Category Archives: Voting technology

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.

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.

Here we go again? Ballot design and the June California primary

Political observers will remember the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, where 135 candidates ran in the election to replace Governor Davis. Rod Kiewiet and I wrote about how this complex election produced difficult decision problems for voters, and in a different paper (with Goodrich, Kiewiet, Hall and Sled) I also wrote about how the complexity of the recall election posed administrative problems for election officials.

The upcoming June primary in California is shaping up as one where again we have a complicated race, though this time it is for the U.S. Senate. In the primary for the U.S. Senate there are 34 candidates competing to win the primary, and to move on to the general election in November. There have been a few preliminary reports in the media about how the crowded ballot might be problematic for voters when they try to find their candidates in the primary election.

So I took a look at the sample Democratic ballot for Los Angeles County, which is reproduced below. The first page is designed to tell voters that the ballot for the U.S. Senate will have two pages, and it reproduces each page.

sample-ballot_Page_1

The next two pages show what the ballot will look like in L.A. County; in this example, there are 19 candidates listed on the first page, and 15 candidates listed on the second page. The way this ballot is laid out, voters would need to look for their candidate on the first page, and then if they don’t find their candidate listed there, flip to the second page to find their preferred candidate.

sample-ballot_Page_2

sample-ballot_Page_3

This is just an example from L.A. County, which uses a unique voting system (“InkaVote”). While the sample ballot provides ample warnings to voters to only vote for one candidate, and to check both pages for their candidate of choice, there’s a good chance that we’ll see voters make mistakes. In particular, we may see a increased risk of overvotes for the U.S. Senate race, as some voters may not understand that they are only supposed to vote for one candidate (or not see the warnings) and instead may believe they are supposed to make a mark for a candidate on each page. We may also see voters get confused and just skip this race, which might result in an increased rate of undervoting in this election.

As other counties are using different ballot designs and layouts for this race, this is just an example of what might happen in L.A. County. Given the complexity of this ballot and election, there’s a good chance that we might see increased rates of both undervoting and overvoting across the state this June, though the exact causes for that will depend on the specifics of ballot design and layout in each county.

Whether these designs and layouts lead to systematic voter errors of the sort seen in 2000 is not clear at this point, as I’ve not had a chance yet to look at sample ballots from many of the larger counties in the state. However, we do know from research published about the infamous “butterfly ballot” used in Palm Beach County in the 2000 presidential election, even a relatively small number of voter mistakes can be influential in a close election (see the paper by Wand et al. on the butterfly ballot). If the U.S. Senate primary is close in June, we could see some scrutiny of ballot design and layout, and whether problems with design and layout may have led to voter error.

President Obama at South By Southwest calls for better use of technology in election administration

Last week President Obama visited the South By Southwest event, and he got engaged in a pretty wide-ranging discussion about a lot of ways in which the federal government could do a better job using technology to engage citizens in government. You can watch the video, or read the transcript.

The part of the conversation that I thought was most interesting regarded some of his comments about technology and elections. Here’s an extended quotation of his comments, which I wanted to emphasize:

THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. I’ve give you a second example, and that is the issue of voting — I mentioned this earlier. We’re the only advanced democracy in the world that makes it harder for people to vote. (Laughter.) No, I hear laughing, but it’s sad. We take enormous pride in the fact that we are the world’s oldest continuous democracy, and yet we systematically put up barriers and make it as hard as possible for our citizens to vote. And it is much easier to order pizza or a trip than it is for you to exercise the single most important task in a democracy, and that is for you to select who is going to represent you in government.

Now, I think it’s important for a group like this, as we come up to an election, regardless of your party affiliation, to think about how do we redesign our systems so that we don’t have 50 percent or 55 percent voter participation on presidential elections, and during off-year congressional elections, you’ve got 39 or 40 percent voting.

Q Mr. President, you’re in the state with the worst voter turnout in the country over the last few years.

THE PRESIDENT: By coincidence.

Q We would take 55 percent tomorrow if we could get it. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: There is a reason I’m bringing this up. (Laughter.) But it’s not just Texas. And so one of the things that we’re doing is engaging folks who are already doing interesting work in the online space, how can we create safe, secure, smart systems for people to be able to vote much easier online, and what are the technologies to help people get aware of what they’re voting about, who they’re voting for — that’s, again, an issue where you don’t want the federal government engineering all that. But what we can do is to have the incredible talent that’s represented in this auditorium really spend time thinking about that and getting to work on it.

This sounds interesting — it’s an excellent idea for the federal government to launch an initiative like this; a large-scale research effort to study “safe, secure, smart” systems for the administration of elections. I look forward to hearing more about this as the election season progresses, and I hope that the President makes good on his promise to “engage folks who are already doing interesting work” in this area. So as way of a shout-out to the President, the team at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has been working on these issues since 2000, and we are ready to do more!

Memories of elections past

This morning I read about a disputed election, for the student representative position on the Los Angeles Community College District board. It was written up in today’s Los Angeles Times, “After 2 contested elections, L.A. Community College District may finally have a tech fix.”

The basic issues with this election are that they are using paper ballots for the student trustee elections, and that they don’t seem to have any routine post-election auditing procedures to check the veracity of the hand-counting of the paper ballots. According to the story, “The fight may seem high schoolish, but it underscores a technology problem at the largest community college district in the nation. Instead of using machines to tally paper ballots, district officials counted them by hand. And instead of employing safeguards to make sure students voted only once, an audit revealed that up to six people voted twice.”

This just brought back memories of elections past, of paper ballots being counted by hand, and elections being conducted without strong post-election audit procedures. Regardless of whether the election is for the president of the United States, or for a student trustee to a local board, having strong administrative procedures can help insure that when elections are close and the results are disputed, there aren’t questions about the integrity of the election.

PCEA research white papers

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration’s report is getting a lot of attention and praise following its release on Wednesday. One aspect of the report I want to highlight is the degree to which the Commission aimed to ground their findings in the best available research, academic and otherwise.  It renews my faith that it may be possible to build a field of election administration that is more technocratic than it currently is.

The report’s appendix, available through the supportthevoter.gov web site, is a valuable resource on the available research about each aspect of the commission’s charge.

I want to lift up an important subset of that appendix, which is a collection of white papers written by a collection of scholars, drawn from a variety of fields and perspectives, that summarized the large literatures that were relevant to the commission’s work.  A collection of those papers has been assembled in one place, on the VTP web site, so that others might have easy access to them.  Here are the authors and subjects:

Much of this research effort was assisted by the Democracy Fund, though of course, the research is all the work and opinions of the authors. Speaking personally, I greatly appreciate the support and encouragement of the Fund through these past few months.

TGDC meeting, day two tomorrow

I just spent my morning out in Gaithersburg on the NIST campus, listening to the meeting of the EAC’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). The day has just ended. However, tomorrow will be a full agenda, too. You can listen in by going to the following link: http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/. Tomorrow’s agenda will focus on UOCAVA-related issues. Check it out.

As I was watching today, I reflected on proposals to abolish the EAC, and just to let NIST deal with standards. As I watch the interaction between the EAC staff and commissioner Davidson, TGDC members, and NIST staff, it’s clear that each provides a set of distinct perspectives and, some would say, checks and balances. In particular, the EAC provides a distinctly public perspective on the proceedings, which would be difficult to replace if it weren’t responsible for the proceedings.

Survey on the Performance of American Elections Data Available

As part of my pre-Thanksgiving clean-up, I have finally gotten around to posting the data sets and documentation for three surveys my colleagues and I did in 2007 and 2008 to gauge the quality of American elections. The studies were funded by Pew, as part of their Make Voting Work Initiative, along with the late, great JEHT Foundation and AARP (for the Nov. ’08 study). The studies were conducted in November 2007 (gubernatorial races in KY, LA, and MS), February 2008 (15 Super Tuesday states), and November 2008 (all 50 states). Lots of questions about how well elections were run, from the perspective of voters, plus some questions about why non-voters didn’t vote.

The data are all on the MIT dSpace site: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5523

One feature of these datasets is that we did parallel administrations using the Internet and telephone (random digit dialing), so people interested in how these two survey modes differ should find things of interest to them there.

Residual votes in LA and Palm Beach Counties

During my lunch talk at the Technology, Diversity, and Democracy conference Mike has previously reported on, I used the case of Palm Beach County, Florida to discuss how metrics to gauge the quality of the voting process sometimes are right under our noses, and under-utilized.

Here is a little more detail about PB County (and all of Florida), along with a comparison with LA County (and all of California).

The accompanying graph shows the residual vote rate for Palm Beach County, Florida, from 1992 to 2008. (As far as I can tell, Florida did not gather separate turnout statistics prior to the 1992 presidential election, so we can’t calculate the residual vote rate earlier than 1992.) For the purpose of comparison, I also show the rate for the whole state (excluding PB County) and the nation.

The PB County residual vote rate surged in 1996 (perhaps an early sign of maintenance issues with the punch card devices?) and again in 2000. By comparison, the residual vote rate for all of Florida, while a bit above the national average, was basically flat.

After 2000, Florida not only quickly abandoned the antiquated systems they were using, but they also instituted a reporting system that tracks explicitly the residual vote rate for the top-of-the-ticket races every two years. Here, for instance, is the 2008 analysis of over- and under-votes.  The results of these changes are evident after 2000. In PB County, the residual vote rate dropped from 6.4% in 2000 to 0.5% in 2004. In the rest of the state, the rate dropped from 2.6% to 0.4%. These numbers moved up a bit in 2008, but it’s clear that PB County, and the state as a whole, has entered a new regime in striving to make every vote count.

Now look at a similar graph for LA County, along with the rest of California. California’s residual vote rate has been trending downward since 1992, dipping down below the nationwide average before 2000.  But as the rest of the nation has aggressively tried to reduce residual vote rates, the rest of the nation has now caught up with California.  LA County, which started off significantly higher than the rest of the state — with a notable spike in 1996 — has seen its residual vote rate drop faster than the state as a whole, so that it is now fairly close to the statewide and nationwide averages.

Note, by the way, that there is no dramatic shift in the residual vote rate — absolutely or compared with the state as a whole — with the introduction of the Inkavote system in 2004.  The downward trend just continues.

The differences between California and Florida, and between Los Angeles and Palm Beach counties, are significant, when we think about how elections are run in both states.  However, there are many similarities.  Both are large states that rely on fairly large counties to conduct elections.  Leaving aside LA County, the average California county had a turnout of 179,000 voters in 2008, compared to an average of 126,000 in Florida counties.  County election directors in both states are on the whole highly professional, even though they are chosen in different manners.  Aside from the fact that California ballots are much longer than Florida ballots, one major difference is that Florida has institutionalized an effort to minimize “lost votes,” whereas California has not.

In 2008, the residual vote rate for Florida was 0.7%, compared to 1.3% in California.  If California could reduce that rate to Florida’s, over 82,000 additional votes would be recovered among Golden State residents in presidential years.  The number for LA County alone is over 20,000.

EAC Commissioners Blog

Not exactly a blog, but the EAC has gotten a lot better about using technology to make their hearings and meetings public.

I went to their website today and found this set of notes from Commissioner Donetta Davidson and Matt Weil on early voting in Florida.

For those who don’t know already, the big innovation in Florida this year is the requirement that ballots be printed on demand.  Conny McCormack was down there as well, and I’ll see if Conny wants to put up a guest posting on the blog.