Category Archives: election administration

The 2018 Voting Experience

My fellow VTP Co-director, Charles Stewart III and some of his research team, released an important study last week: “The 2018 Voting Experience: Polling Place Lines.” Charles and his team continue to find that long lines can be an issue in many states and election jurisdictions. They estimated that in 2018, 5.7% of those who tried to vote on Election Day waited more than 30 minutes to vote, and that this was significantly longer than what they had found in the previous federal midterm election in 2014. Importantly, they also show that wait times are not distributed uniformly across the electorate, with nonwhite and voters in densely populated areas waiting longer to vote than whites and voters in less densely populated areas. Finally, as they note that wait times are strongly correlated with a voter’s overall experience at the polls, long wait times are an issue that needs continued attention in the United States. This is especially true as we are heading into what may be a very closely contested array of state and federal primary and general elections in 2020, where many states and jurisdictions may see much higher turnout than in 2016 and 2018.

Seo-young Silvia Kim’s research on the costs of moving on turnout

Seo-young Silvia Kim, one of our PhD students at Caltech working on our Monitoring the Election project, has recently posted a really interesting working paper online, “Getting Settled in Your New Home: The Costs of Moving on Voter Turnout.” Silvia’s recently presented this paper at a couple of conferences and in research seminars at a number of universities.

What is the dynamic impact of moving on turnout? Moving depresses turnout by imposing various costs on voters. However, movers eventually settle down, and such detrimental effects can disappear over time. I measure these dynamics using United States Postal Services (USPS) data and detailed voter panel data from Orange County, California. Using a generalized additive model, I show that previously registered voters who move close to the election are significantly less likely to vote (at most -16.2 percentage points), and it takes at least six months on average for turnout to recover. This dip and recovery is not observed for within-precinct moves, suggesting that costs of moving matter only when the voter’s environment has sufficiently changed. Given this, can we accelerate the recovery of movers’ turnout? I evaluate an election administration policy that resolves their re-registration burden. This policy proactively tracks movers, updates their registration records for them, and notifies them by mailings. Using a natural experiment, I find that it is extremely effective in boosting turnout (+5.9 percentage points). This success of a simple, pre-existing, and non-partisan safety net is promising, and I conclude by discussing policy implications.

This is important and innovative work, I highly recommend her paper for readers interested in voter registration and voter turnout. She uses two different methods, one observational and the other causal, to show the reduction in the likelihood of turnout for registered voters who move.

Auditing Voter Registration Databases

As many readers know, we’ve been working on a variety of election performance auditing projects, focusing on voter registration database auditing and other types of statistical forensics (you can see a number of examples on our Monitoring The Election project page). We also have been working on post-election ballot auditing, including our recent Election Audit Summit.

Recently the first paper from our new election integrity project in Orange County (CA) was published, in the peer-reviewed journal American Politics Research. This paper, “Evaluating the Quality of Changes in Voter Registration Databases”, was co-authored by myself, Silvia Seo-young Kim (a Ph.D. student here at Caltech), and Spencer Schneider (a Caltech undergrad). Here’s the paper’s abstract:

The administration of elections depends crucially upon the quality and integrity of voter registration databases. In addition, political scientists are increasingly using these databases in their research. However, these databases are dynamic and may be subject to external manipulation and unintentional errors. In this article, using data from Orange County, California, we develop two methods for evaluating the quality of voter registration data as it changes over time: (a) generating audit data by repeated record linkage across periodic snapshots of a given database and monitoring it for sudden anomalous changes and (b) identifying duplicates via an efficient, automated duplicate detection, and tracking new duplicates and deduplication efforts over time. We show that the generated data can serve not only to evaluate voter file quality and election integrity but also as a novel source of data on election administration practices.

An ungated pre-print version of this paper is available from the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project’s website, as Working Paper 134.

We are continuing this work with Orange County, and have in recent months been working to explore how these same voter registration database auditing methodologies can work in larger jurisdictions (Los Angeles County) and in states (Oregon). More on those results soon.

The process that led to the development of this project, and to the publication of this paper, is also interesting to recount. In this paper, we make use of daily voter registration “snapshots”, that we obtained from the Orange County Registrar of Voters, starting back in April 2018. This required that we collaborate closely with Neal Kelley, the Orange County Registrar of Voters, and his staff. We are very happy to participate in this collaborative effort, and thank Neal and his team for their willingness to work with us. It’s been a very productive partnership, and we are very excited to continue our collaboration with them going in the 2020 election cycle. This is the sort of academic-election official partnership that we have worked to build and foster at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project since our project’s founding in the immediate aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

It’s also fun to note that both of my coauthors are Caltech students. Silvia is in her final year in our Social Science Ph.D. program, and she is working on related work for her dissertation (I’ll write later about some of that work, which you can see on Silvia’s website). Spencer worked closely with us on this project in 2018, as he participated in Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program. His project was to work with us to help build the methodology for voter registration database auditing. Currently, Spencer is working in computer science and engineering here at Caltech. This paper is a great example of how we like to involve graduate and undergraduate students in our voting technology and election administration research.

Better methods for informing voters — new research

Outside of the U.S., there has been a great deal of interest in voter-advice applications (VAAs). These tools give voters an opportunity to get unbiased advice about which candidates or parties to support, usually in complex multicandidate or multiparty contexts.

However the academic research on VAAs has, to date, focused on observational studies and hasn’t shown a clear causal connection between VAA use and changes in voting intentions. However, Joelle Pianzola, Alexander H. Trechsel, Kristjan Vassil, Guido Schwerdt, and I just published a paper in the Journal of Politics, “The Impact of Personalized Information on Vote Intention: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment.” In the paper we present evidence from a randomized controlled field experiment in Switzerland that indicates that VAA use produced changes in voter intentions.

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are voter information tools that millions of individuals have used in recent elections throughout the world. However, little is known about how they affect political behavior. Until now, observational studies of VAA have produced inconclusive results. Here we present the results from a randomized field experiment in Switzerland that estimates the causal effects of VAA use on voters’ vote intentions. Our results suggest that usage of the Swiss VAA smartvote strengthened the vote intention for the most preferred party and also increased the number of parties considered as potential vote options. These results imply that VAAs can influence voting behavior and that they can play an important role in electoral politics.

Don’t miss C-SPAN on Saturday!

C-SPAN was recently in Pasadena, as part of their Cities Tour. I did an interview with them, focusing on my research with Andrew Sinclair on primary election reform in California. My interview will be aired at 4:30pm Pacific on Book TV (CSPAN-2), so don’t miss it.

The interview centers around the book that Andy and I published, Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief. I talked a bit during the interview about the work that Andy and I have been doing more recently with Betsy Sinclair of Washington University in St. Louis and Christian Grose of USC, studying the more recent elections in California using the top-2 system (hopefully that material didn’t end up on the cutting room floor!).

But if you do miss it on Saturday, when the link to the interview is available, I’ll post it here.

It’s happened again — more DMV-generated registration snafus in California

Late this past week, there were stories in California newspapers about yet another snafu by the DMV in their implementation of the state’s “motor voter” process. This time, DMV seems to have incorrectly put people into the voter registration system — though exactly how that happened is unclear.

For example, the LA Times reported about the new snafus in their coverage, “California’s DMV finds 3,000 more unintended voter registrations”:

Of the 3,000 additional wrongly enrolled voters, DMV officials said that as many as 2,500 had no prior history of registration and that there’s no clear answer as to what mistake was made that caused registration data for them to be sent to California’s secretary of state.

The Secretary of State’s Office is reportedly going to drop these unintended registrations from the state’s database.

As we are nearing the November 2018 midterm elections, and as there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm in California about these elections, there’s no doubt that the voter registration system will come under some stress as we get closer and closer to election day.

Our advice is that if you are concerned about your voter registration status, check it. The Secretary of State provides a service that you can use to check if you are registered to vote. Or if you’d rather not use that service, you can contact your county election official directly (many of they have applications on their websites to verify your registration status).

Voter registration snafus in California

There’s a story circulating today that another round of voter registration snafus have surfaced in California. This story in today’s LA Times, “More than 23,000 Californians were registered to vote incorrectly by state DMV” has some details about what appears to have happened:

“The errors, which were discovered more than a month ago, happened when DMV employees did not clear their computer screens between customer appointments. That caused some voter information from the previous appointment, such as language preference or a request to vote by mail, to be “inadvertently merged” into the file of the next customer, Shiomoto and Tong wrote. The incorrect registration form was then sent to state elections officials, who used it to update California’s voter registration database.”

This comes on the heels of reports before the June 2018 primary in California of potential duplicate voter registration records being produced by the DMV, as well as the snafu in Los Angeles County that left approximately 118,000 registered voters off the election-day voting rolls.

These are the sorts of issues in voter registration databases that my research group is looking into, using data from the Orange County Registrar of Voters. Since earlier this spring, we have been developing methodologies and applications to scan the County’s voter registration database to identify situations that might require additional examination by the County’s election staff. Soon we’ll be releasing more information about our methodology, and some of the results. For more information about this project, you can head to our Monitoring the Election website, or stay tuned to Election Updates.

Let’s not forget the voters

Recently my colleague and co-blogger, Charles Stewart, wrote a very interesting post, “Voters Think about Voting Machines.” His piece reminds me of something a point that Charles and I have been making for a long time — that election officials should focus attention on the opinions of voters in their jurisdictions. After all, those voters are one of the primary customers for the administrative services that election officials provide.

Of course, there are lots of ways that election officials can get feedback about the quality of their administrative services, ranging from keeping data on interactions with voters to doing voter satisfaction and confidence surveys.

But as election officials throughout the nation think about upcoming technological and administrative changes to the services they provide voters, they might consider conducting proactive research, to determine in advance of administrative or technological change what voters think about their current service, to understand what changes voters might want, and to see what might be causing their voters to desire changes in administrative services or voting technologies.

This is the sort of question that drove Ines Levin, Yimeng Li, and I to look at what might drive voter opinions about the deployment of new voting technologies in our recent paper, “Fraud, convenience, and e-voting: How voting experience shapes opinions about voting technology.” This paper was recently published in American Politics Research, and we use survey experiments to try to determine what factors seem to drive voters to prefer certain types of voting technologies over others. (For readers who cannot access the published version at APR, here is a pre-publication version at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project’s website.)

Here’s the abstract, summarizing the paper:

In this article, we study previous experiences with voting technologies, support for e-voting, and perceptions of voter fraud, using data from the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that voters prefer systems they have used in the past, and that priming voters with voting fraud considerations causes them to support lower-tech alternatives to touch-screen voting machines — particularly among voters with previous experience using e-voting technologies to cast their votes. Our results suggest that as policy makers consider the adoption of new voting systems in their states and counties, they would be well-served to pay close attention to how the case for new voting technology is framed.

This type of research is quite valuable for election officials and policy makers, as we argue in the paper. How administrative or technological change is framed to voters — who are the primary consumers of these services and technologies — can really help to facilitate the transition to new policies, procedures, and technologies.

California’s massive 2016 voter guide

I’m glad that I recently had a large and sturdy mailbox installed at the end of our driveway. Our previous mailbox was small, rusty, and was starting to lean to one side — had the mail carrier tried to leave California’s massive, 224-page, 2016 general election voter information guide in our old mailbox, I have no doubt it would have immediately toppled over.

The LA Times has a fun video that shows the printing of this super-sized voter information guide:
http://www.latimes.com/la-pol-vn-printing-the-california-voter-information-guide-2-20160909-premiumvideo.html

Don’t get me wrong, I think that it’s great that California voters receive the voter information guide from our Secretary of State (it’s available online in pdf format as well, which might be more easily usable for many voters). The information guide helps remind voters about the upcoming election, it provides useful information about voter rights and resources about registration and voting, and it also gives lots and lots of detailed information about all of the ballot measures that we will have on our ballots in California this fall.

But with seventeen statewide measures on the ballot (this does not include county or local measures), the information guide is a bit intimidating this election season. Californians are being asked to provide their input into a wide range of statewide issues, including fiscal matters like school and revenue bonds, tax extensions and new taxes, the death penalty, and marijuana legalization. These are important issues, and this fall voters will need to take a close look at the voter information guide to get a better understanding of these issues and to figure out how to cast their ballots.

With so many issues on the ballot, and with a lot of important candidate races (a presidential race, the U.S. Senate contest, and lots of competitive congressional and state legislative races), it’s a long ballot. Combine the long ballot with a lot of interest in this election, there’s a good chance we will see strong turnout through the state this fall, which even with widespread voting by mail will likely mean long waits at polling places on election day.

In any case, Californians should be on the lookout for their massive voter information guide in their mailboxes, or take a look at the online version. Just make sure that you have a sturdy mailbox, and don’t drop it on your toes when your copy arrives soon.