Election Updates

The State of Maine has entered into an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department over its efforts to meet the timelines and requirements of HAVA. The link above takes you to the full release. In part, it notes that:

Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap announced on Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has accepted Maine’s plan to implement the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The plan includes timelines for meeting requirements, such as the statewide implementation of a Central Voter Registration (CVR) system and an Accessible Voting Solution (AVS) to help individuals with disabilities vote with privacy and independence.

Although many HAVA provisions have already been carried out in Maine including provisional voting, an administrative complaint procedure, new voter registration applications, and new voting system standards with a uniform definition of what constitutes a vote, the Justice Department is seeking through a consent decree to support the state’s efforts to fully comply with HAVA by the November 7, 2006 General Election.

For those of you who have never been there, Maine has numerous little cities and a very community-oriented culture. (Full disclosure, I was born there). This excerpt from the state's release illustrates how difficult it is to move from a localized voter registration system to a statewide system in a state like Maine.

The creation of this system requires moving approximately one million voter registration records from more than 500 municipalities into a single system. Until now, those records have been maintained with care on the local level—but in a great variety of ways. In many cases, the records are on cards or paper lists, sometimes maintained in the home of the municipal voter registrar.

While I am blogging on international things, there was an NPR story this morning about this weekend's election in the Congo. As the NPR text accompanying the story notes:

Twenty-five million Congolese are registered to vote. With no functioning road or rail network, it's been a feat ferrying election material to the polling stations.

Congo's Elections' Commission spokesman, Dieudonne Mirimo Mulongo, says voting equipment has been airlifted and delivered by road, by river, on canoes, bicycle and on foot all over Congo.

The Electoral Commission has the help of a massive U.N. peacekeeping operation. The historic polls are costing the international community more than $400 million.

There is a very nice story in the AP about the Mexican Federal Electoral Tribunal outlining the choices the Tribunal has. You also realize why it is these people are the highest paid public servants in the country. As the story states:

The judges, who must issue a ruling by Sept. 6, face three choices: declaring a winner, ordering a recount, or annulling the vote. Each could have grave consequences.

If the judges confirm Calderon won the July 2 election, Lopez Obrador is likely to reject the ruling and stage massive protests. The former Mexico City mayor has already held two mass demonstrations since the election, and has called for supporters to fill the capital's main Zocalo plaza Sunday.

If they order a recount, they risk weakening a law designed to combat fraud by prohibiting ballot boxes from being opened unless there is evidence of irregularities.

If they annul the elections, they will leave Mexico without a president-elect for more than a year, threatening the country's stability. No candidate has supported annulling the vote.

There is also a nice story on this topic on NPR today as well.

I'm happy to pass along that my MIT VTP colleague, Ted Selker, recently received a much-deserved award from the American Association of People With Disabilities --- their Thomas Paine Award. The MIT press release announcing Ted's award noted that he received the award for his research that:

... has focused on improving the human interface in voting machines to better orient voters, provide visual cues and feedback and allow voters to double-check choices. He has also created "audio voting" technology that lets voters hear instructions on earphones; he has shown that an "audio trail" is more verifiable than a paper trail. Dickson also praised Selker and the Voting Technology Project (www.vote.caltech.edu) for developing hard data on voting problems, an alternative to partisan speculation about election follies.

It's fantastic to see that Ted's work is receiving such attention from the AAPD --- congratulations, Ted!

Electionline.org released a new study on the current status of voter registration. Here's a summary of the report, from this week's electionline Weekly:

Among the findings:

*While the variety of services available from state governments online is growing in most areas, it remains largely under-utilized in the voter registration field. Forty-one states use the Internet as a place for voters to find forms, but once located such forms still need to be printed, filled out by hand, and sent to or dropped off at a registrar’s office.

*Only one state, Arizona, allows for a completely paperless, online registration, using digital signatures from DMV transactions. Even with the Internet option, however, Arizona voters must complete the registration at least 29 days before an election.

*Restrictions on “third party” registration drives conducted by political parties, civil rights groups, environmental activists and others are growing nationally as each federal election cycle brings scattered reports of mishandled or discarded registration applications. Of the 37 states responding to the survey, 17 indicated that rules are in place requiring some increased level of scrutiny registration drives – sometimes to the dismay of groups organizing from such drives. Rules vary, from mandatory training or registration of volunteers in some states, to “anti-bundling” regulations in Ohio that prohibit the return of multiple applications, to Florida’s new $5,000 fine for every voter registration application that cannot be accounted for by the group who solicited the application.

*Most states do not maintain statistics on the number of rejected applications. Those that did indicated the numbers nationally could be in the hundreds of thousands each year. The most common reasons cited – applicants are not old enough, do not have a valid address or are not U.S. citizens.

*While localities were not separately surveyed, state officials indicated that local registrars of voters contact applicants if mistakes are identified on registration applications. However, it is not known if the practice is standard for all applicants in all localities.

“The reluctance to embrace technology is not unsurprising, especially considering the unease with which many view the modernization of elections generally,” Chapin said. “While there may continue to be technological advances in the area of voter registration in the foreseeable future, I would expect such advances to be met with the same skepticism and scrutiny that has attended modernization efforts in other parts of the voting process.”

More great work from electionline.org!

As part of the planning process for the upcoming VTP conference on voter registration and identification (October 5-6, MIT), Spencer Overton sent me a link to a forthcoming paper of his on voter identification.

Here's the abstract from Overton's paper:

In the wake of closely contested elections, calls for laws that require voters to present photo identification as a condition to cast a ballot have become pervasive. Advocates tend to rely on two rhetorical devices: (1) anecdotes about a couple of elections tainted by voter fraud; and (2) “common sense” arguments that voters should produce photo identification because the cards are required to board airplanes, buy alcohol, and engage in other activities. This Article explains the analytical shortcomings of anecdote, analogy, and intuition, and applies a cost-benefit approach generally overlooked in election law scholarship. Rather than rushing to impose a photo identification requirement for voting, policymakers should instead examine empirical data to weigh the costs and benefits of such a requirement. Existing data suggests that the number of legitimate voters who would fail to bring photo identification to the polls is several times higher than the number of fraudulent voters, and that a photo identification requirement would produce political outcomes that are less reflective of the electorate as a whole. Policymakers should await better empirical studies before imposing potentially antidemocratic measures. Judges, in turn, should demand statistical data to ensure that voter identification procedures are appropriately tailored to deter fraudulent voters rather than legitimate ones and do not disproportionately exclude protected classes of voters.

Given the relative lack of research on voter identification requirements (especially their effect on election administration and voter participation), it is great to see that scholars are starting to consider this question.

We'll hear more about the existing state of research on voter registration and identification at the October conference, which of course I'll be writing more about as we get closer to the conference date.

As reported in the Annapolis Capital, Maryland's highest court has struck down attempts to subject early voting to a voter referendum.

The City of San Diego is considering all mail balloting for special city elections, the Union Tribune reports.

The City of San Diego's Elections Task Force has issued a report on by mail elections, available here .

The report is a fairly well-reasoned document. It is apparent that the task force wants to implement by mail voting, since they dismiss most of the objections to the process. For instance, for those who worry that by mail voting may result in a loss of secrecy, the report simply notes that some voters already receive assistance at the ballot box by someone of the voter's own choosing. I'm not sure this is analogous to the situation in a by mail election, where the voter has no choice whether to cast a ballot in secret or not.

Similarly, to those who worry about fraud, the taskforce notes that ballot fraud is a felony. Of course, that is what the State of Oregon has relied on for ten years, with few resulting cases of fraud.

One last note: the task force misunderstands the conclusions of the Berinsky et al. Public Opinion Quarterly paper. This paper did not conclude that "voting by mail increases voter participation in the long run,because the process makes it easier for current voters to continue to participate, but does not necessarily turn non-voters into voters." What they concluded is that it increased participation in lower intensity contests by regular voters. You still have to engage in efforts to bring voters into the system.

This story, from WBIR TV in Knoxville, TN, reports on an interesting conflict over early voting, electioneering, and free speech.

The Knox County clerk's office rents out space in the Knoxville Center Mall, and decided to use this space as an early voting center.

However, the Mall invoked its right to limit solicitation on private property, and removed campaign literature and campaign workers from the property, sparking charges of First Amendment violations.

This may be a minor legal misunderstanding between the mall and the clerk's office, but it may portend of problems in the future, as public elections are located in private sites such as shopping centers, banks, and grocery stores.

This conviction announced in the Roanoke, VA Times

This from the King County Department of Executive Services: (press release).

King County is slated to receive an award from the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials, and Clerks based on their quality control standards for mail ballot processing.

The National Academies of Science released a report this morning, "Electronic Voting Will Present Challenges for November." The thirteen-page "letter report", in the form of a letter addressed to Lawrence Brandt of the National Science Foundation, stems from discussions during the May 2006 workshop that the NAS held, and the previous 2005 project the NAS conducted on electronic voting.

The report overviews the existing state of election administration in the United States, and concludes that "some jurisdictions --- and possibly many --- may not be well prepared for the arrival of the November 2006 elections with respect to the deployment and use of electronic voting equipment and related technology ..." The first section of the report lists a number of reasons, coming from the work of the NAS e-voting panel in 2005 and 2006, for why many jurisdictions may not be well-prepared for the November 2006 election cycle.

The report issues a number of recommendations, many of which I've advocated for some time:

1. Jurisdictions should plan for contingencies, and develop backup plans for election day problems. Here the NAS report focuses primarily on failures of e-voting equipment and related technologies on election day, which should be part of any jurisdiction's contingency plan.
   
2. "Jurisdictions should band together in their interactions with vendors."
   
3. Election officials should work together to share information about vendors and voting technologies.
   
4. Jurisdictions should try to conduct parallel tests of their voting systems on election day, if they can implement such a testing regime before the election.
   

Again, another helpful report from the NAS. As a member of the NAS panel that helped to produce this report (and the 2005 report), I again wanted to thank Herb Lin of NAS who had primary responsibility for developing the workshops and writing the two reports, and my colleagues on the NAS panel who were both challenging and enjoyable to work with.

The Mankato, MN Free Press argues for expanding Minnesota's voting by mail program (currently limited to very small precincts and jurisdictions).

There is another odd provision in Minnesota law that I was not aware of--another registered voter must sign (certify?) the vote by mail ballot. I wonder how that is possibly checked.

As some of our readers know, Thad Hall and I (along with our new collaborator, Morgan Llewellyn) have been working lately to better understand American public opinion regarding election reform and voting technology issues.

One of the dimensions that we have been measuring in our public opinion survey work is electoral confidence, regarding which there is currently little rigorous academic research.

To help resolve that problem, and to begin a serious scientific discussion as to whether Americans are confident in the electoral process --- and who in the population may lack confidence --- we today released a working paper titled "Are Americans Confident Their Ballots Are Counted?" (VTP working paper 49). The paper contains a great deal of sophisticated analysis of the survey question we have been using, "How confident are you that your ballot for president in the (2000 or 2004) election was counted as intended?"

What we find (as summarized in Table 1 in the paper) is that while most voters are confident (approximately 90% after 2000, and virtually the same around the 2004 election), there are roughly one in ten voters who lack confidence. And there are some clear patterns in the data: when we first used this survey question in our surveys following the 2000 election, we found that about 17% of African Americans lacked confidence; but when we got to the 2004 election cycle, the same survey question posed to African American voters showed that nearly 33% lacked confidence.

As we point out in the paper, there is a lot more work in this area to be done, in particular making sure that we keep tracking voter confidence, that we look to some of the important subpopulations (like African Americans) who seem to lack confidence, that we look to non-voters to see how their confidence compares to voters, and that we work to unpack the causal determinants of confidence. There is a lot of interesting analysis in this working paper, but there is a lot more research to be done on this critical evaluation variable.

There is a opinion piece out today from by Thomas Elias, "How to regulate petition carriers." In it, he discusses some new legislation making its way through the California state legislature, that seeks to place regulations on initiative signature collection practices in the state. Her's Elias's summary of the legislation:

Now comes Democratic Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza of Long Beach with what she believes is a correction. Her bill requiring California residency - and even residency in the county where they're working - for people who collect signatures on petitions to place initiatives on the statewide ballot has already passed the Assembly and will likely have little trouble in the state Senate later this summer.

It's unknown whether Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will sign it, as many Republicans believe this measure aims to make it more difficult for conservative interest groups and business lobbies to qualify their pet measures for a vote. The Republican reasoning: Labor unions have less trouble putting volunteers in the field to carry petitions for free, so any restrictions on the carriers would favor leftist causes.

But as Elias points out, the courts have been quite skeptical of similar attempts in the past to regulate the growing signature collection industry.

Elias poses an interesting alternative proposal:

How about a law rendering any petition signature invalid if the carrier was paid for gathering it? A law like that would be akin to existing ones that forbid payment for actual votes. In some ways, petition signatures are even more influential than real votes, since they determine which issues will be considered at election time.

Payment for signatures, then, can be interpreted as every bit as corrupt as buying votes.

As Elias correctly points out, the political prospects for his proposal are dim, but it is an interesting notion.

For a recent study that Fred Boehmke and I did of the signature gathering process in California and it's influence on political participation, see VTP working paper 45, "The Influence of Initiative Signature Gathering Campaigns on Political Participation."