Election Updates

Dave Howell and Skip Lupia of the National Election Studies sent me emails that explained the choice of items on the 2006 study. I want to share the central items with our readers, many of whom may be consumers of this study.

The NES went through a re-competition a few years back, and it no longer receives NSF funding for the midterm studies. The 2006 study was conducted as a "pilot", meaning that it was primarily a vehicle to try out new question wordings, question experiments, etc., but not primarily to maintain the "core" items. As a consequence, because no one specifically requested items on non-precinct and early voting, none were included.

The NES has an open invitation for users to propose content in future studies. To do so, you have to register at the online commons. I plan to draft a brief proposal to return to the format of the 2004 voting items, but add a response category for "early in-person" voting.

I encourage interested readers to register in the commons, even if you don't intend to propose questions. The NES is using the commons as a way for users to comment on the proposals which are made. This way, all of us in the election reform community can help shape the content of this important survey resource.

Early voting is underway in Belarus and opposition leaders charge that a long early voting period has been instituted as a way to rig the elections. I'm not sure why early votes are easier to steal than day of election votes--this is a topic ripe for a dissertation!

Reports from the IDEA Project, the BBC, and Radio Free Europe.

The 2006 release of the National Election Study, a large biennial national survey, has just been made available to the public.

As you might expect, I quickly went into the question listing to see how they queried respondents about early voting. Along with Mike McDonald and Thad Hall, I am attending an election reform conference next week in Columbus, OH, and am working on a paper on early voting and turnout.

So I was disappointed to find out that, in the 2006 study, the NES did such a poor job asking about early voting. Specifically, they ask these items:


QUESTION:
--------
[Did you vote in person on election day, or did you vote
by mail? / Did you vote in person on election day, or did
you mail in an absentee ballot before election day?]

VALID CODES:
-----------
1. Voted in person
2. Voted by mail

Most readers of this blog will recognize the problem with this question: what about voters who can vote early in person (comprising, for example, 20% of the Florida electorate)? What if people carried in their absentee ballot (admittedly a very small proportion of the electorate in any state)? What about Oregon, and increasingly Washington, where there you may "vote by mail" on election day?

What's surprising is that the NES did such a better job in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Here are the items they used that year:

P001245 C4. Did R vote on election day or before

C4. IF R VOTED:

Did you vote on election day -- that is, November 7th
2000, or did you vote at some time before this?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

1. ELECTION DAY --> SKIP TO C5
5. SOME TIME BEFORE THIS --> C4a

8. DK --> SKIP TO C5
9. RF --> SKIP TO C5
0. NA; INAP, 1-3, 8, 9, 0 in C1

==============================
P001246 C4a. How long before election did R vote
MD1: EQ 0, MD2: GE 98
Numeric

C4a. IF R VOTED PRIOR TO ELECTION DAY:

How long before November 7th did you vote?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

[PROBE: A FEW DAYS, A WEEK, LONGER THAN THAT?]

01. Less than one week, 1-6 days
02. One week; 7 days
03. 1-2 weeks; 8-14 days
04. 2-3 weeks; 15-21 days
05. 3-4 weeks; 22-28 days
06. One month; 29-31 days
07. More than one month; 32-60 days
11. A few days; a couple of days; several days -- NFS
12. A few weeks; a couple of weeks; several weeks -- NFS
91. More than a few days -- NFS
92. More than a few weeks --NFS
97. Other

98. DK; not sure
99. RF
00. NA; INAP, 1, 8, 9, 0 in C4

==============================
P001247 C4b. Did R vote in person or absentee

C4b. IF R VOTED PRIOR TO ELECTION DAY:

Did you vote in person or by absentee ballot?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

1. IN PERSON --> SKIP TO C5
5. ABSENTEE BALLOT --> SKIP TO C5
7. R VOLUNTEERS: BY MAIL [OREGON ONLY] --> SKIP TO C5

8. DK --> SKIP TO C5
9. RF
0. NA; INAP, 1, 8, 9, 0 in C4

Now admittedly, they still don't have the "in-person early voting" quite right, but at least they give the respondent more (and more accurate) options.

Perhaps I am seeing only the early release of the 2006 survey, and the full version will have the complete series. But at this point, I sure hope that the NES doesn't make the same mistake in 2008, and instead returns to the 2004 version of the item (and adds the "early voting in person" option).


An additional problem: the NES asks respondents whether they voted "in this county" or in a different county, presumably to track respondents who moved since the time of the election and the date of the interview. But how are respondents in states with regional voting centers supposed to answer that item?

A list of upcoming events in the elections world --

• Jan 11-16: IACREOT Mid-Winter Meeting (Charlotte, NC)
  
• Jan 16: 2008 and Beyond: The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States, hosted by Kent State University, OH
  Conference Schedule
  
• Jan 22-23: Public Meeting: EAC Board of Advisors, Sunshine Act Notice
• Feb 8: EAC Public Meeting, 10am -1pm, Washington, DC
  EAC Tentative public meeting schedule
• Feb 9-12: NASED / NASS Winter Conference (Washington, DC)
  Conference Agenda
  
• Feb 14-18: Election Center Special Workshop: Election Training (Savannah, GA)
  Registration deadline: Jan 31
  Election Center events schedule
  
• Mar 3-4: NACRC 2007 Legislative Conference (Washington, DC)
  
• Apr 18-22: Election Center Special Workshop: Election Training (Kansas City, MO)
• July 15-18: NASS 2007 Summer Conference (Portland, OR)
  
• July 17-21: IACREOT 36th Annual Conference and Trade Show (Charlotte, NC)
  

There is a conference next week at Kent State University, "The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States." Here's the overview provided of the event:

The critical theme of this Symposium is that the 2008 Presidential Election will be crucial for American democracy, especially in light of the apparently related phenomena of decreasing voter participation rates, alleged procedural irregularities in recent elections, and the undisputed lapses in ethical judgment by politicians and policymakers in the past decade. Closer examination of elections and ethics laws in a public forum will be enlightening for academics as well as for policymakers and politicians and, hopefully, will contribute to an informed dialogue that will lead to improvements in the American election system. This event will discuss trends in laws adopted in the American states, with a focus on understanding the effects of these rule changes. What do we know from the fifty states (and other nations) about how alternative election laws and ethical requirements affect policy, voter turnout and participation, election outcomes, legislatures, campaigns, representation, and more? Our speakers are recognized national experts in the field, drawn from the halls of academia and the corridors of political power. The Symposium is an opportunity for scholars, policy analysts and elected officials to discuss what needs to be done to update the system for the 21st century.

Since the State of Ohio has been a key battleground in recent Presidential elections and promises to be a "bell-weather" state in 2008, and has had at least its share of ethical issues in the public arena, as the capital of the state, the City of Columbus is a symbolic choice for this Symposium, and one that will maximize participation by state policymakers and students of state government.

They have lined up an impressive set of speakers, including our own Thad Hall. As Thad will be in attendance, we can hope to get a complete summary of the conference here next week!

Labels: election reform, Voting technology

In addition to the reports of fraud that I wrote about in the past few days, there are two additional ones that I ran across this morning.

The first comes from New York, from a report in the Daily News:

An aide to former Queens Assemblyman Jimmy Meng was charged yesterday with rigging voter addresses during a primary battle in 2004.

Simon Ting, 42, who was registering voters for the Flushing Democrat, whited out the addresses of Asian-American voters who lived outside the district and replaced them with addresses inside the district, according to Queens prosecutors.

The fraud wasn't hard to detect: dozens of legitimate addresses were replaced with one of two addresses - either Ting's former home or a bookstore Meng owns in Flushing, prosecutors said.

The second comes from Virginia, as reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

A former Gate City mayor who used absentee ballots as if they were marked cards to deal himself a 2004 re-election victory will spend 196 days in jail.


Charles Dougherty, convicted of 29 felony counts of vote fraud in two separate trials last year, was also ordered by the court yesterday to pay $51,500 in fines.

The sentence, handed down in Scott County Circuit Court, brings to an end an election scandal that rocked the town of 2,300, upset the political order and exposed an election process that may have been corrupt for years. During one of Dougherty's trials, one woman testified she had always been paid a bottle of liquor for her vote.

...

A panel of judges agreed the election results were suspicious, threw out the votes and appointed a new Town Council. The council then appointed Jenkins mayor, and a judge appointed Botetourt County Commonwealth's Attorney Joel Branscom as special prosecutor.

Branscom charged Dougherty with more than three-dozen counts of election fraud. In two trials, jurors agreed with Branscom that Dougherty had duped voters, many of them elderly and residents of an assisted-living complex, into applying for absentee ballots even though they didn't qualify for them.

Labels: absentee voting fraud, election fraud, Voter fraud, voter registration fraud

Here's a link to a copy of the report on the Denver electronic pollbook problems. We wrote about these problems as reported in the media in the 2006 midterm election in Denver.

Here's the report's executive summary:

The general election of November 7, 2006 in Denver was marred by significant technical and operational errors, as well as a seeming lack of needed oversight in some key areas. These errors and omissions led to unacceptably long waiting times for voters and an abandonment rate estimated at 18,000-20,000 voters (approximately 20% of the anticipated physical turnout on Election Day). In addition, seemingly preventable problems with the tabulation of absentee ballots led to significant operational stresses within the DEC and delayed reporting on key races and measures for several days.

The most direct cause of voter inconvenience on Election Day was the repeated failure of the “electronic poll book” (“ePollBook”) software, which hampered the efforts of election judges staffing voting centers to search for voters as they arrived, indicate that they had arrived to vote, and forward them to a machine to cast their votes. The ePollBook, developed exclusively for DEC use by Sequoia Voting Systems, is of decidedly sub-professional architecture and construction and appears never to have been tested in any meaningful manner by either the vendor or by the DEC. This software’s failure to accommodate Election Day traffic led to lengthy lines developing at the registration desks of voting centers while voting machines stood idle. Well-publicized media reports concerning line lengths were broadcast throughout the day and likely contributed to dampening turnout among voters without the time or determination to devote multiple hours to casting their votes.

While the ePollBook’s considerable shortcomings represent the most direct cause of Election Day angst in Denver, we must caution readers against assuming that merely repairing or replacing it will ensure the smooth conduct of future elections. That the ePollBook was deployed at all in such an unready state is symbolic of a consistent pattern of substandard information technology management within the DEC. Given the increasing dependence of election processes on technology, the state of technology management within the DEC must be recognized as an operational risk to the City and County as it looks toward future elections.

In addition to technology concerns, the DEC’s conduct of the 2006 elections suffered from inadequate contingency planning (some technical, some purely operational) and errors in logistical operations and assumptions, especially given the number of significant environmental changes with which the DEC was wrestling in preparing for this election. In 2006, the DEC was coping with new voting machines, new scanning equipment, software upgrades, vacant staff and leadership positions, new leadership, and a fundamental shift from traditional precinct-based polling places to voting centers, at which a voter from any part of the County may vote. These environmental changes, in addition to several others, represent an extremely complex problem set, and one might expect a cautious, if not ultra-cautious attitude to prevail among those responsible for the election’s conduct. Instead, planning and due diligence activities were less thorough than needed.

In analyzing the causes underlying the difficulties of 2006, it is tempting to search for a single factor, act, or error on which to place all blame. The purpose of this assessment, however, is not merely to diagnose what went wrong in 2006 but also to surface information of use to Denver in conducting future elections. In that light, it is critical that the failures of 2006 be viewed in an appropriately broad context that takes into account disparate factors such as planning, management, technology, interagency politics, and the degree of environmental change surrounding the conduct of the 2006 election cycle.

I've not seen an official response to this report from Sequoia Voting Systems, but I suspect at some point there will be a response and when it is available, I'll post it here.

UPDATE (1-16-2007): Here is Sequoia's response to the report.

Labels: electronic pollbooks, voter registration

This has circulated the past few days, here's an AP report on the allegations:

She worked in August and September as a voter registration recruiter for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN. She is accused of using another woman’s Social Security number to get hired by ACORN and Project Vote.

Davis also is charged with causing three voter registration applications with false addresses to be filed with the Kansas City Board of Elections Commissioners.

Labels: Voter fraud, voter registration fraud

We wrote a number of essays about problems in the March 2006 primary in Cook County. A review committee has produced a report (which I'm not seen yet), which according to this story in the Chicago Tribune, says both the Cook County Clerk David Orr and the Sequoia Voting Systems (the vendor) are to blame for the problems:

The group's findings, documented in a 29-page report obtained by the Tribune, suggest that much work is needed if similar problems are to be prevented in the February and April municipal elections.

"Although technology problems occurring on Election Night constituted the primary cause of the reporting delays, operational shortcomings in the process leading up to Election Day also played a role in failing to understand and thus mitigate the risks," the report said.

...

The report dealt only with issues experienced in suburban Cook County. Chicago had plenty of its own voting problems, but the city's election officials built a more effective backup system to handle traffic when roughly half of the precincts were unable to wirelessly transmit results.

"The overall system was put together in a way that has not been tested for an election that is the scale of Cook County," said panel member Xiaoping Jia, a software engineering professor at DePaul University. "A lot of failure occurred."

This story from Illinois claims that election officials there have found 27 individuals who double-voted in the March primaries in the Chicago area.

Labels: Voter fraud

One of the things that is scary about the clique of us who study election administration is that we all often have the same thoughts reading things not directly related to elections. An example of this occurred last week, when the Wall Street Journal ran a story about its new fexible shift scheduling. The day the story came out, my former colleague Tova Wang emailed me to ask if I had seen the article and to question why we don't do this in elections. I would have blogged it when the article came out, but the WJS is subscription-only. However, the story re-ran today in the Salt Lake Tribune, so I am blogging it now.

So what is WalMart doing that could possibly be of interest to election adminstrators? Well,

Early this year, Wal-Mart Stores, using a new computerized scheduling system, will start moving many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge retailer, but could be a major headache for employees.

Instead of having 100 people work from 7 am to 8:40 pm (or something similar), they might have 60 people work from 7-10 but ramp up to having 120 workers from 11 to 2 -- the lunch time rush -- ramp back down for mid-afternoon, then ramp up for after-school or post-work rushes. So a worker might still work 8 hours, but the shift might be 2 "rush" shifts (10-2 and 4-8).

If you have ever done election observation, many polling places have the same dynamic. Some polls are busy all day, but there are true rush periods, especially the morning of a major election. So the question Tova raised (and I too thought reading the WSJ story) was why don't election officials do rush staffing of polls as well? You could have a core of, say, three poll workers, but have 3 or 4 additional workers who would work only during high volume periods. This would be cost-effective and provide enhanced staffing when it is needed.

Now, not that WalMart has A LOT of data they are crunching to compute their worker needs. However, all the election official needs is data on how many voters cast ballots by hour, by precinct, for several election cycles to do the same thing. And in precincts with electronic voting or electronic precinct tabulation -- such as in precinct based optical scan locations -- such data could be garnered from the scanner or card encoders, if these devices have a cloc. (Note, the clock does not have to be set correctly either. You just need to know what hour was the zero hour and you can compute everything from that point.) With such data, basic operations management comes into play and the staffing solution is easy to calculate.