Election Updates

The Florida Secretary of State has released the results of their audit of the Sarasota County election. I've not digested the audit report materials yet, but Secretary of State Browning's statement summarizes the results: "The audit team concluded that there is no evidence that suggests the official results are in error, and further concludes that the results of the November 7, 2006 election in Sarasota County are accurate. Additionally an independent study was conducted by the Security and Assurance in Information Technology (SAIT) Lab at Florida State University of the iVotronic and PEB source codes. That study found no evidence that would have contributed to the undervote."

Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, released a directive recently that outlines minimal qualifications for Ohio election officials, and procedures for their selection. The qualifications are given for three areas: education (at least a high school or GED degree), election experience, and more general managerial experience. Moving to a world where there are clear standards for the selection of election officials is an excellent step, but we also should start a conversation about developing professional standards and certification programs for election officials at all levels of government.

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story this morning about a controversy in Beverly Hills over the translation of their entire absentee and sample ballots into Farsi. I've not seen the Beverly Hills ballot in question, but have seen my local Pasadena absentee ballot, which is in both English and Spanish; it's a bit complex, and after our local elections are over, I'll write a bit more about these local ballots and their complexity.

As some of you know, certified figures for non precinct place voting have been very slow to emerge from the states. We have been trying to assemble these at EVIC and have been stymied in at least 20 states. Many are waiting until the EAC's current election day survey is due in mid March.

California just released it's figures, and they report 42% absentee balloting in 2006, with 16 counties (out of 58) having more absentee voters than precinct place voters.

Judy Lin of the Sacramento Bee provides a nice overview of voting by mail (absentee) in CA, and the disagreements over making is mandatory statewide.

The Hawaiians are going to be experimenting with Internet voting in neighborhood board elections in Honolulu. As the Honolulu Advertizer notes,

The city is inviting Honolulu residents to vote online for the first time, offering the option of casting ballots via the Internet for this year's neighborhood boards election.

"This pilot project will enable more people to participate in this year's election in a cost-effective way," said Joan Manke, executive secretary of the Neighborhood Commission, the citizens group that oversees O'ahu's 32 neighborhood boards.

The elections, held every two years, were previously held only by mail, and to save taxpayers money, ballots were not mailed out for uncontested races. In the 2005 elections, only 25 percent of the 198,405 ballots that the city mailed out were returned.

To make online voting happen, the city teamed up with Commercial Data Systems Inc. The Hawai'i company has more than 18 years' experience in providing secure online data services. The company created and operates the balloting system for Kids Voting Hawai'i, the online program that allows schoolchildren to cast votes for mock elections that parallel the real ones. "Online voting is not to be confused with electronic voting machines," Manke said. "Neighborhood board voters will be allowed to vote securely from any computer with Internet access, as opposed to the electronic voting machines used in state elections."