Paul recently wrote about a balloting problem in Illinois. Here’s a different one, out here in Southern California. Arcadia is a city just east of Pasadena, with a large Asian-American population. The problem regards an incorrect translation of the ballot, and this story contains much of the details, “Arcadia Election Ballots Contain Translation Blunder.” Here’s [...]
Election Updates
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Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, “What the Numbers Say: A Digit-Based Test for Election Fraud”
Political Analysis, the journal that I co-edit with Jonathan Katz, just electronically published in Advance Access a new paper on the statistical detection of election fraud. This paper, by Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, is titled “What the Numbers Say: A Digit-Based Test for Election Fraud.“ Here is the paper’s abstract: Is it possible to [...]
Poll taxes in California
Those of you in Southern California know how interesting and fun the monthly Rose Bowl Flea Market can be: collectibles, antiques, and people-watching. This morning I went with my daughter, and picked up an unusual find (at least unusual to me, as this is something I had never seen before): a collection of poll tax [...]
Weekend reading for election geeks, “How to Win an Election”
“Civitas quae sit cogita, quid petas, qui sis.” What great advice for an aspiring politician, which translates to “Always remember what city this is, what office it is you seek, and who you are.” This is the second paragraph from a fun new book recently published by Princeton University Press, How To Win an Election: [...]
Guest Blog: Martha Kropf, “Ballots and Voter Errors”
Policymakers and political scientists alike should pay attention to Herrnson, Hanmer and Niemi’s forthcoming article, as tagged by Mike Alvarez. The advantage of this study is that they have analyzed the individual’s interaction with the ballot via the experimental research design similar to that marshalled in their book Voting Equipment: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting [...]
New research on voting errors and ballots by Herrnson, Hanmer and Niemi
Paul Herrson, Michael Hamner and Richard Niemi have an interesting study that is available in Early View at the AJPS. The paper, “The Impact of Ballot Type on Voter Errors”, presents results from field studies the authors conducted, examining two different ballot formats. Here’s the paper’s abstract: Studies of ballots have traditionally focused on roll-off, [...]
OSCE-ODIHR report on Swiss 2011 elections
Recently the OSCE-ODIHR election assessment mission report for the 2011 Swiss elections was released, including an analysis of the internet voting trials conducted by the Swiss in the fall 2011 elections. Here is a summary statement from the report: The careful, limited, and step-by-step manner in which Switzerland is introducing and testing internet voting is [...]
New paper by Susan Hyde on electoral competition
Political Analysis has a new paper by Susan Hyde and Nikolay Marinov available in Advance Access, “Which Elections Can Be Lost.” Susan, who along with Thad and I edited “Election Fraud”, has here co-authored an interesting piece (and provided a really helpful data set of national elections from 1945 to 2006). Here’s the abstract: [...]
EAC issues report on problems in ballot scanning device
Here is a link to the EAC report: http://www.eac.gov/blogs/eac_issues_formal_investigation_report_on_ds200_precinct_count_optical_scanner/ I’m sure that Charles, Paul and Thad may have thoughts about this report and it’s implications soon.
New research on election fraud in Argentina
Francisco Cantu and Sebastian Saiegh just published an interesting paper on detecting election fraud in Argentina. Their paper, “Fraudulent Democracy? An Analysis of Argentina’s Infamous Decade Using Supervised Machine Learning” is in the current issue of Political Analysis. Here is their abstract: In this paper, we introduce an innovative method to diagnose electoral fraud using [...]