Election Updates

From the Rocky Mountain News. And the Denver Post:

Rodriguez, a former Denver clerk and recorder under Mayor Wellington Webb, refused to comment when asked about a possible nomination. Her aide said he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

...

As a councilwoman, Rodriguez has kept a close eye on elections in Denver. And she is currently on an investigative panel assembled by the Mayor John Hickenlooper to examine the failures of the Denver Election Commission that led to long lines at the polls on Election Day and a slow vote-tallying process.

It was Rodriguez who in 2005 championed the idea to scrap the Denver's election commission in favor of a single elected clerk and recorder system that would closer resemble the structure of 62 of the 63 other counties in Colorado.

She also led a charge last spring for an all-mail ballot election this November, worrying at the time that tangle of federal and state laws left Denver and other counties in the state with little time to prepare for the election.

There is a new Carter Center video on international election observation; it gives a nice overview of what the Carter Center does when it sends observing missions to countries throughout the world.

A digest of early voting stories from the past week.

1. Blackvoice News (a California based online news and information service) voices the oft-raised concern that voters are opting for absentee ballots because they don't trust electronic machines.
2. Voters in Huntsville, Ontario rejected a proposal for all voting by-mail
   
3. Sheila Kennedy, an associate professor at Indiana University, Indianapolis, opines that voting by mail would solve current problems in our election system (and incorrectly attributes Oregon's high turnout completely to voting by mail).
4. The Hamilton, OH Journal News has an interesting story about how rising numbers of absentee balloters changes campaign strategies. See also this commentary by Steven Hill of the New America Foundation (originally appeared in the LA Times) on how early voting may increase campaign costs.
   
5. The Athens County (OH) News details problems with vote counting machines, particularly high speed machines that were supposed to count absentee ballots, but worked poorly and delayed the release of final numbers.
6. Randy Shultz of the Palm Beach Post editorial staff agrees with me that a solution to voting problems might be making election day a long weekend or a holiday (see my comment in the Nov 2nd. Economist [subscription required]).
7. A great story from the Salt Lake Tribune on the first early voting election in Utah. I was particularly interested to see a claim from party officials that the rapid release of early voting results (1/2 hour after the Utah polls closed) "energized voters nationwide."
8. An excellent article in the Weekly Standard discusses the pluses and minuses of early voting. The usual suspects (Gans, Fortier) are there, with a special appearance by Adam Berinsky, who co-authored one of the earliest and best articles on early voting in Oregon.
9. This Naples News story is one of dozens that report on the dramatic rise in absentee and in-person voting among states that recently adopted these reforms. The Florida Times-Union, however, reports a different problem with early voting: it slows the count (in Jacksonville's case, it tripled the number of memory cards that had to be processed).
   

Flipping through the channels a few weeks ago (Oct 27) I came across a documentary on a local PBS station called "By the People: Democracy in the Wild". I had missed the opening few minutes so I didn't really know what it was about--but the clues began to add up: talk of Election Day and Marion County--I just knew it was a program documenting behind the scenes of Election Day in the county of Indiana's state capital. I am officially an election geek--I was so excited to see a program such as this, especially from my home state! The program was so interesting. I am hopeful that this program will help foster a dialog regarding the important service election officials and poll workers perform on Election Day.
DVD description: "An unprecedented, insider's look as events unfold over the 11 days preceding the 2004 Presidential election, By The People: Democracy In The Wild reveals who and what it takes to put on an American election."

Yesterday was World Usability Day 2006. VTP team member Ted Selker and some students/researchers from his group in the Media Lab at MIT participated in the Boston activities held at the Museum of Science. They presented a touchscreen voting system where visitors casted ballots on an electronic voting machine. See graduate students Shawn Sullivan and Ana Pandalfo describing the project on YouTube.com in English and Spanish.

Wired Magazine has an interesting article titled "Election '08: Vote by TiVo" discussing the push for electronic voting, citing how internet voting has been used in the US and is used in various countries in Europe.

CNN has the story ...

Democrat Joe Courtney's lead over Republican Rep. Rob Simmons grew to 109 votes Monday, after dipping to as low as 66 votes earlier in the day.

The roller-coaster recount in one of the closest congressional races in the nation has uncovered significant errors in two communities. Preliminary Election Day returns had Courtney winning by 167 votes out of nearly 250,000 ballots cast in the 2nd Congressional District.

Officials in Lebanon discovered Monday that Courtney was given an extra 100 votes over Simmons. "It was human error," said Lebanon election moderator John Bendoraitis. "It was strictly misreading one number on one machine."

Computerworld has a story this morning on "vote-flipping", where a voter selects a candidate on a voting machine but the machine seems to record a vote for another candidate. The bottom line here is that we really need to do some serious research to figure out how frequently this occurs, and what the underlying causes of this phenomenon are.

Count me as another voice in favor of non partisan election administration, as Rick Hasen recently opined in the NY Times, and as Bob Bauer wrote in agreement.

As Bob notes, partisan influence need not be conscious or even present in order to lead one to support this important reform.

Here in the state of Oregon, as in many states, the Secretary of State, Bill Bradbury, is elected on a partisan ballot and runs state elections. I've posted many times regarding the excellent election administration in Oregon, what Rick called "squeaky clean" in his op-ed.

But even Bradbury has been accused of partisanship, most frequently when his office has to make a determination over whether a referendum or initiative has sufficient signatures to qualify for the ballot. (Unlike in a vote by mail election, where every signature is checked, the SoS checks a random sample of signatures on petitions.)

There is really no good reason to leave election administration in partisan hands. The depth of partisan divisions, and ongoing public distrust in election outcomes, makes it vital that we pursue this important reform.

I only write for myself here, and not for my collaborators on this blog. But sign me up as one more supporter.

There's an interesting article in an Elections Canada publication, by Eric C. Bjornlund, "Improviing Vote Count Verifications in Transitional Elections." Bjornlund is also the author of "Beyond Free and Fair" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which is a definitive study of international election monitoring. Here's an abstract of the article:

Despite the increasing popularity of exit polls in international election assistance programs, this article argues that "parallel vote tabulations" (PVTs) or "quick counts" are a more appropriate tool for verifying vote counts in transitional or post-conflict elections. PVTs – often conducted by local monitoring organizations – are generally more reliable than exit polls in political environments characterized by intimidation or uncertainty, as is typical in such elections. Although exit polls can provide insights about voter motivation, the use of exit polls to verify or project results often fails to serve the purpose of true democratization by undercutting the role of domestic organizations. To contribute more effectively to democratic elections, international donors and advisors must better understand these techniques.

Thanks to Susan Hyde for passing along this link!

On the lighter side, the AP is reporting that there might be a rare stamp, from 1918, on an abstentee ballot sitting in a Broward County ballot box ... see the Washington Post for details.