Election Updates

There is an interesting article in tomorrow's Washington Post about Internet voting in Estonia. Much of what they talk about I blogged on when I was in Estonia, but here is an interesting excerpt (but do read the whole thing, it is very interesting).

It is no accident that the first e-elections took place in Estonia. The Baltic Sea nation of 1.4 million tucked hard against Russia had reclaimed its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 -- and it never looked back. Eager to differentiate itself from Russia and other countries in the region, Estonia positioned itself as a technological trailblazer. It quickly became a leader in e-everything, with citizens paying parking fees via cellphones and submitting tax declarations online.

Online elections were a natural next step. Estonia already had in place some of the practical elements for e-voting. Citizens must carry chip-based ID cards that include digital signatures, allowing them to be unambiguously identified online after logging in to vote. Although the country's rate of Internet use is not terribly high -- about 60 percent, compared with 70 percent in the United States -- it has a strong e-banking system, which increases trust in the Internet for important transactions. (In my experience, Estonia's Internet banking is more advanced, more customer-friendly and safer than that of the United States.)

Still, e-voting has not been unanimously accepted here. The country's Reform Party, representing the most e-literate voters -- often younger and more urban -- has favored the innovation, as has the nationalist and pro-market Fatherland Party, whose leaders think the effort provides great global PR for the country. But parties drawing support from older and poorer voters hurt by the post-Soviet changes, such as the Center Party and People's Union Party, have opposed e-voting. The digital divide is alive and well here.

Yesterday was the final day for remote early voting in Los Angeles County. In addition to my experiences yesterday at the Pasadena early voting site, I went with a graduate and undergraduate student yesterday to an early voting location in Monterey Park (where we have also observed early voting in the past). I had a few observations to note, in addition to those I wrote about during the past week:

• The ballot was amazingly long, and it does seem to take most voters somewhere between 8 to 10 minutes to cast their ballots. We'll have some hard data on this sometime in the near future, as some of my Caltech undergraduate students are doing a research project this fall collecting quantitative data on how long it is taking people to vote. But in any case, my ballot was 18 screens --- and it took me probably about ten minutes to cast my ballot, check for errors (I did find that I had mistakenly not cast a ballot in a race), and then compare my screen with the VVPAT on the Diebold device. One thing to note about my VVPAT: the paper was slightly misaligned, and as a result one of the races that appeared on the screen was not visible on my VVPAT. Only when I went to the next screen would that final race be visible on the VVPAT (but of course by then my vote on that race was no longer visible on the screen). I wonder how often this sort of problem occurs with VVPAT devices ...
  
• I personally still find it difficult to navigate between the sample ballot that Los Angeles County issues to every registered voter, the summary screen on the Diebold device, and the VVPAT. There are a couple of sources of confusion. First, the sample ballot is laid out for use with InkaVote --- it has the same appearance as the vote recorder does for InkaVote users. But that is not what the Diebold summary screen looks like --- which leads me to wonder what it might take to reprogram the Diebold summary screen so that it looks more like the county sample ballot? That might make the sample ballot more usable for comparison with the summary screen. Second, the Diebold VVPAT device is located in an awkward position relative to the screen, to the right, and much below the screen. It requires that many voters, myself included, stoop and peer at the paper trail --- inconvenient and difficult to use. Third, the way the summary information is provided on the screen, relative to the paper trail, is very different which makes it difficulty to easily and effectively compare the information. This certainly is an area where some good research and redesign could simply the technology and improve the voting experience.
  
• We saw a lot of "assisted voting", especially in Monterey Park --- both elderly voters, and language minority voters. Clearly, figuring out ways that the technology can be used more easily by such voters, so that they can cast a private and secret ballot, should be a high priority.
  
• Finally, early voting was very brisk yesterday, both in the morning in Pasadena, and in the late afternoon in Monterey Park. I won't be surprised to see that McPherson's prediction of 44% California's votes are cast by early or absentee voters is correct.
  

Many observers (including myself) have expressed concerns that new statewide voter registration databses might present problems in some locations, especially in states where the new voter registries are really being used for the first time in a major election (see my October 24 essay that discusses this).

Yesterday we had a potential taste of things to come.

I went with an friend to the early voting location in our area (at the Jackie Robinson Center in Pasadena), right after the early voting site opened at 8:30am in the morning. There was a short line (perhaps 6 people waiting), and all of the eight voting machines were utilized. My friend and I had both brought our sample ballots with us, and signed the line on the sample ballot and gave it to the person checking voters in. I received my smart card in just a few minutes (but did have to wait another couple of minutes until a voting machine was available). But my friend had to wait longer; the pollworkers could not find her name in the county voter registry, when they searched for her name (despite the fact that she had her sample ballot with her!).

The hitch seemed to be the fact that she had a hyphenated last name, and when they went to look for her in the database by her voter identification number printed on the sample ballot, they did find her --- though it was not clear to either of us at that point exactly what her last name was in the electronic voter registry.

She did get to vote, but had to wait a few extra minutes. The pollworkers were pleasant and helpful about the problem.

But these are highly-experienced election workers (these same people have worked this early voting site for many successive elections), with electronic access to the county voter file. I just wonder how many of these problems may crop up on election day, how they will be resolved, whether they will create lines in polling places as they are resolved, and if they will further stress already stressed pollworkers.

California's Secretary of State Bruce McPherson yesterday released his predictions for voter turnout in next weeks election: a prediction that 55% of the state's registered voters will cast ballots.

But the really interesting prediction is that 44% of these ballots will come from absentee or early voters, showing that these convenience voting methods are being utilized in a dramatically increasing way in California.

Some data from McPherson's release on this trend:

The latest registration figures compiled by Secretary McPherson’s office indicate 15,837,108 million voters are registered to vote in next Tuesday’s election. This is an increase of more than 500,000 registered voters since the 2002 General Election. As of this morning, an informal survey with responses from 54 county elections officials reported more than 5.1 million absentee ballots were issued and over 1.5 voted absentee ballots were received.

Science News has a story this morning that focuses on the problems of voting technologies, but outlines some of the new approaches, including the "scratch and vote" approach of Adida and Rivest, Chaum's "Punchscan", and other new cryptographic approaches to the voting process. The story has a user-friendly presentation of these new methods:

Scratch & Vote and some new cryptographic approaches like it use a perforated ballot with voting boxes on one half and candidates' names—printed in varying order from ballot to ballot—on the other. After marking a ballot, each voter detaches and shreds the portion with the printed candidate names. The voter then feeds the marked portion, which includes an encrypted version of the names and their order, through an optical scanner to record the vote in the election system. That portion, which the voter keeps as a paper receipt, doesn't reveal the voter's choices but does provide an indelible record of the voter's ballot.

A major issue for cryptographic schemes is that the encrypted information must truly represent the order of selections on a given ballot, Adida notes. That's where the scratch part of his and Rivest's scheme comes in. Each ballot has a scratch foil like that of a lottery ticket, which voters can scrape away to verify that the codes are correct.

After voting, citizens can also look on the election district's Web site and confirm that their ballots were scanned. Moreover, because all the encrypted votes are posted on the Web with no violation of their secrecy, outsiders have a way to independently perform tallies on the encrypted data, Adida explains.

Because the cryptographic systems are so transparent, they "achieve a class of verification that's really far superior to current systems," he says.

Another new cryptographic scheme, called Punchscan, uses scannable ballots with two separable layers that are marked by voters with ink daubers like those used in bingo games. Unlike Scratch & Vote, a Punchscan election would allow voters to keep either layer of the ballot while destroying the other. But neither half on its own includes enough information to reveal a voter's choices.

Steven Hill and Rob Richie have an interesting op-ed in this morning's Sacramento Bee: "Job One for Congress: improve elections." They argue that the next Congress should work to improve election governance (including nonpartisan election administration), work toward universal voter registration, and fix our antiquated voting systems,.

The Los Angeles Times has this story on the lengths the exit pollsters and the various media organizations that rely upon exit polls to predict and explain election outcomes are going to try to make sure they get it right next week --- and to avoid the early release of data. Let's hope they do get it right, and that they also make sure that data is not released early, so that we can avoid the controversy that surrounded the exit polls in 2004.

In the old days, voters used to frequently receive something once they cast their ballot, often something potentially more liberating that the "I Voted" sticker (read Richard Bensel's book, "The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century", for many examples). There was a story in the Los Angeles Times this morning about something similar going on in Houston: the city has a "Vote and Vaccinate" program going at early voting locations in heavily Latino and African American parts of the city.

But the program has become politicized, as Republicans apparently are charging that the availability of flu shots at early voting locations will increase Democratic turnout in Houston ... forcing the mayor to pull the plug on the vaccination program.

According to the Washington Post:

Voters across Virginia are casting absentee ballots in record numbers this year, signaling not only the growing popularity of early voting in busy lives but also the likelihood of heavy turnout Tuesday, state and local election officials said yesterday.

More than 114,000 voters have requested absentee ballots or voted early in person, according to the State Board of Elections. That compares with 44,500 who voted absentee in 2002, the last time there were midterm federal elections.

This is a tremendous boost -- more than twice as many--and actually could bode well for election day. If this many people have already voted, it may be that election day will be somewhat more manageable for election administrators on Tuesday.

I just talked to the election officials in Salt Lake County. We have implemented expanded early voting in this election and there have been 20,000 people who early voted in the past week, with voters still voting today. By comparison, in the 2004 presidential election, there were 24,000 early AND absentee ballots. Salt Lake already has 5,000 or so absentee ballots in their safe for this election, so early voting is quite booming here!

The USA Today has a story about how actually counting all of the provisional ballots may cause delays in reporting official eleciton results. They also make a connection between provisonals and the new ID requirements--the argument being that provisionals are more likely where there are strict ID requirements--and how these states will likely take much longer to report results since the provisionals could be the difference in who wins. The story also has some nice graphics.

The Washington Post has a story today on ID laws and the concerns many have about the likelihood that there will be problems at the polls with voters not having the correct identification. The story has an interesting start, which is below.

On Indiana's primary day, Representative Julie Carson (Democrat) shoved her congressional identification card in a pocket, ran out of her house and raced down the street to be at her polling site when it opened at 6 a.m. The Democrat, seeking to represent Indianapolis for a sixth term, showed the card to a poll worker, who told her it was unacceptable under a new state law that requires every voter to show proof of identity.

The law compels voters to show an ID, issued by Indiana or the federal government, with a photograph and an expiration date. Carson's card was for the 109th Congress, but did not say when the session ends. "I just thought I was carrying the right thing -- if you have a card that has a picture and shows it is current," she said.

This ad was in the "California" section, of this morning's Los Angeles Times, somewhere below the fold in the middle of the section ... Nothing near the publicity of the "Got Dots?" campaign in 2004, with full-page ads and billboards along the LA freeways (see the "Voter Education Initiatives" section on the following page of archival materials from 2004).

USA Today offered this story this morning, "Many eyes will watch the polls." Here's a snip:

Thousands of lawyers, election monitors and volunteers with video cameras will be mobilized on Election Day in an effort to guard against problems at the polls.

The Justice Department will dispatch more than 800 observers, a record for a non-presidential election year, to look for evidence of discrimination, intimidation and other obstacles to voter accessibility in at least 20 states.

The Democratic Party has a 50-state voter-protection effort and an estimated 7,000 lawyers at the ready. Liberal groups have set up hotlines for voters to call if they are denied the right to vote. And hundreds of people plan to film interviews at polling places where voters are being challenged that day.

You can add a couple of handfuls of Caltech, MIT, and University of Utah professors and students to that equation.

And other entities like "Video the Vote". (added 8:47pm, November 2, 2006).

Geri Mannion of the Carnegie Corporation, who I should note supports various projects that Mike, Paul, and I do, sent this to me and others today and I wanted to post it in its entirety.

In collaboration with the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation and with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, we are writing to let you know about a new tool we have developed to assist voters who may experience problems voting on Tuesday, November 7, 2006. Because of the dramatic increase of electronic voting machines and longstanding concerns about the integrity of the democratic process, we created VoterStory.org, a distributed web “widget” to help record and gather individual voter problems experienced on Election Day.

VoterStory.org is an open source distributed web site widget that we hope you will place on your website for Election Day. It is our hope that this distributed widget will appear across the web and throughout the country so voters who are having trouble can get their story recorded.

As you can see, the tool is designed to document individual instances or stories where a voter is having trouble voting or has been denied the right to vote. Once a “story” is submitted, it will automatically be referred to nonprofit, nonpartisan voter protection organizations that will be standing by to intervene or lend support, if they can. With your participation, we believe VoterStory.org will increase the capacity to address the specific voter problems that may occur on Election Day by organizing the relevant stories and making sure the information is forwarded to the appropriate authorities. Voters using the system will receive an e-mail confirmation and will be registered in a database of election incidents that can be used by numerous groups to document the need for election reforms in the future.

Please visit VoterStory.org to register your organization and help us roll out this important utility. We would appreciate it if you would spread the word to other groups active in this election so they will consider joining this effort. Every voter should be able to go to the polls with the confidence that their vote will count.

With your help, VoterStory.org will play a vital role in protecting voters now and in future elections.

With the rapidly increasing numbers of early voters, the polling community has had to adapt. Already in 2000, and following up in 2004, the National Annenberg Election Study included explicit questions designed for early voters.

The American National Election Study, which has been conducting election surveys since 1948, had to adapt as well. In 2000, they discovered an increasing number of respondents who, when asked about vote intentions, told the interviewer that they'd already voted. The 2004 study adjusted to this fact.

How about 2006 and beyond? Under the current balloting system, there are states where as many as a third of voters have already cast their ballots by the Friday before election day. Surely, these voters will show up in pre-election tracking polls.

Have the pollsters noticed? You bet they have. A poll recently released by the Tester campaign in Montana claims that "Montanans are voting for a change." The poll shows a 21% lead for Tester among those who report already voting.

We've long wondered whether pre-election polling alters the decision making of voters. Do citizens flow to the majority choice? Will citizens stay home if it appears that their candidate is trailing in the public opinion polls? Now voters, journalists, and the candidates themselves can make estimates about actual votes.

The biggest effect, I suspect, will be on campaigns. Now a candidate can not only track his position in the pre-election polls, but among voters themselves.

The poll is reported here

As we enter the high pressure week before elections, I thought everyone could benefit from a bit of election related fluff from Palm Beach County (of course!) This story has been in USA Today and other major media outlets as well and the article below is from the Miami Herald.

WEST PALM BEACH - Conservative columnist Ann Coulter has refused to cooperate in an investigation about whether she voted in the wrong precinct, so the case will likely be turned over to state prosecutors, Palm Beach County's elections chief said Wednesday.

Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson said his office has been looking into the matter for nearly nine months, and he would turn over the case to the state attorney's office by Friday. Anderson's office received a complaint in February that Coulter allegedly voted in the wrong precinct during a Feb. 7 Palm Beach town council election. Since then, Anderson, a Democrat, said he has made repeated attempts to resolve the matter with Coulter and her attorney but has been rebuffed.

Knowingly voting in a wrong precinct is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney's office in West Palm Beach. Edmondson said his office generally reviews such cases, then turns them over to local authorities for a full investigation.

By Michael Alvarez and Paul Gronke

We've received a bundle of media inquiries at electionupdates over the last week over the very high rates of absentee balloting. Does this indicate a higher than average turnout in this election? And is one party benefitted from no-excuse absentee balloting?

The conventional wisdom, at least as conveyed by most reporters to us, is that Republicans benefit from the extension of absentee ballot rules.

We're not sure where this folk tale came from, but most of the evidence doesn't support it, at least not stated in its most simple form. As John Fortier recently wrote, "political party mobilization efforts work hand in hand with mail voting." A candidate or party that is well-funded can take advantage liberalized absentee balloting system to encourage early turnout by voters that they've targeted. And these same campaigns can then be more efficient in their mobilization efforts by no longer moblizing these voters once they have cast their ballots.

But otherwise, there is little evidence of partisan bias in absentee balloting systems, or in early voting systems more generally (for example, see the excellent work by Bob Stein of Rice University, who examines in person early voting in Texas; or Gronke's papers on early voting in Miami/Dade County in 2004 and in Oregon).

We're conducting some more systematic research into this question as we write this, but our initial reading of the situation is different than the conventional wisdom. We will of course update readers as we progress, but at this point the previous research on point here is pretty clear: absentee balloting doesn't confer a partisan advantage.

Thus to us, the notion that Republicans reap disproportionate votes from absentee or early voters is somewhat of a political "urban legend."

This "urban legend" often refers back to the 1982 gubernatorial election in California, luckily, an election that was studied by Samuel C. Patterson and Gregory A. Calderia in a seminal paper, "Mailing In the Vote: Correlates and Consequences of Absentee Voting" (published in the American Journal of Political Science, November 1985, Vol. 29, No. 4, pages 766-788.) Patterson and Calderia's paper begins with a wonderful introduction, setting up the substantive research question well:

...California offered political observers an especially intriguing gubernatorial race in 1982. After a long campaign season in which the Democrat had held a substantial lead, it had come down to the wire and made for a spectacular political drama. Mervin Field's California Poll showed Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, the Democratic candidate for governor, leading his Republican adversary, Attorney General George "Duke" Deukmejian, right up to the end of teh gubernatorial campaign. His exit polls projected Bradley as the winner ... On election day, 2 November 1982, Bradley won more than half of the two-party vote ... Yet, to the chagrin of Democrats in the Golden State, Deukmejian "snatched victory from the jaws of defeat." When officials had counted absentee ballots, Deukmejian won the final reckning by garnering over 113,000 more of the votes cast in absentia than had been mailed in for Bradley ...

How had this unusual electoral outcome transpired? In 1978 California's legislature adopted a new law on absentee voting that abandoned restrictions limiting eligibility to those too ill to go to the polling stations, or to those who would be traveling on election day (766-767).

Patterson and Calderia go on to a series of multivariate statistical analyses of gubernatorial election results in California and Iowa, and find that "partisan candidates are likely to harvest absentee votes in the very localities where their party is otherwise strong" (784-785). They argue futher that:

Our evidence for California, and our comparison of California gubernatorial election results with Iowa's, indictates no solid proof of special manipulation in California absentee voting. Governor Deukmejian is not the beneficiary or product of any new peculairity in the pattern of absent voting. Rather, he won the election merely because of the magnitude of absentee voting. And, of course, the absentee ballots proved decisive only in the trivial sense that officials counted them last (785).

Thus, this seminal paper looked at one of the very elections that appears to have given birth to this particular urban legend, subjected it to a detailed analysis, and has rejected the hypothesis that the Republican candidate won because of partisan disparities in absentee voting.

Again, there are other studies on point here, but Patterson and Calderia's work is worth presenting here in detail because it looks at one of the races that gave rise to this "urban legend" and because of the systematic way in which they look at the question.

I've gotten a bunch of emails about an alleged vulnerability with the Sequoia touchscreen system, widely used in California (where much of the uproar seems to be centered). Ian Hoffman has a story out on this alleged vulnerability, where he says that "a button in back ... can allow someone to vote multiple times." Later, he writes:

Sequoia's yellow button isn't a hack or flaw. The button has been a feature on Sequoia's mainline AVC Edge touch screens for years, designed as a backup for the typical method of voting on the machines.

In most counties, poll workers use a separate machine to activate a card that a voter inserts into the touch screen in order to retrieve the proper ballot. The yellow button is for counties that can't afford the separate machine or for cases when the card activator becomes inoperable, as happened to Diebold systems in March 2004 in Alameda and San Diego counties and last primary in Kern County.

Pressing, then holding the button for several seconds twice and answering a screen prompt sends the machine into a "manual activation" or "poll worker activation" mode. In that mode, someone can call up one ballot after another and vote them.

No doubt, this feature may be a potential vulnerability. But, as David Wagner from UC Berkeley (and other researchers that Hoffman consulted) point out:

Several computer scientists said Wednesday that the vulnerability found in all touch-screen machines sold by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems was not especially great because using the yellow button for vote fraud would require reaching far behind the voting machine twice and triggering two beeps.

"If the machine beeps loudly and someone has their arms wrapped around the machine, the poll workers are going to become suspicious," said David Wagner, a computer security and voting system expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's kind of hard for me to see how this could be used very widely," he said. "It's retail fraud, so it's onesies and twosies and can only affect very close races."

From what I've seen of this device and read so far about this vulnerability, I'd have to agree with David's assessment. I'd also point out that this is a potential vulnerability that election officials can minimize by a variety of procedural and training steps (which should be used where possible in the current and future election cycle):

1. Train pollworkers, election judges and other election officials about this vulnerability and alter them to closely monitor the machines during the course of voting to insure that they are not being tampered with.
   
2. In the short term, seal the button to minimize access.
   
3. In the long term, the button should be dealt with via a physical hardware or firmware change, that will effectively "lock" the button (physically or via a password).
   

Update (10:45am):
I received email from Michelle Shafer from Sequoia Voting Systems, pointing out that this "function is configurable at the jurisdictional level when the customers set up their database." She also passed along reference to the following from their formal statement:

Election jurisdictions have three choices regarding Pollworker Activation when setting up their election databases. Jurisdictions can choose: 1) to allow ONLY Pollworker Activation of the Edge voting unit (in the case where jurisdictions have decided not to use card activators at all), 2) to NEVER allow Pollworker Activation, which would disable this back-up feature in all Edge voting units in the jurisdiction for that election and 3) to allow PollWorker Activation as a back-up procedure only as determined is needed by an individual polling location because of a card activator issue. This flexibility has always been present in Sequoia's election management system and gives our customers options to activate or not activate per their determination and election procedures.

So jurisdictions do not have to use this function. But if they do, they need to insure that they have procedural safeguards in place (again including seals where possible, and education for the pollworkers), as I discussed earlier.

On Point, a Boston-based NPR show, had a show Monday on election reform.

Dan Seligson from electionline.org was on Fresh Air today with Terry Gross talking about election reform. You can here the show here.

As promised, from our press release, written by a smart student who is entering grad school soon ....

Voting by Mail—Turnout Effects in Oregon

It’s been Election Day in Oregon for eight days now. For more than a decade statewide elections in Oregon have been conducted entirely by mail. It is clear, when compared to the 2002 and 2004 contest, that early voting is not higher in Oregon, in contrast to what is occurring in states such as Tennessee, Florida, Colorado, and Texas.

Early voting increases rapidly when states relax their requirements—such as adopting no excuse absentee balloting—and make early voting convenient. However, these new voting methods do not appear to have much of an impact on turnout, especially once the systems have been in place for a significant length of time, as they have been in Oregon.

Instead, campaign spending, voter mobilization, and the state of the times drive turnout. In Oregon in 2006, A lot more money is being spent on GOTV this year, but because there are not many ballot measures energizing the base—such as gay marriage or abortion—turnout will be similar to 2002.

I posted the following to Rick Hasen's listserv. I thought the readers here might be interested if they don't follow that list.

====
Michael,

We have a release coming out this afternoon making a similar point to your own. We look specifically at early voting numbers in Oregon (http://www.sos.state.or.us/elections/ ) and compare this to 2002 and 2004.

The numbers thus far track 2002 almost exactly.

Reporters seem to be missing two things:

(1) There are more early voters this cycle because there are more opportunities to vote early. Doug Chapin can chime in here, but four more states adopted no-excuse absentee balloting in 2006. A larger number adopted either in-person or no-excuse absentee in 2004. And every example we've seen shows rapid early adoption of early voting, then topping out at some threshold.

(2) But more importantly, the level of early voting relative to total turnout is higher in a midterm. Early voters constitute a larger proportion of the voters in lower profile, lower intensity contests, because early voters tend to be more partisan, more informed, and more habitual voters.

Ok, so now we're more in the realm of speculation, but let's add Michael's observations about the Pew study. *If* it is true that voters are expressing a higher level of interest in the outcome, and *if* this reflects nationalization of the contest by the two parties, then this will only magnify the effect in (2).

So I am with Michael--I am forecasting turnout in Oregon at around the same level in 2002. My out on a limb forecast for the proportion of early voters is 30% of the total turnout.

===
Paul Gronke
Director, Early Voting Information Center
Reed College
Portland, OR

Michael McDonald Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 10:35 AM
To: election-law
For those of you interested, my 2006 turnout rate prediction and the
reasoning behind it, can be found at the Washington Post's Think Tank Town
blog:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/30/AR2006103000
712.html

For those turnout junkies, you can find early voting statistics for some
states, and based on previous early vote turnout, one can make fairly
reliable projections on total turnout within those states:

Iowa (on track for turnout in the high 30s)
http://www.sos.state.ia.us/pdfs/staff/AbBallReq.pdf

Oregon (on track for turnout in the low 40s)
http://www.sos.state.or.us/elections/nov72006/daily.pdf

Tennessee (on track for turnout in the high 40s)
http://www.state.tn.us/sos/election/EarlyVoteNov2006.pdf

Texas (on track for turnout in the mid 30s)

http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/earlyvoting/index.shtml

# posted by Paul Gronke @ 12:38 PM links to this post

We've gotten a pdf copy of the 2006 Professional Practices Papers, from the 22nd Annual Conference of The Election Center. (Warning: while worthy of downloading, it is a BIG pdf file!).

Here's the list of papers in the pdf file:

BEST ELECTIONS PRACTICES PRESENTATIONS

Mobile Election Notification (Podcasting & Textcasting); Brian D. Newby, Johnson County, KS

Midnight Madness Event; Cynthia Young, Collier County, FL

Your Vote is Your Voice; Pat McCarthy, Pierce County, WA

Welcoming New Citizens; Elaine Larson, Santa Clara, CA

Using GIS Software to Assess Service Delivery During Early Voting; David Beirne, Harris County, TX

Evaluating Election Judge Performance – The RTE (Recruitment, Training/Evaluation) to Success!; Sara Harris, Montgomery County, MD

BEST ELECTIONS PRACTICES PAPERS

College Student Worker Program; Bruce Clark, Kankakee County, IL

New Precinct Register, Voter Authorization and Reconciliation Process; Kurt S. Browning, Pasco County, FL

Vote in Honor of a Vet High School Program; Michael B. Greenman, Pinellas County, FL

Judges’ Training to Go . . . Training Videos provided on Palm Pilots; J. R. Perez, Guadalupe County, TX

Election Advisors Program; Nancy Whitlock, Pinellas County, FL

Vote in Honor of a Vet Program; Patricia M. Hollarn, Okaloosa County, FL

Postal Carrier Appreciation Pin; Pat McCarthy, Pierce County, WA

Worthy of reading ... examples of some of the excellent work done by election officials throughout the country!

See the idea that I had about how a technology like Intellipedia might be used by election officials for threat assessment ... on my other blog, "bytes and ballots."

The Orange County District attorney yesterday announced the establishment of a "strike force" of investigators who will be on ready to respond to complaints of voter intimidation in next week's election. This comes in the wake of the letter sent out to over 14,000 Latino voters in Orange County, warning immigrants not to vote.

Here's more from the Orange County Registrar on the "strike force."

The Registrar also has a high-quality scan of the intimidating letter sent to Latinos, in both Spanish and English.

LA County election officials put out a special call for bilingual pollworkers yesterday --- looking for at least 700 additional workers for the election, next week. Here's a reprint from the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, the election is only a week away.

On Friday afternoon, I went with two colleagues to observe early voting at a site in Los Angeles County, at the West Covina County Library, a site that we observed during the primary elections earlier this year. I had a couple of observations to note about this early voting location:

• The pollworkers here appeared to be a completely different team than we had seen in June 2006 (in other early voting locations we typically see approximately the same pollworker teams between elections). In all honesty, this might be good, because as I wrote in June 2006, in this location the pollworkers were not very cooperative with our observation efforts. On Friday, the exact opposite was the case: the pollworkers were friendly, and took the time to answer our questions. The atmosphere (from an observer's perspective at least) was much improved! This did leave me to realize that a very interesting research question would be to try to examine whether early voting (or other polling place) sites with new pollworker teams were any more likely to experience problems, or to have different types of outcomes, relative to early voting locations with consistent teams across elections.
  
• Turnout, while not overwhelming, was brisk (relative to the June primary). We were at the location for about an hour on Friday afternoon, and observed twenty voters during that period. I timed four of these voters (selected at random) and they took 4:30, 8:50, 9:10, and 11:50, respectively; not times that are radically different than what I had seen earlier in the week in East Los Angeles.
  
• During this period, four of these twenty voters made some verbal statement regarding the voter verified paper audit trail (three of which I recorded):
  
  
  
  • "Where's my copy of the ballot?"
    
  • "Where did it go"
    
  • "I'm disappointed I didn't get a printed ballot"
    
  
  In each case the pollworkers explained the concept of the voter verified paper audit trail to the voter, but it is interesting to note the misperception that many voters have about the audit trail.
  
• During the hour we were there, the pollworkers attempted to clean the touchscreens with a dry paper towel three times. When asked, one said that they had no explicit procedures regarding when or how to clean the touchscreens, but clearly they did seem to be quite focused on trying to clean the screens with a dry paper towel!
  

The Pew Research Center For the People and The Press, in conjunction with The Associated Press, recently released the results of a survey study of who votes, who doesn't, and who does only intermittently. Here's a snapshot of the study's main findings:

hey vote ­ but not always. Compared with Americans who regularly cast ballots, they are less engaged in politics. They are more likely to be bored with the political process and admit they often do not know enough about candidates to cast ballots. But they are crucial to Republican and Democratic fortunes in the Nov. 7 midterm elections.

They are the intermittent voters: Americans who are registered to vote but do not always make it to the polls. They differ significantly from those who vote regularly. For one thing, they're less likely to be married than are regular voters. Intermittent voters also are more mistrustful of people compared with those who vote regularly. They also are less angry with government, though no less dissatisfied with President Bush than are regular voters, according to a survey conducted Sept. 21-Oct. 4 among 1,804 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in collaboration with the Associated Press.

The survey also finds large differences between Americans who are not registered to vote or vote only rarely, and intermittent or regular voters. The two groups at the bottom of the voting participation scale are much less likely than regular or intermittent voters to believe that voting will make much of a difference. They also are less likely to agree with the statement: "I feel guilty when I don't get a chance to vote."

To understand who votes and who doesn't, survey respondents were divided into four groups based on their voting history, attitudes about voting, and interest in the current campaign. Together, these groups span the breadth of political participation, from regular voters to democracy's bystanders(1):

Regular voters. These are adults who are currently registered to vote. Nearly all regular voters cast ballots in the 2004 presidential election; most say they "always" vote and that they are certain to vote in the upcoming congressional election. Together, they constitute roughly a third (35%) of the adult population.

Intermittent voters. All intermittent voters say they are registered to vote, but fewer acknowledge always voting. They report less certainty of voting in the upcoming election and less interest in the campaign compared with regular voters. Intermittent voters make up 20% of the population.

Registered but rare voters. About a quarter of Americans say they are registered to vote, but acknowledge that they rarely make it to the polls (23%). Fully three-quarters (76%) say they sometimes feel they don't know enough about the candidates to vote.

Unregistered adults. These are Americans who say they are not registered to vote, or indicate their registration may have lapsed. They comprise 22% of the population.

Interesting stuff, and important research for those who are intereted in efforts to increase voter participation.

It's a perfect Halloween story, a study by the Poughkepsie Journal alleges that as many as 77,000 dead people are on the New York statewide voter registry, and as many as 2,600 of them might have voted from the grave.

Here's more from this creepy story:

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File." That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937.

The state database was current as of Oct. 4, the master death index through June.

And they also found that:

- There were dead people on the voter rolls in all of New York's 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.

- One Bronx address was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., in Riverdale, site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

- Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where the higher population produced more matches.

But the story does note that the instances of people seemingly voting from the grave appear to be instances of clerical error or other mistakes, not direct evidence of election fraud in New York. These numbers do provide some metrics on the the accuracy of statewide voter registries, however.