Election Updates

Richard Winger, of Ballot Access News, writes today of a House Judiciary Committee resolution (HJ4) introduced by Stephanie Tubbs Jones which would mandate same-day registration and no-excuse absentee balloting.

The press release from Tubbs's office refers to it as the "Count Every Vote Act," and it includes a substantial number of reforms, including:

• Voter verified paper records
• Standardized rules for provisional ballots
• Uniform training procedures for all poll workers, produced (and policed?) by the EAC
• Designates election day as a Federal holiday
• Mandates no-excuse absentee voting
• Requires day of election registration

Many of these reforms are laudable. I've argued before, for instance, that we should make election day a national holiday first as a way to enhance participation before we try out other "solutions" (such as widespread absentee balloting) which may other other unanticipated consequences.

There is a lot in there, however, and don't think the chances for this legslation are good. The list of supporters is impressive: " Senator Clinton and Representative Tubbs Jones announced the action today in a press conference joined by co-sponsors Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative John Lewis (D-GA) and voting rights advocates, including Ralph G. Neas, President of People For the American Way; Hilary Shelton, Director of the Washington Office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Barbara Arnwine, the Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director, the Brennan Center for Justice."

Let's hope they make some headway.

To see other election reform bills on the Congressional Agenda, just browse over to Thomas.gov.

There's a report out from Project Vote, by Lorraine Minnite, studying voter fraud in the U.S. Here's the full report.

Here's a snip from the news release describing the report:

Claims of “Voter Fraud” Often Manufactured, Exaggerated for Political Purposes, Says New Report from Project Vote
Washington, DC - Widespread “voter fraud” is a myth promulgated to suppress voter participation, according to a new Project Vote report released this week. “The Politics of Voter Fraud” finds that fraudulent voting, or the intentional corruption of the voting process by voters, is extremely rare. Yet, false or exaggerated claims of fraudulent voting are commonly made in close electoral contests, and later cited by proponents of laws that restrict voting. The report is authored by Lorraine Minnite, Ph.D., Barnard College, Columbia University.

“I set out to study what situations generated incidents of voter fraud and, after researching the laws and examining the existing evidence, I found that voter fraud did not occur with enough frequency or was enough of a significant factor in elections to model or study,” Minnite said. “Instead, in this report, I examined circumstances in which claims of voter fraud were made and how they came to receive widespread public attention.”

Analysis of federal government records concludes that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of fraudulent voting, culled from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings paints a similar picture.

“We shouldn’t base public policy on urban legends but on sound facts. It’s clear from this report that fraudulent voting isn’t threatening the integrity of our elections; we do know that erecting additional bureaucratic obstacles to voting discourages legitimate voters,” said Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater.

The report includes case studies in which accusations of “voter fraud” received widespread media attention. Each one demonstrates the way in which partisan politics exploit administrative errors or minor problems to create the illusion of systemic fraud.

While there is little evidence of fraudulent voting, the case is clear that voting rules restrict voter turnout. A recent study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University found that laws requiring voters to show a document establishing identity reduce minority voter turnout. Researchers found that in the 2004 election, all voters, in states requiring voters to present documentation establishing their identity at the polls, were 2.7 percent less likely to vote than voters in states where no documentation was required. Latinos were 10 percent less likely to vote, Asian-Americans 8.5 percent less likely to vote and African Americans 5.7 percent less likely to vote.

...

I did an interview for a blogger here in Estonia that was made available to the Estonian media. You can watch it on Youtube. The first part is in explains the context of the interview and then I talk for a bit about Internet voting.

Last night, Mike and I watched poll workers count ballots after the polls closed at a precinct in a school in Tallinn. We will post some more pictures when we return from Estonia that show ballots and the post-election ballot process, but basically, the ballots contain a box in which the voter writes the three-digit number for the candidate of their choice. The poll workers then stack the ballots of like numbers and count and bundle them when the polls are closed.

In one stack were the ballots that were uncounted because of a problem. Three examples of problems were:

• a ballot cast with nothing written in the box.
• a ballot cast with XXX written in the box.
• a ballot cast with 000 written in the box.
  

These items were on hand-counted ballots for a single-race election.

We are gathering data on the frequency of this occurrence for our project we are doing with Alexander Trechsel, who is at the European University in Florence Italy, for the Council of Europe. The three of us, along with some others, are writing a report on the Estonian experience for the Council and we are likely to write a book about it as well.

By the way, this blog post was written from Double Coffee--the Estonian version of Starbucks--using free wireless access. This city is full of free wireless; hence the name E-stonia.

Thad and I have been in Estonia, observing their parliamentary election, including their use of Internet voting. In coming essays, and in other work, we will begin to put together our observations, reflections, and analysis of their process --- especially regarding their Internet voting system.

Last night, we had an opportunity to be literally locked into a room in the Estonian parliamentary building for sixty minutes, with the doors guarded by security, while we observed the decrypting and initial counting of the votes that were cast online in the Estonian election (we had spent the earlier part of the day watching their paper-based voting in polling stations in Tallinn and to the west of Tallinn, and then after the counting of the Internet ballots was done, had a fascinating experience watching the close of polls at a polling station in Tallinn --- much more on all of that later).

During the Internet vote decrypting and counting, we learned that 30,275 people voted online, and 30,243 online votes were included in the tabulation (32 of the online voters decided to cast a final ballot on paper). This photograph below comes from the Internet voting decrypting and tabulation process last night, and this initial slide from the presentation gives some of the Internet voting participation statistics.



We'll write more about the Estonian Internet voting system soon ...