Author Archives

Paul Gronke is a professor of political science at Reed College and Director of the Early Voting Information Center. In 2007-2009, Gronke is working as a consultant to the Make Voting Work initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the JEHT Foundation.

Gronke received a PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of Chicago. He has taught at Duke University prior to Reed, and has worked for the National Election Studies and the General Social Survey.

More on differential turnout by mode and the implications for ballot measures

Doug Chapin of the Pew Center on the States sent me this story from Nebraska. Like yesterday’s posting of DiCamillo’s article, the Nebraska pieces notes the dramatically different turnout rates for low level contests (in this case, non candidate ballot measures) when using vote by mail.
Interestingly, the story tries to cite a quasi-experimental demonstration of [...]

DiCamillo on “The Rapid Growth of Permanent Mail Ballot Registration in California and its Impact”

Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, published a piece in Survey Impacts on the growth of permanent absentee balloting in California and how it has changed the composition of the California electorate.
He shows that nearly one-third of California’s registered voters now opt for permanent by-mail status, and the higher probability of turnout among this [...]

Why Data ARE good for Democracy (and for the EAC)

There has been a fairly active set of threads on Rick Hasen’s Election Law listserv about the newly released EAC reports on UOCAVA and the Election Day Survey (full disclosure: I worked as a subcontractor on both of those reports).
Ned Foley of the Moritz School at the Ohio State University expressed some concern about the [...]

Gregoire pushes to make WA election results more timely

Governor Christine Gregoire (WA) has publicly announced (as reported in this story) that she is meeting with SoS Sam Reed to figure out ways to speed up the reporting of election results in WA.
The current race that is causing controversy is the Seattle mayor’s race, which still has not been announced.  King County is still [...]

Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators Conference

I just came across a reference to the “Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators” conference that is co-sponsored by the American Political Science Association and the Goldman School at Berkeley.  This came across the search results as I was probing around, looking at other implementations (planned or otherwise) of the Democracy Index idea (this search itself [...]

EAC Election Day Survey Data Released

The full report and the data are here:
http://www.eac.gov/program-areas/research-resources-and-reports/completed-research-and-reports/election-day-survey-results

Election Fraud story in NY Times

There’s an interesting story in today’s Week in Review section titled “Why Russians Ignore Ballot Fraud.” Michael’s colleague Peter Ordeshook has written about election forensics with a focus on Russia, and may have additional thoughts on the article.
One point that readers might find interesting is the description of how a biostatistician found evidence of fraud [...]

Fellowship at FairVote

Just got this email from Rob Ritchie.  Fair Vote is a great organization.  I hope our readers can distribute this among qualified young people.
Tell a young person about our Democracy Fellowship program!
FairVote always has relied heavily on volunteer interns. We also have paid democracy fellowships in which participants earn a living wage while getting great [...]

Virginia Voting Information Project Page is Live

The first release of the long awaited Voting Information Project, a partnership between the state and local election officials in Virginia, the Pew Center on the States, and Google, is up and running.
The site can be found here.
If you want to see how it compares to the old lookup page, go here. It’s a nice [...]

NAS Report on Voter Registration Released

Our own Michael Alvarez is a committee member. The pre-publication report can be found here: http://www.eac.gov/News/national-academy-of-sciences-releases-eac-funded-report-on-statewide-voter-registration-databases/base_view
This is the full report, but it appears that a better formatted version will be released soon.