and sandwiches, Paul Gronke and his Earlyvoting blog is going to be consolidated with our Election Updates blog. Paul is going to point his blog readers to Election Updates, and from here on out he'll be writing about early voting in the U.S. and across the world from Election Updates! Thad, Melissa and I are excited by this consolidation, and we hope that our readers appreciate finding all of this material in one place.

More soon from the visit to Chicago. The Illinois Board of Elections meeting this morning was quite interesting, and of course we'll have much more to say about MPSA in coming days.

During yesterday's MPSA conference (which I wrote about recently, and which continues through Sunday), there was one very interesting panel (nominally about methodology, but largely about the substance of election administration). Paul Gronke (who writes the Early Vote blog) was there with me, and we both found ourselves taking a lot of notes and finding the presentations very interesting. Unfortunately, the hotel facility where the conference was located did not have public wi-fi, so neither Paul nor I could engage in live blogging ...

I'll write more about some of the specific papers later, and I'm sure that both Paul and Thad will also write about their observations from this conference. However, there were a few general points that the papers made, and some specifics, that I thought I'd write about this morning before heading to the Illinois State Board of Elections hearing later this morning.

The papers fell into three areas: early voting, ballot design, and provisional balloting. The breadth of topics, and the sophisticated use of data and methodology, were impressive. It is clear that there is engagement now in the political science research community to study election administration, and this engagement promises to yield a healthy research literature in our journals soon.

Specifically, two of the presentations were about provisional balloting: Mcdonald's and Andersen's papers. Andersen relied largely on the EAC Election Day Survey data, and engaged in a sophisticated analysis of those data to study how many provisional ballots were cast, and how many were counted, in the 2004 election. Mcdonald, though, moved the analysis of provisional balloting in 2004 further, as he also used the Election Day Survey data, but he then provided new analysis of individual voter history data from North Carolina which allows an individual-level analysis of who votes provisionally and whether their vote was counted. While both Mcdonald and Anderson talked about problems with the Election Day Survey data (which Thad and I of course have written about recently), despite those problems there were a few important results that were discussed in their presentations. When I can link to these papers I'll provide a more detailed discussion of their research.

Two of the other papers, one by Stein and Vonnahme, the other by Sinclair and myself, were about different topics (early voting and ballot design, respectively), but they were methodologically innovative, both using new techniques that take advantage of natural experimental situations. When I've got the time, I'll discuss the substance and method of these papers as well.

Off to the hearings ...

The EAC’s hearing on Vote Counting and Recounting was quite interesting. The first panel had representatives from Washington and Virginia discussing their recent recounts, as well as a local election official from Sacramento California discussing recounting VVPAT ballots. The Washington and Virginia cases illustrated the great difference among states on election practice and procedures. One of the most interesting differences was in the scope of the recounts – Washington conducted a statewide recount but Virginia only recounted a very small number of precincts were there was clear evidence of problems. Also of interest was the difference in how the two states handle ballots; in Washington, every absentee ballot is hand checked to discern voter intent before it is tabulated. If a voter makes an error, for example, by circling the names instead of bubbling the circle next to the name, the ballot is remade. In Virginia, the election officials do not do anything similar.

The most amusing discussion, however, was a discussion of the time it took to conduct a recount of the Avante voting system in Sacramento, using a VVPAT. A plethora of problems arose during the recounting process and, in the end, it took 127.5 hours to count 114 ballots! This works out to 67 minutes a ballot. Not surprisingly, the county decided to purchase an optical scan system.

The second panel was Doug Chapin and me. My testimony is below.

Good morning. My name is Thad Hall and I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah and principal investigator of the Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Vote Count and Vote Recount Project. There are three other primary investigators on this project: Michael Alvarez of Caltech, Kim Brace of Election Data Services, and Doug Chapin of electionline.org. In my testimony this morning, I will describe our effort to study vote counting and recounting, provide an overview of our findings, and discuss the best practice component of our work. My discussion will largely focus on the Count component of the project; Doug Chapin will be discussing the recount and challenge analysis we have done to date.

Our view of the vote counting process has been rather comprehensive in scope and this view was largely influenced by our experiences observing elections and in talking with election officials. My own views were greatly influenced by a trip I took to Austin Texas, where I met with Dana DeBouvoir, the Travis County election administrator. Her election administration practices are predicated on the idea that an election should be viewed as maintaining the chain of custody of all election materials—from pre-election logic and accuracy machine tests to the counting of absentee and precinct-cast ballots. This goal is accomplished by (1) having a product—some piece of paper or report—for every aspect of the election process, (2) having a witness for every product (i.e., a signature from a witness for the production of every product), and (3) securing every product effectively. Should a challenge arise regarding any aspect of the election process, Dana can produce (1) a product showing what was done, (2) witnesses regarding how it was done, and (3) show that the item in question was stored securely.

We have viewed the vote counting process within this broad scope, starting with the printing of ballots and the securing of voting machines before an election and ending with the auditing of the election. Our study focuses on this process for all channels of voting—precinct, absentee, and in-person early voting. We developed a specific data collection instrument that was reviewed by several election officials, election lawyers, and the EAC staff. The instrument was completed at the University of Utah by reviewing state laws and state regulations relating to each activity in the instrument. The draft of each state’s process is being sent to each state for their review to ensure that the final document is complete and reflects any changes in election law made since 2005.

At the outset, I would like to make four observations that arise from our data collection.

• First, the transparency and accessibility of state election laws varies greatly. In some states, it is possible for a citizen to go to the website of the state election official, click a link, and access the state’s election code and regulations. In other states, the election code is not online and several states could not produce easily a copy of their election regulations. Transparency is a hallmark of free and fair elections, and the public should be able to easily know what the rules of the game are for elections.

• Second, there is wide variation in the terms used to describe any given practice in elections; a common set of terms or a Rosetta stone document would be very helpful for everyone in comparing election practices across states.

• Third, some states have clearly updated their election codes in light of changes in voting procedures and technologies. Other states retain election processes and procedures from 60 or 80 years ago but apply them to new technologies. Georgia is an example of a state that radically updated their election code in response to the development of new voting technologies. The processes in statute and regulation related to securing, operating, and counting ballots tracks the technologies used today. By contrast, some other states use lever machine laws from 60 to 80 years ago to govern the use of direct recording equipment (DRE) voting systems.

• Fourth, there is great variation among states in their use of regulations to govern elections and provide greater guidance—guidance with the force of law—to local election officials regarding how to implement specific activities. For example, Maryland has detailed regulatory guidance regarding how every make and model of voting technology used in the state is to be handled throughout the election process.
  
  I would like to provide a brief overview of our findings to date. Because the data we have collected is currently being reviewed by the states, I am going to avoid focusing on exact numbers but instead will report trends and issues we have identified from our data analysis.

  Pre-election Processes

  States vary in the type of pre-election processes that they have. Almost all states have procedures for testing tabulation equipment before the election. These tests vary in the level of detail but generally involve casting a pre-audited set of votes on a machine and comparing the tabulation results with the known results. Beyond the tabulation testing process, however, there is little consistency in pre-election processes. For example:

  • Only half of all states require tabulation equipment to be sealed after the test and few states explicitly require precinct count optical scan tabulators to be sealed after the pre-election tabulation test is completed. Often, machine sealing rules date back to the days of lever machines, creating requirements that are not appropriate for today’s machines.
  • Most states have no laws or rules governing the production and securing of ballots upon delivery from a printer, or after being printed in-house.
  • Often, the rules governing the security of voting machines and vote tabulation machines prior to the opening of the polls date back to the time of lever machines and relate to the delivery of keys in a sealed envelope.

  Voting Through Early and Absentee Channels

  Absentee voting is one area where almost all states would be expected to have detailed rules governing the process. However, there are again variations in the way in which absentee ballots are treated across states. For example:

  • Just over half of all states explicitly state how an absentee ballot is to be secured upon receipt from the voter. (e.g., “when received, the county election board shall cause envelopes containing absentee ballots to be placed in a ballot box, locked with three locks, in a secure place.”)
  • Some states transport absentee ballots from the central election office back out to precincts for counting, but other states count such ballots centrally.
  • More than half of states allow absentee ballots to be counted before the election day ends, by more than 20 states do not.
  • Almost every state provides a detailed set of guidance regarding what is a valid absentee ballot for inclusion in the tabulation process. States do vary greatly on the exact time by which ballots have to be received to be counted, however.

  In-person early voting is another area where there is wide variation among states. Specifically, there are varying rules regarding the clarity of how ballots and voting machines are to be handled at the close of each day of voting.

  Voting in Precincts

  Most states have very clear rules about how ballots and voting equipment are to be treated in precincts. However, when it comes to actually counting ballots, there are variations. One of the places where such variation is seen most starkly is in the area of in-precinct vote reconciliation. In at least 17 states, there are no provisions for reconciling the ballots counted in the precinct against the number of voters who cast ballots. This means that there is no effort made to determine that the number of voters who cast ballots and the number of ballots counted are related. Even in states with such rules, the rules are not equitable across voting system platforms. This problem is not addressed in most states in the canvass process either; more than 40 states have no requirement that the canvass process balance the number of voters voting and the number of ballots cast.

  For example, when paper ballots are used (including optical scan ballots), several states have rules that the ballots are counted and if the count exceeds the number of voters who are listed as having cast ballots, all ballots are put back into the ballot box and then ballots are randomly removed until there are no excess ballots. (The excess ballots are then carefully stored and accounted for). Obviously, such a process cannot be done the same way with electronic voting systems and although many states have explicit rules regarding noting discrepancies between the number of ballots cast on an electronic system and the number of voters who cast ballots, no state explicitly listed a process for conducting a similar random reduction in electronic ballots when excess ballots are discovered.

  The problem of election accounting also exists in other aspects of the vote count process. For example, at least 12 states have no rules governing the handling of a spoiled ballot when it is returned by the voter to the precinct election official. In these states, voters may be allowed to spoil a ballot—often, a voter is allowed to spoil up to three ballots—but there is no law or rule for accounting for these ballots after they are spoiled, or even a process for formally voiding the ballot.

  The key issue on vote counting, obviously, is what constitutes a vote on various voting platforms. Here, we see two types of states. First, there are states with very clear statutory or regulatory language contained in sections entitled “vote definition.” For example, the language might state that a vote on a DRE is:

  • the statement of results of votes cast produced by operating its mechanism may be considered the results of the votes cast; or
  • the results on the tape from each DRE unit and the memory card.

  Many of these states also have long sections in their codes where they have descriptions and illustrations of what constitutes a vote on a paper ballot. This might include having descriptions of every possible combination of markings on an optical scan ballot.

  Second, there are states that define a vote much less clearly. For example, several states define a vote as “the standard for all of these voting systems is voter intent.”

  I would note here that most states tend to have very clear rules for what it takes to be an eligible write-in candidate and for counting write-in ballots. The same holds true for those states allowing straight-party balloting.

  Transparency

  One of the hallmarks of free elections is that the election is transparent to the public. We measured transparency in three aspects of the election. First, we examined if there were provisions for observing pre-election machine testing. Second, we examined who can observe voting in precincts. Third, we considered who can observe vote tabulation. In localities where votes are tabulated in-precinct, these last two items obviously are conflated.

  At each point, there is a strong bifurcation between states that allow the public to observe each of these components of the voting process and states that only allow representatives of candidates or political parties to observe such activities. In some states, observers are explicitly not allowed to observe voting, machine preparations, or vote counts. Instead, a very limited number of registered and credentialed challengers are allowed in polling places, but they are not there to observe the conduct but to challenge the credentials of voters to cast ballots. In these states with restrictive laws, there is often not even an exception for the media to observe the election. In other states, the law explicitly requires the public to be allowed into polling places to observe the voting process, as well as vote counting and pre-election processes.

  Post-Election Auditing

  One of the areas where there is a small but very important effort to improve vote counting is in the post-election auditing. Most vote tallying today is done by some electronic means, either through the use of DREs or by scanning ballots through an electronic tabulator. To ensure that there are not problems with the system, a small number of states have adopted procedures for auditing the results of the election by comparing a manual tabulation with the electronic tabulation of the same ballots.

  These manual recount procedures allow jurisdictions to have some increased level of confidence that the tabulation process is accurate. In addition to the manual counting of paper ballots and comparing the totals to the machine tabulation totals, paper audit trails that many DREs produce allow for the audit receipts from a sample of machines to be compared with the electronic totals produced by the same machines.

  The post-election auditing procedures differ from the canvass of results at the local level. In many cases, the canvass can also audit election results that seem to be in error, but many states do not allow ballots to be re-tabulated after the initial tabulation is conducted.

  Best Practices in Counting

  The best practice component of our project is being guided by two streams of work. First, the Government Accountability Office has published a series of works on best practices and the methodology that is most effective in identifying best practices. Second, there are also international principles for best practices for vote counting that have been elaborated. The Administration and Cost of Elections (ACE) Project (www.aceproject.org) – a collaboration of IFES, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) – has identified eight (8) guiding principles for vote counting. The Project states:

  to establish and maintain public confidence in the electoral process, vote counting systems and procedures should incorporate the fundamental principles of vote counting in a democratic election.

  These “guiding principles” are: transparency, security, professionalism, accuracy, secrecy, timeliness, accountability, and equity.

  Using data from a related international election project, the Election Process Information Center (EPIC) Project, we can see that many aspects of these goals for counting and recounting are also norms for activities in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. Key findings from in this overview include:

  o Most nations require that the number of ballots counted equal the number of voters listed in the poll books.

  o Most nations have explicit requirements for transporting sealed and secured ballot containers.

  o Computers and electronic tabulation are used in more than half of OECD countries in the initial tabulation process.

  o Twenty-five (25) of the twenty-six (26) OECD nations studied allow for recounts; most commonly, nations allow for recounts by request (allowed for in 13 OECD nations).

  o Five (5) OECD nations have rules requiring that all ballots cast to be recounted in all elections to ensure an accurate initial count at the polling place or count center.

  We are currently completing the best practice component of our work. Our goal is to identify a limited number of highly transferable practices that address the issues identified in the international guiding principles for vote counting and recounting.

  To highlight a couple of strong practices that currently exist, Oregon has a very flexible yet effective mechanism for handling ballot security. They require all jurisdictions to submit a security plan to the state that encompasses all aspects of their election process, from ballot printing to ballot tabulation. Likewise, Washington State has developed a new but comprehensive procedure for post-election accounting of ballots that allows local governments to ensure that every ballot is accounted for. New technologies and practices are also being used in Washington to facilitate this accounting process.

  Over the next two weeks, we will be finalizing our work on this project and look forward to getting feedback from you and your stakeholder organizations regarding the work products we will be presenting you.

  
  
  # posted by Thad Hall @ 9:34 PM links to this post

Openness and transparency are words we hear a lot these days associated with election administration and voting technology.

A critical question for election officials is how they can work to achieve effective citizen involvement in the election administration process, in issues ranging from the acquisition of new voting technology to better evaluating consumer satisfaction. It's easy for critics to tell government officials they need to be more open and transparent in their actions, but it is another for government officials to figure out how best to implement policies that allow for open and transparent governmental decisionmaking.

Our friends at the IBM Center for the Business of Government have recently released yet another very helpful report, this one on exactly this question: "Public Deliberation: A Manager's Guide to Citizen Engagment", by Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer and Lars Hasselblad Torres. This report examines the challenges associated with engaging citizens in governmental decisionmaking, but then delves into a detailed discussion of both face-to-face and online citizen engagement approaches. This report is well worth the read, and we recommend it to government managers who are seeking to understand better ways to involve the public in the complex decisions they routinely make.

The only issue I had with this report concerns the analysis of online citizen engagement. Clearly this should be a powerful tool for government managers to use for citizen input, but there is one drawback to online citizen engagement that was not addressed well in the study --- the technological hurdle of implementing online citizen engagement. This may be a challenge for many election administrators, who may not have the resources to develop online engagement forums, surveys, or other ways of using new technologies to get citizen input. Thus, I thought it would be useful at some point for this problem to be addressed: perhaps organizations or research groups with expertise and resources could develop simple-to-use and flexible applications that could be used by resource- and technology-strapped election officials for effective citizen engagement.

Recently I wrote about my presentation at a U.S. Election Assistance Commission discussion on improving their survey and data collection efforts in 2006 and beyond. During that discussion, Thad and I provided copies of a draft report we have been working on, "Improving the Election Day Survey"

Today we made the final version of this report available on the VTP website. In this report, we discuss a variety of issues we have observed as we have tried to use the EAC election day survey data in some of our research.

Most importantly, we discuss twelve recommendations for improvement of future election day survey efforts:

1. Define the terms and concepts to promote uniformity across jurisdictions.
   
2. Refine and clarify the survey instrument.
   
3. Seek additional important information.
   
4. Reduce the cost and complexity of the survey instrument.
   
5. Improve the technology of reporting.
   
6. Insure interoperability across datasets.
   
7. Automate data collection where possible.
   
8. Improve compliance.
   
9. Improve data distribution.
   
10. Provide data at precinct level.
    
11. Methodological development of tools for fixing and analyzing future datasets.
    
12. Build collaborations.
    

For researchers, we also have made available at http://vote.caltech.edu/data.htm five versions of the EAC election day survey data. As some who have tried to use the EAC data have noted (and as we noted when the data were originally released), the data are only available in state-by-state files. So our diligent VTP research team pulled the state files together into one large dataset, which is available at the above website in Excel, comma-delimited, STATA, SPSS, and SAS formats. We've made no attempt to check the data, other than some simple tests that attempted to verify that the appending procedures across the state files appear to have worked as we hoped. If users have questions with the data, let us know. If users do anything to build additional value to these datasets, we will let our readers know of those developments.

Readers know that I like to keep track of voter education commercials and multimedia presentations. I just ran across some new materials being used in Texas, linked off their website, VOTEXAS.org. Go to the website, pick your language, then click on the "Commercials" button to get a sense for how to navigate the site.

The perspective that both the television and radio ads take is interesting: trying to position the new technology and procedures relative to the "old ways of voting". The radio ad is particularily clever and funny, using cavemen grunting to make the point that voting in Texas is undergoing procedural and technological change. Given that the radio spot is available as an mp3 file, the real election geeks out there will no doubt download this one for their mp3 players!

Later this week (Thursday-Sunday) the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association will be in Chicago; this is one of two major national meetings for American political scientists. There are a number of paper presentations that may be of interest to our readers, and below is a list of some of the presentations that I've pulled from a quick study of the preliminary conference schedule, which is available here.

• Thursday, 8:30am: Section 19-8, "Getting out the vote." There are four papers on this panel, three of which might be of particular interest to our readers:
  
  
  
  1. Gerber, Grebner, Green and Larimer, "Does Publicity of Voting Records Increase Voter Turnout? A Field Experiment."
     
  2. Magleby, Monson and Patterson, "The Ground War in the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign."
     
  3. Nickerson, "Unpacking the Black Box of Door-to-Door Canvassing."
     
  
  
  
• Also on Thursday, 8:30am: Section 21-2, "Election reform." This panel features four papers on election reform, two on general election reform in the United States, two on reapportionment and redistricting. The two on election reform might be of interest:
  
  
  
  1. Chesteen, "Carter-Baker Election Reform: Too Much, Too Little, Too Early, Too Late."
     
  2. Ryan, "Liven Up! How Election Reform Can Rejuvinate American Democracy."
     
  
  
  
• And there is more on Thursday morning, at 8:30am, when Thad will be presenting a poster on some of his innovative new research on polling place workers: Section 43-301, "Poster Session: Public administration", Thad E. Hall, "How Poll Workers Shape Public Confidence in Election Outcomes."
  
  
• During the next session, there are more interesting panels. For example, Section 23-5 ("Youth socialization and political participation in the U.S."), and Section 24-1 ("New technoloogies of persuasion in federal politics") both sound interesting.
  
  
• Later in the day, at 3:45pm, there is a really interesting panel: Section 19-2, "Casting Ballots." Here there are a set of papers worth hearing and reading:
  
  
  
  1. Andersen, "Keeping the Vote: The Use of Provisional Voting in the 2004 Election."
     
  2. Johansen, "Early Voting, Party Mobilization, and Their Influence on Voter Turnout."
     
  3. Mcdonald, "The 2004 Election Day Survey."
     
  4. Sinclair and Alvarez, "Is It Better To Be First Or Last? The Ballot Order Effect."
     
  5. Stein and Vonnahme, "Election Day Voter Centers and Voter Turnout."
     
  
  
  
• Then on Friday, there is one poster presentation that sounded interesting: Section 19-301, "Poster Session: Voting behavior", Bobic, "When Function Follows Form: How Ballot Design Affects Voting Choice."
  
  
• Friday, 1:45pm, "Advanced models of voting". Mebane is presenting "Detecting Attempted Election Theft."
  
  
  
• Friday afternoon also has a roundable discussoin on "The Elusive Ballot Box", 3:45pm (Section 4-103).
  
  
• On Saturday morning (8:30am), there is an interesting panel on "Competition and turnout" (Section 19-4), with a paper by Galatas, "None of the Above? Casting Blank Ballots in Canadian Provincial Elections."
  
  
• Then on Satuday afternoon, at 3:45pm, there is a panel on "Electronic Voting Systems" (Section 19-7):
  
  
  
  1. Bailey, "Measuring the Effect of Voting Technologies on Residual Votes."
     Conrad et al., "Usability of Electronic Voting Systems: Field and Laboratory Experiments."
     
  2. Herrnson et al., "Voter Errors in Electronic Voting: Voting Systems, Ballot Type and Voter Traits."
     
  3. Herron and Lewis, "From Punchcards to Touchscreens: Some Evidence From Pasco County, Florida, on the Effects of Changing Voting Technology."
     
  4. Niemi et al., "Voters' Abilities to Cast Write-In Votes Using Electronic Voting Systems."
     
  
  
  

No doubt there are other presentations that might be of interest.

As a general observation, while I've not made the attempt to quantify the changes over time, my intuitive observation here is that we see in this program an increased number of research presentations from political scientists on voting technology and election reform. Also, while I will have more to say about specific papers and presentations after the conference, from the individual researchers involved I suspect it will also be clear that there is a dramatic improvement in the quality of scholarship in these areas. We will just need to keep working hard to help translate the high-quality research into improved public policy.