Election Updates

The past couple of days have seen a flurry of reports coming out of Sacramento, both in the press and in private, indicating that Governor Schwarzenegger and the state legislature may be close to a deal that could push a redistricting reform bill out of the legislature in time for it to be put on California's November ballot.

The basics of the deal have been debated from some time, the change in the past couple of weeks have been the public signals from the Governor that he will support the deal (here's a link to the most recent story from the Los Angeles Times on the negotiations).

The deal is going to involve moving the current redistricting proposal now under consideration in the legislature, sponsored by Senator Lowenthal, that relies upon an eleven person citizens commission to undertake new redistricting, through the process and onto the November ballot. In exchange, the Governor now appears ready to support term limits reform, something that the legislators in Sacramento obviously want (though it is unclear whether voters will support changing California's existing term limits law). The legislators are debating various term limits changes, with the current favorite being a proposal that would allow an individual to serve twelve years in either branch of the legislature.

There will be more to come on this deal in the next few weeks. As I wrote about earlier this week, there aren't many states with election reform on the ballot this fall. It will be interesting to see what happens in California, and if voters will support this new redistricting approach if it makes it to the ballot this fall, right after strongly opposing another redistricting measure (sponsored by the Governor and opposed by Democrats) in the recent special election. Stay tuned.

Back following the 2000 presidential election, when the VTP was originally formed, one of the most difficult aspects of our early research was compiling data on how much money is spent on local, state and federal election administration. As some readers may recall, in the end we were forced to rely on some relatively poor-quality data in our 2001 report, "Voting: What Is, What Could Be."

Recently one of the VTP's graduate student researchers, Sarah Hill, made data available from her research. Sarah compiled election administration finance data from California counties, ranging from 1992-2003, and she has archived her database in the VTP's new data archive, located at the following link. Our hope is that Sarah's research in this area, and her data collection efforts, will help foster more research in this area, so that we can develop a better understanding of how much money is being spend in the United States on election administration, and also then determine what level of service to the voter this money is buying.

If you do use this data, please to give Sarah Hill, a graduate student in Social Sciences at Caltech, credit for collecting and distributing this important new database to fellow researchers.

Our friends at the Initiative and Referendum Institute (IRI) recently released a state-by-state survey of what is going to be on statewide ballots throughout the nation in this election season. Unfortunately the IRI report does not give a convenient table describing what is on the ballot by issue area, there are some interesting ballot measures described in the IRI report that election reformers might want to follow, including:

• Alaska: a campaign finance measure to restrict campaign contributions.
  
• Arizona: a measure that would give a million dollars to a randomly-picked voter after each general election, in an attempt to stimulate voter turnout.
  
• Colorado: a constitutional amendment to extend initiative rights and limit the abilities of courts to impose "single subject" rules.
  
• Florida: a constitutional amendment to require a 60-percent threshold for initiative passage.
  

The intriguing measure is clearly the Arizona one; if that passes, it will be interesting to see if it has any effect on voter participation in that state.

During the IACREOT panel discussion last Friday in San Francisco, we discussed the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recent workshops and discussions of the issues associated with electronic voting. The NAS e-voting panel had another meeting in early May, and as I mentioned at IACREOT on Friday, there is another report forthcoming soon from the NAS on voting systems. This second report should be of great interest to Election Updates readers, so once this report is available, we'll post it here ... stay tuned to this blogsite!

Well this is an interesting story in the Baltimore Sun. I am in the midst of surveying state party leaders about their early voting efforts in 2004. I guess I'll have to run another survey after 2006!

The Illinois state legislature has changed early voting procedures in order to avoid some of the problems they encountered in their first trial run this Spring, the

LaSalle County Times reports.

(Ed note: as I blogged earlier, Illinois did this one exactly right--they implemented new procedures during a low turnout, off year election. Kudos to state officials and the legislature for not backbiting on the problems in the spring and moving quickly to rectify the problems for the Fall.)

On Friday afternoon, I participated in an interesting panel discussion at the IACREOT conference in San Francisco. Conny McCormack (LA County's chief election official) moderated the discussion, Tim McNamara (currently an election official in San Diego County, soon to move up to LA County to work with Conny), and I had an interesting and productive discussion about threat assessment for election administration.

Tim's comments covered two different topics. First, as he has been involved in the NIST threat assessment process, he summarized that for the audience and talked about many of the threats that have been researched so far in the NIST process. Second, Tim talked more specifically about his experiences, and thoughts, about threat assessment. There were four things that Tim discussed that I found very useful:

1. He defined a threat as "an attack on an election function so that it doesn't work as intended."
   
2. He talked a lot (reiterated by Conny's comments and experiences) that at this point many of the claimed threats, which may in fact have a very low likelihood of being realized, are themselves eroding confidence and are becoming an increasing workload on election officials [as an aside, later in the discussion Conny mentioned that she has a person on her staff who is devoted to dealing with public information requests and inquires, a new phenomenon].
   
3. He emphasized that we need a process of practical mitigation for real elections (a point that I emphasized as well in my comments).
   
4. He recommended the development of a "threat advisory consortium", involving election officials and academics, a great recommendation.
   

Here's a photo of me giving my comments and thoughts to the audience. And here is a pdf file of the outline of my talk.. One point of departure from Tim's comments came early in my talk, when I borrowed Tim's definition of a threat, but broadened it to include the more general (and perhaps sometimes more practical) threats that election officials face that may not be intentional; I defined threat as "something that jeopardizes an election function so that it doesn't work as indended." Not again that Tim's definition ("an attack") is more focused on the narrower set of intentional threats, whereas mine is broader to include the sorts of unintentional threats that election officials must plan for, and work to mitigate.

In my talk, I outlined the reasons why election officials, at the federal, state, and local levels, should work to undertake threat assessment and contingency planning to the extent possible. I gave some examples of places where they can get other models (including studying existing best practices across the nation and world, academic research on election threats and fraud, the NIST threat assessment process, other research by other government entities that have existing research on threat assessment, and other resources); at some point in the very near future I'll work to develop these resources in a single place either here or on the VTP website, and when that happens, I'll post a note here.

This discussion, and conversations I had with other election officials and vendors at the conference, led me to realize that election officials today are quite concerned about alleged threats to their electoral processes. Some election officials are being very proactive, and are devoting resources to threat assessment, contingency planning, and public education. Others are in a more defensive mode, and are very worried about how threat allegations are making their work more difficult and consuming the time and energy of their staff.

The bottom line, as I repeated in my talk, is that election officials have to be ready: bad things will happen, and in today's environment the mere threat of bad things happening can erode confidence in the process. Thus, planning for when bad things happen is imperative for election administration today. And Tim's idea of the development of a "threat advisory consortium" is a very good one; hopefully there will be interest among election officials in developing such a process.

Today's Washington Post discuses how the fallout from the Mexican election is getting uglier. The paper reports:

Lopez Obrador ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers Saturday morning, alleging for the first time that Mexico's electoral commission had rigged its computers before the July 2 election to ensure the half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, a champion of free trade.

Based on this claim, he is planning a strong challenge to the electoral commission.

Lopez Obrador added a new layer of complexity to the crisis by saying he not only would challenge the results in the country's special elections court but also would attempt to have the election declared illegal by Mexico's Supreme Court. That strategy presages a constitutional confrontation because according to many legal experts the special elections court is the only body that can hear election challenges.

The goal of this pressure it to get the electoral commission to recount every ballot from every precinct.

Lopez Obrador wants a vote-by-vote count, which would require opening sealed vote packets from more than 130,000 polling stations. Electoral commission officials have sided with Calderon's strategists, who argue that the law does not allow for the packets to be opened unless tally sheets attached to the packets appear to have been altered. Lopez Obrador said that only 2,600 vote packets were opened Tuesday and Wednesday during a marathon official count, which shrank Calderon's lead from 400,000 votes after a preliminary vote to 230,000.

Thousands of Lopez Obrador's supporters, many of whom had marched across the city for hours, chanted "Voto por voto, casilla por casilla" -- vote by vote, polling place by polling place -- as they streamed into the Zocalo on Saturday.

This strategy raises two questions, both of which are also relevant to the United States. First, what happens if you do a recount and the outcome does not change? Does Obrador say the election is fair or does he argue that the electoral commission rigged the recount as well? Equally as important, does this set a precedent where you always have recounts, something that--I have a strong feeling--Obrador's supporters would be strongly opposing if their candidate had won the election.

Second, will the argument that the election is rigged suppress turnout in future elections? This question has direct relevance in the United States, where certain segments of the population argue that elections are systematically unfair, are designed to suppress votes, and that "your vote won't be counted anyway." By making these arguemtns, there is a risk that certain segments of the population will believe it and will not vote.

Ironically, the argument can become self-reinforcing. In Obrador's case. if he argues elections are rigged and his supporter's votes do not matter, they may be less likely to vote in the next election--why should they, the election is rigged--and then their candidate loses again.

The key issue is how the issue of election reform is framed. Framing the debate in terms of confidence--everyone should be confident that the election was well-run, well-audited, and provides an outcome that follows clear rules--is different that framing the debate in terms of fraud and election theft.

It would be beneficial to conduct more extensive survey research on this issue of confidence and how framing the debate over election reform can suppress turnout in elections. Mike and I have started to do some work in this area but there is clearly a need for more research on this very important issue.