Election Updates

There is an odd sense of deja vu here --- another federal election, and another instance of problems with ballot design in Florida ...

The current problem in Florida's 16th Congressional district race is that former representative Mark Foley's name, according to Florida law, has to remain on the ballot --- despite the fact that he has resigned from office and is no longer running for reelection. That has left Joe Negron, who has taken Foley's spot on the ballot, scrambling to inform voters that a vote for Foley is really a vote for Negron.

Here's some information from a Los Angeles Times story about the race:

A vote for Mark Foley is a vote to elect Joe Negron," explained Negron, who took over the GOP spot on the ballot when Foley resigned after explicit messages he sent to teenage male pages were made public.

The Nov. 7 ballot had already been approved and some absentee forms mailed out when Foley resigned. Florida law forbids variation in the voting materials within any district, so Foley's name had to stay.
...
A new squabble over the unchangeable ballot arose Friday, when the Florida Democratic Party filed a court motion to prevent "illegal electioneering" at polling places — which is how it sees district election officials' plan to post notices telling voters that they should mark their ballots for Foley if they want to vote for Negron.

"Plain and simple, posting candidates' names is considered electioneering, and electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place is illegal," said Karen Thurman, state Democratic party chairwoman. "It's not the state's job to inform voters about the Republican candidate."

Politics aside, no question that this situation is likely to confuse voters in the 16th district when they cast their ballots, now and through Election Day. It'll be interesting to see what the vote turns out to be, and this presents an interesting situation for those who might be interested in studying ballot design and voter information efforts: in situations like these (which we have seen in other states recently), how can voters be informed about their choices, and how can ballots be designed so that voters are no confused?

A report released by the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, Common Cause, and The Century Foundation, examines progress on election reform since 2004, across a variety of areas: voter registration, voter identification, provisional ballots, voter suppression and intimidation, poll workers and polling places, and voting machines. This report also provides a detailed analysis of election reforms in ten key states, in a series of detailed appendices. There are three areas that the report identifies as potential problems in 2006: that some states have made the voter registration process more difficult, that long lines in polling places are likely to be a continued problem in 2006 and beyond, and that voter identification laws are likely to cause problems this fall.

Proposition 205 in Arizona will implement voting by mail in Arizona. It has a prominent set of supporters (listed at Your Right to Vote of Arizona, including the League of Women's Voters, a number of mayors, state representatives, and state senators, and other civic leaders.

The Arizona Republic provides a nice summary of the two sides to the initiative.

Sadly, both sides are making unsubstantiated claims about voting by mail. Proponents claim that voting by mail increases turnout "especially amongst people with disabilities, homemakers and young voters ages 18 to 38".(see the main Your Right to Vote page), citing a "study by the University of Oregon."

Southwell and Burchett's December 2000 study (American Politics Quarterly) does show an increase in the three voting by mail elections when compared to 43 other elections, but this also corresponds to a potential novelty effect. The work has not been replicated in additional elections.

What they apparently draw upon is a 2003 study conducted by Southwell (available here). The problem with this study is that is is based purely on individual self-reports of what balloting type people "prefer" and what type they think makes them vote "more often." This is purely a self-report, with a very questionable baseline for comparison. How many of us can really say how much "more likely" we are to vote compared to some unknown alternative?

The stronger evidence, which I have mentioned many times, is that voting by mail does improve turnout in lower intensity contests--such as state and local races and inititives--but does so not by drawing in new voters, but simply by activating regular voters.

The opponents are no better, though. Typically, they charge that voting by mail will increase voter fraud, although there is virtually no evidence of this in Oregon. Furthermore, as state officials in Oregon have often told me, at least under voting by mail, every signature is checked. People seem to think that the same thing happens at the precinct, but as anyone who has witnessed precinct place voting can tell you, no one compares signatures.

I've seen no polling data on this proposition to date. I'll keep updates coming to the blog.

USA Today is reporting on a preliminary copy of the EAC election fraud study, produced months ago by Tova Wang and Job Serebrov.

At a time when many states are instituting new requirements for voter registration and identification, a preliminary report to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has found little evidence of the type of polling-place fraud those measures seek to stop.

USA TODAY obtained the report from the commission four months after it was delivered by two consultants hired to write it. The commission has not distributed it publicly.

...

Conservatives dispute the research and conclusions. Thor Hearne, counsel to the American Center for Voting Rights, notes that the Justice Department has sued Missouri for having ineligible voters registered, while dead people have turned up on the registration rolls in Michigan. "It is just wrong to say that this isn't a problem," he says.

That's one reason the commission decided not to officially release the report. "There was a division of opinion here," Chairman Paul DeGregorio says. "We've seen places where fraud does occur."

The consultants found little evidence of that. Barry Weinberg, former deputy chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil rights division, reviewed their work. "Fraud at the polling place is generally difficult to pull off," he says. "It takes a lot of planning and a lot of coordination."

Here's a link to the preliminary version of the twelve-page report obtained by USA Today.

As Dan Tokaji has pointed out earlier this morning in his blog posting on the "release" of this report in USA Today, it is really not clear why this study was not released to the public earlier (I don't think that a division of opinion within the EAC is a great reason for not releasing studies funded by the federal government). The EAC has recently been funding many different research projects (some of which have produced final reports which haven't been made public yet, either), and as these studies constitute the federal government's commitment to studying election administration, these reports (and all data collected as part of their research activities) should be made available to the public once the research has been completed.

It's worth noting that Section 241 of the Help America Vote Act, that laid out the many studies that Congress wanted the EAC to conduct, notes right in the first sentence of that section: "the Commission shall conduct and make available to the public studies regarding the election administration issues (described below) ..."

Note the phrase "make available to the public..."

While early, early voting is now available throughout California, there seem to be few early, early voters. According to the Los Angeles Times:

It was the second day of early voting for the statewide Nov. 7 election, and sample and absentee ballots were just starting to land in mailboxes — which historically starts people thinking about their vote, said Dean C. Logan, chief deputy registrar-recorder and county clerk.

Only a dozen people had cast ballots in the Norwalk office by early afternoon Wednesday. The day's total of voters won't be tallied until today, and their votes won't be counted until election night.

On Tuesday, 46 people voted, 19 using the 6-year-old electronic touch screen. A third of Wednesday's voters used the screen system.

The early voting push is part of the registrar's campaign to make it almost impossible for someone to find an excuse not to vote.

"For early voting, the voter gets to choose when and where they want to vote," Logan said. And starting Oct. 25, voters can cast ballots at 16 locations in addition to the registrar's office. Besides the touch screens, another option at all 17 sites is dropping off an absentee ballot.

The Akron Beacon Journal had a good story about how pollworkers in Cuyahoga County (Ohio) are going to a local community college to receive training before their November election. No doubt, after reports like the one we collaborated on with ESI, additional pollworker training in Cuyahoga is essential for insuring a smoothly-functioning general election this fall. The only question is whether or not they will have any evaluation mechanisms in place to determine the effectiveness of the training program (for example, will they reproduce the ESI audit to see if the pollworker training program leads to measurable improvements in any quantitative performance metrics?).

Here's the highlights from the story:

CLEVELAND - Vanessa Lawrence was happy to be back in class Wednesday.

...

She and thousands of other poll workers in the state's most populous county are not just getting instructions for the general election Nov. 7. This time they have to pass a written test on procedures at the end of a four-hour training session and demonstrate that they can perform basic tasks involving a touch-screen voting machine, such as encoding a voter card and changing paper.

Under a $730,000 contract, Cuyahoga Community College is taking over training after a disastrous primary in which poll workers were blamed for not knowing how to operate new electronic voting machines, losing vote-holding memory cards and, in some cases, not even showing up.

The training program is among the first of its kind, said David Reines, the college's executive vice president. It could point the way for election boards around the country that are switching to electronic voting machines, said Dick Dadey, executive director of the New York-based Citizens Union Foundation, a nonprofit research, education and advocacy group.

"I think it's an essential model if the country is going to make the transition to these new machines as seamless as possible," he said.

Lawrence was one of about 12 students taking instruction from one of the college's instructors and a staff member from North Canton-based Diebold Election Systems, which makes the voting machines.

"This class, I think, is going to help make our day go better than it did the last time," Lawrence said. "Some polls didn't open on time. You've always got people coming in before they go to work and want to get their votes in."

...

About 1,400 poll workers have completed the training since the sessions started Sept. 30. The board needs to train about 5,700 poll workers, and training sessions will continue into November if necessary, said Jane Platten, who coordinates the program for the elections board.

County commissioners have authorized a $50 increase in poll workers' pay, to $172, covering the new, four-hour classroom training, a meeting lasting about an hour and a half the night before the election and election day work.

...

All men and women may be created equal, but a new report from Alameda County suggests that all voting machines are not. The report examines security vulnerabilities with the Sequoia voting equipment used in the County. According to a report by Pacific Design Engineering that was done for the County, the Sequoia voting system is a secure system, when basic physical security initiatives are in place. (I have a hard copy of the report; it is not at present online).

The most important take-away is in a table in the report that outlines a series of vulnerabilities that voting systems have to attack, both in precincts and in the central office. It then compares the vulnerablities of a Diebold system, as documented in various reports, with the Sequoia system. The study finds that the Sequoia system is only vulnerable to one of the 12 precinct attacks and one of the five central attacks and both can be mitigated through security procedures. By contrast, the Diebold system has been found to be vulnerable to 13 of 15 precinct attacks and 4 of 5 central attacks.

The report then identifies threats and countermeasures. The report finds that the County already has in place many countermeasures needed, and suggests new countermeasures for some specific threats.

We will publish more on this once we get the report posted and can more fully digest it.

Early voting --- in the offices of election officials in California --- begins today. Later in the month, early voting will move to distributed sites. For example, in LA County, citizens there can now cast early ballots down at the Norwalk offices of the Los Angeles Registrar/Recorder; starting October 25, early voting locations will open in sixteen other places throughout the county.

Lake County, CA projects a 300 percent increase in the level of absentee ballot usage since the 2002 election. This is in line with projections that I made in papers I wrote after the 2004 election.

The Lake County Record Bee

Apropos of the current EAC research proposal on free and reduced postage absentee balloting: two counties in California have ballots that are so heavy that two first class stamps will be required to deliver them.

I wonder how many ballots will be returned to sender?

Contra Costa Times

Indeed, Latvia just had a parliamentary election, and according to data that is now available it appears that 7,530 votes outside Latvia were cast in this election, a slight increase over the 7,490 overseas ballots cast in 2002, but a substantial decline from the 10,080 ballots cast in 1998. These figures come from the Latvians Online site, and here is the article that provides the turnout data. The article has a brief description of the procedures:

In all, 53 polling stations operated outside of Latvia for this year’s election, almost twice as many as in 2002 when a total of 7,490 votes were cast abroad in person or by mail. In addition to those who voted in person, a total of 557 Latvian citizens abroad requested absentee ballots that would be returned by mail, according to the Central Election Commission in Rīga.

as well as the following reminder, which gives us some understanding of how the overseas voters in this election were authenticated:

Election day dawned overcast and at times rainy in Rīga and other parts of Latvia, but in many other spots around the world voters were greeted with clear skies.

Polls were open until 10 p.m. (22:00 hours) local time as voters selected from among 19 political parties and their 1,024 candidates for the 100-seat parliament.

Voters should remember to bring their Latvian passports with them to the polling station, Arnis Cimdars, head of the Central Election Commission in Rīga, said during an Oct. 6 press conference. He also suggested voters who need eyeglasses should remember them.

Interestingly, the overseas vote was different than the domestic vote, according to a different story in Latvians Online:

With all 1,006 districts in Latvia and abroad reporting by 1:37 p.m. local time in Latvia, Tautas partija had earned 19.49 percent of the vote; Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība, 16.69 percent; Jaunais laiks, 16.38 percent; Saskaņas Centrs, 14.42 percent; Latvijas Pirmā partija and Latvijas Ceļš, 8.59 percent; TB/LNNK, 6.95 percent, and PCTVL, 6.02 percent.

Under the Latvian electoral system, parties must earn at least 5 percent of the vote to get seats in the parliament. Which candidates actually got seats in the parliament will be clear in about three weeks, the Central Election Commission said. Ballots first need to be reviewed and notation made of candidates whose names were crossed out or who earned addtional points by voters adding a “+” next to a name.

Voters abroad disagreed with those in Latvia, giving nearly 38 percent of their ballots to Jaunais laiks, 17 percent to TB/LNNK and just under 14 percent to Tautas partija. A total of 7,530 ballots were cast at 53 polling stations abroad, with 7,490 of those counting as valid, according to provisional results compiled by the Central Election Commission in Rīga.

Interesting data, both on the participation of Latvians abroad, and on how their voting preferences differed from the domestic voters. Now if the Latvians can produce data like this, it really begs the question as to why we can't get data like this in the United States!

I'll have more to write about in the near future about a few of the specific presentations, as some of the later presentations on voter identification raised some interesting questions and presented some provocative data.

But CNET had a nice summary story covering the conference:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The government was quick to trust the Internet with tax returns, but it still has not managed to organize a paperless voting system. What's the holdup?

Many voting citizens, whether they consider themselves red, blue or green, have been asking that question since the 2000 election shed light on how inconsistent, and often low-tech, the voting systems are in the United States.

Standardization of data fields, interoperability between counties and states, and an unwillingness on the part of local municipalities to embrace change are some of the major obstacles, according to panelists here at the Voter Identification/Registration Conference, hosted by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday and Friday.

Politicians and election officials have been scrambling to put together high-tech solutions, but the potential for voter fraud, coupled with the exposure of security flaws in e-voting systems and voter databases, has slowed down the conversion.

The panel put aside legal issues concerning e-voting machines and, instead, concentrated on how technology could be used to ensure that electronic voter registration and identification is valid and consistently maintained.

Ann McGeehan, director of elections for Texas, Kim Brace of Election Data Services, and Thad Hall an assistant professor at the University of Utah who co-wrote "Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting," shared their experiences and examples of why, six years later, there is still no system in place.

One of the most basic problems across the states, Brace said, is trying to match and verify data when there is no standardization for reporting voter registration rolls or for constructing data fields. Some states keep both active and inactive voters on the rolls, some states retain only active voters, and some leave the decision up to individual counties. The differences lie not just between states, or between various departments of motor vehicles and voter registration systems, but between counties within the same state.

"These driver's license files are not as good as everybody thought they were," Brace said.

Names, for example, which should be broken out into first-, middle- and last-name fields, appear as one name field in many data sets, according to Brace. Suffixes like Jr. and Sr., and the modern use of hyphenated or two-word last names, has also added to the confusion. Some counties even collapse street address, town, ZIP code and state into one address field rather than breaking them out.

McGeehen has been overseeing the implementation of the Texas Election Administration Management (TEAM) System, a Web-based voting system that Texas counties can access through the Internet. TEAM, scheduled to be in place by the end of 2006, will electronically enable counties to add local election information to a state-provided ballot, have the ballot certified and send voting results.

The TEAM site allows citizens to confirm registration, get directions to their polling locations and find out what's on their ballot. If a voter moves within the state, TEAM will cancel the voter in the former county and register them in the new county, McGeehan said. But before any information can be imported into the system, the state has had to clean up disorganized data from existing motor vehicle and voter registries.

"In some counties, the data is 'dirty.' For example, my husband and I are registered at the same address and yet registered in different precincts," McGeehan said, referring to her own state's problems. "TEAM has stronger address standards that match the postal standards, so it will not allow for mistakes like that. But we can't deploy until mistakes like that in old data systems are brought forward, cleaned up."

Thanks to CNET for covering the conference, and for focusing on the substance of the conference!