Election Updates

Some of our readers (and my fellow bloggers) love our "live blogging." So here goes, live from IACREOT in San Francisco ....

I just got out of an interesting session where EAC commissioners Paul DeGregorio and Donetta Davidson spoke, and picked up a few insights about the thinking of the EAC as well as some of their new initiatives.

Both of the commissioners focused on a similar theme: many, if not most, of the problems that we are seeing in the electoral process in the US today are not directly technological, but involve humans and their interactions with technology. Commissioner DeGregorio at one point in his talk noted that most of the problems he is familiar with in the 2006 primary elections so far have been human ones. Commissioner Davidson had two bullet points on some of her slides, which read "Voting is a human exercise", followed by "Training is key."

Commissioner DeGregorio also related some interesting "war" stories, including one from a recent election in Carteret County (North Carolina), where he witnessed pollworkers who were unable to produce a correct zero tape from a voting system. He also showed a wonderful videotape of two elderly pollworkers who were setting up a VVPAT device in the recent San Diego primary election.

Commissioner Davidson's comments focused on the EAC's role in testing and certification, and she reiterated that the EAC is now going to accredit testing labs and will certify voting systems based on the reports from the accredited labs. She also focused a lot on the security of the entire election administration process, not just of the voting equipment itself. Commissioner Davidson passed out hard copies of a wonderful document that the EAC just put out, their "Quick Start Management Guide for New Voting Systems." The "Quick Start" guide is now on the EAC's website.

One final point; during discussion, Commissioner Davidson referenced the video that her colleague had shown, and she noted that her observation was that pollworkers were much more effective in setting up their pollsites in situations where the paper in the voting device was attached upon delivery, rather than the situations where pollworkers were required to set up the paper in the voting device before the polling place could open.

Now off to my session, on threat assessment. I'll blog more about that, and a few other things I've learned in my visit to the IACREOT meeting, later today and perhaps over the weekend.

BTW, for the non-election geeks, IACREOT stands for "International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers."

The New York Times also reports a Calderon victory is virtually certain.

El Sol de Mexico and La Prensareport on Obrador's press conference this morning, charging electoral irregularities (Spanish language).

ABC News and the London Times have English language reports on the press conference.

More financial reports from Reuters and MarketWatch. Clearly, the business community wants Calderon to win.

This morning's Los Angeles Times headline on the Mexican election was "Now the Leftist Has the Lead in Mexico." This comes after days of reporting that Calderon was winning the election, by a small margin.

Imagine my surprise, when just after reading that article in the print version of the paper to see on the LA Times website a new story, "Mexico Conservative Wins Election By Narrow Margin." How quickly things change in a very, very close electoral contest!

The print story this morning, whether or not it got the outcome right, had some excellent details on how the Mexican election officials were conducting their recount. Here are the details from the earlier story, based on their reporting from two vote counting locations in Mexico City:

At the District 10 office in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City, sealed white boxes that had been in the custody of the Mexican army since Sunday's vote were cut open beginning 8 a.m. Wednesday. The tally sheets were read aloud before representatives of the five parties in the race and entered into the electoral system's computerized database.

The seven-member district electoral board in the overwhelmingly PAN neighborhood voted down all but one of the PRD's six appeals to recount ballots in individual boxes.

Federico Martinez, the PRD representative at the District 10 counting table, objected. He insisted that one ballot box the electoral board refused to recount contained two ballots more than reported on the tally sheet.

Word of the conflict filtered outside the building, riling the small crowd of protesters.

"Multiply those two votes by thousands of polling places and they add up," said Lidia Andrade Rodriguez, 43. "We're going to fight for those two votes."

The seven election officials conducted the count around a large table, in the presence of party representatives and a score of independent observers. The scene bore a faint resemblance to the examination of Florida's infamous hanging chads.

Safeguards built into the system for transparency were evident. The table was piled high with copies of the tally sheets kept by each party's poll watchers as a check on the official sheets pulled from the ballot boxes. The laptop computer on which the tallies were entered was projected onto a wall for everyone to see.

Across town at the Tlalpan district counting office, the PRD challenges were more effective. The electoral board there accepted its first seven requests for recounts, resulting in a gain of 310 votes for Lopez Obrador.

Each recount was a mini-drama, conducted by Marineyla Huerta, a formidable economist serving as the electoral board chairperson, and watched intensely by dozens of party representatives and observers in the crowded room.

Wielding a green box cutter, Huerta opened the seventh box and separated the ballots by candidate preference on the table before her. Then she proceeded to count each pile, slowly and out loud.

As she leafed through the pile for Lopez Obrador, she accidentally counted two ballots as one.

"Wait! You're miscounting!" someone shouted. A PRD activist with a mini-cam filmed the scene from up close.

Huerta checked and conceded her error.

"I'll start over," she said.

The recount confirmed that the box had contained 11 ballots more than were listed on the tally sheet. Ten of those votes were for Lopez Obrador.

"How interesting, no?" Huerta said.

This sounds very similar to vote recounts we've seen in the United States, though the process by which ballot boxes are recounted seems somewhat subjective. It seems that at the counting stations, ballot boxes are opened for recounting only when the election officials at the counting station notes some irregularity or discrepancy associated with the paperwork for the particular ballot box. From the LA Times coverage, and other stories I've read, it seems that representatives of the major parties are on hand at the various vote counting stations, and they essentially try to lobby the election officials to recount ballot boxes, based on allegations of irregularities. It seems that it is up to the election officials whether to recount the ballot boxes (if they deem the irregularities have merit?). And from the two counting stations the LA Times reporters wrote about, it does seem that some election officials are more willing than others to recount ballot boxes.

The Nation has an article this week predicting an electoral meltdown in Ohio in 2006. Here is just one excerpt:

The technicalities of the voting process were already a huge problem in 2004, when everything from the updating of voter registration lists to the number of voting machines made available in each precinct to the opening hours of polling stations was subject to undue political influence and rank bureaucratic incompetence, prompting an avalanche of complaints. (Blackwell's office rejected every last one of them.) That election, though, was held predominantly with the old machinery, which may have lost an unacceptable number of honestly cast votes but at least had the virtue of familiarity. Now the advent of e-voting has opened up a whole new world of pain for election officials and their woefully undertrained precinct volunteers. The first big test of the new machines, in the May primary election, resulted in a multiplicity of problems, especially in Cuyahoga County in and around Cleveland, where poll workers lost seventy memory cards recording the votes from electronic touch-screen terminals (the votes had to be retrieved through back-up data systems inside the terminals) and more than 15,000 paper absentee ballots had to be counted by hand, delaying the results by six days, because of a system failure in the automated tabulation system. And that was on a turnout rate of only 23 percent.

The head of the Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation came out against attempts to restore early voting, ITAR-TASS reports.

The Diane Rehm show today did a show on electronic voting. You can link to it here.

When I was in Mexico, another of my election reform opinion pieces was published in the Pasadena Star-News, "Draw California voters back to the polls." There is a pdf version of the op-ed available here. Here's the punchline:

But we've got to figure out how to re-engage and excite California voters about politics, reducing the effect of "voter fatigue" and better empowering voters in future elections.

We can work to give California voters more choices when they are asked to cast ballots, and re-engage them with politics, and this should be a high priority in Sacramento. Real redistricting reform is making its way through the Legislature. That reform must be passed and signed by the governor this summer.

But we also have to open up the primary election process and shift from the current system that robs voters of meaningful participation in primary elections. That should be the next focus of work in the state Legislature on election reform, unless we want to continue with a situation where most voters are no-shows.

The NY Times on Obrador's demand for a vote by vote recount and the IFE's admission that up to three million ballots have yet to be counted.

Reuters , Bloomberg, and MSN Money discusses the impact of the election recount on a the Mexican stock market.

European coverage of the recount in the Times of London.

And the San Jose Mercury News on the inevitable (and I'm not sure correct) comparisons to Florida 2000.

Radio Open Source on NPR did another show on election fraud the day after their show on the Robert Kennedy Ohio article in Rolling Stone. A description of the show is here, along with a link to it:

Last night we dissected the 2004 Ohio presidential election (what went wrong and why), and tonight we’ll use that same Ohio election as a kind of launching point both forwards and backward in time. Backwards to learn whether it and Florida in 2000 were particularly egregious failures — or whether they were basically business-as-usual in a two-party system that’s not eager for voting reform. And forwards to try to understand whether Ohio is any kind of indicator of our country’s electoral health.

Andrew Gumbel, U.S. correspondent for Britain’s Independent newspaper and author of Steal This Vote, will lead the charge — with an outsider’s perspective on how we, the self-proclaimed model of democracy, actually match up to our Founding Fathers’ ideals…and to the rest of the democratic world.

NPR did a story last week that I meant to post about the new Medicaid ID requirements. Under the new requirements, all Medicaid beneficiaries have to prove that they are American citizens and the story discusses how difficult that is, especially for the poor and minorities. (Remember, it used to be illegal for African Americans to be born in hospitals, which greatly reduced the likelihood that they would receive government issued birth certificates.)

In the recent Mexican elections, Mexico allowed overseas voters to cast ballots for the first time, once they had been vetted. This article from the Salt Lake Tribune discusses some of the experiences of these voters and problems that they encountered.

First Florida, then Italy, now Mexico. Needless to say, I am happy I now live in a nice, box-shaped state, not something with a long tail to it. How bad will the aftermath of the exceptionally-close election in Mexico be? Here is how the Washington Post characterizes things:

Teams of lawyers are girding for a massive challenge of the results, threatening a crisis reminiscent of the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election. Legal experts and campaign strategists here say the winner of Sunday's ballot might not be officially declared for up to two months.

Remember those small irregularities I blogged on yesterday? Today, with a razor-thin margin, they are not so small.

"This is going to be like the hanging chads," said Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, a Mexico expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who observed votes being counted at Mexico's electoral commission headquarters. "It will be disputed to the last ballot."

Clearly, this blog should send an observer to ensure that there are no ballot boxes floating in either the Pacific or Caribbean!

The LA Times is reporting tonight that the Mexican election is very close, but that it was also one of the best administered elections ever. As the paper notes,

More than 40 million people, or about 60% of the electorate, were expected to vote, according to officials with Mexico's Federal Election Institute. More than 130,000 polling places have been set up, from within yards of the U.S. border in Tijuana to Indian villages in Chiapas.... Nationwide, only eight polling places failed to open, the best performance ever by Mexico's electoral system, officials said.

This is not to say there were not allegations of problems. To give two examples from the LA Times:

• In Oaxaca, groups of striking teachers surrounded a police station, alleging that officers inside had stacks of ballots pre-marked with votes for the candidates backed by Gov. Ulises Ruiz, news agencies reported. For weeks teachers have led a protest movement against the governor.
• The most common complaint was one voiced by voters in many Mexico City neighborhoods: lines outside polling places stretched for blocks. "I've been here for more than an hour, and I haven't advanced one meter," said Raul Cordero Lopez, a 42-year-old engineer as he stood in a line with hundreds of voters in southern Mexico City. "It's totally disorganized. The poll workers got here late."

If the election remains close and is challenged, it will be interesting to see how such allegations are handled.

KSL TV has a story that the State of Utah is going to audit its electronic voting system using its VVPATs. The state is currently considering what procedures to use, something we are currently studying as a part of the EAC Vote Count and Recount project. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

The other day I jokingly noted that watching the election in Utah, which went smoothly, was like watching paint dry. Unfortunately, certain localities in India recently encountered the other extreme. The Hindu Newspaper in India reported today that:

Violence, clashes between Congress and TDP workers, snatching of ballot boxes and other poll malpractices again marred the second phase of polling to the local bodies in 11 districts on Sunday. A Congress worker was stabbed to death in Guntur and in an election-related incident on Saturday night in Mahbubnagar district, another Congress worker was fatally attacked. The State Election Commission (SEC) ordered re-poll in 44 polling stations and was examining further requests from district Collectors by evening. Guntur alone accounted for 21.

For all of the problems in the United States with elections, we should be happy that the problems are not violent.

Mike Alvarez's observations on the Mexican election, and how it is covered in the United States, brought to mind this recent article from the Oregonian on absentee voting among expatriate Mexicans living in the United States.

The story focuses on the problems faced by Mexicans (who primarily live in small towns and rural areas) in registering as an absentee voter.

At least in this story, immigrant activists speculate that the government may have intentionally made it difficult for expatriates to vote. The reason, they suggest, is that these Mexicans, who have chosen to come to the US for higher wages, are more cognizant of the economic problems in their homeland.

I haven't seen much data that compares the attitudes of Mexican citizens living in the US with those who remain in Mexico, but I can imagine just the opposite happening--as Mexicans in the United States are exposed to our more conservative and capitalist culture, they would be more supportive of Fox's conservative party than the neo-socialist alternative.

The Washington Post's Mexico election blog has a great piece today about the very strict rules in place to ensure that election day is a sober event--literally. They even have a very cool picture to go with it (people after our hearts, taking photos of election signs!)

I have a piece in the Salt Lake Tribune today with Quin Monson and Kelly Patterson (professors at BYU). Quin and Kelly conducted an exit poll in the 3rd congressional district, which had a highly contentious primary, using a set of questions we have worked on examining public confidence in the new voting machines and in the poll workers.

In the exit poll, respondents were asked to to rate the poll workers and their experience interacting with them and with the new voting equipment. As we note in the opinion piece:

Ninety-five percent of voters rated the performance of the poll workers at their precinct as "good" or "excellent." When asked more specific questions about their experience with poll workers, the results were similarly positive. Large majorities of voters agreed that the poll workers knew what they were doing (93 percent), treated them with respect (95 percent), were helpful (95 percent), and knew how to operate the voting machines (95 percent). Voters in the primary also thought the voting equipment itself performed well, with 88 percent agreeing that the machines were easy to use and 95 percent reporting that the touchscreen machines were either much better or somewhat better than the punchcard system used in previous elections. Only 3 percent of voters reported having any problems with the new equipment, and when voters asked for help using the touchscreen machines, they nearly always received it from a poll worker.

The success of the election largely rests with the poll workers and the training they received from the counties. Without good training, an election involving new voting technology can quickly degenerate into a problem-fest. This election was an example of how to avoid that.