Indeed, Latvia just had a parliamentary election, and according to data that is now available it appears that 7,530 votes outside Latvia were cast in this election, a slight increase over the 7,490 overseas ballots cast in 2002, but a substantial decline from the 10,080 ballots cast in 1998. These figures come from the Latvians Online site, and here is the article that provides the turnout data. The article has a brief description of the procedures:

In all, 53 polling stations operated outside of Latvia for this year’s election, almost twice as many as in 2002 when a total of 7,490 votes were cast abroad in person or by mail. In addition to those who voted in person, a total of 557 Latvian citizens abroad requested absentee ballots that would be returned by mail, according to the Central Election Commission in Rīga.

as well as the following reminder, which gives us some understanding of how the overseas voters in this election were authenticated:

Election day dawned overcast and at times rainy in Rīga and other parts of Latvia, but in many other spots around the world voters were greeted with clear skies.

Polls were open until 10 p.m. (22:00 hours) local time as voters selected from among 19 political parties and their 1,024 candidates for the 100-seat parliament.

Voters should remember to bring their Latvian passports with them to the polling station, Arnis Cimdars, head of the Central Election Commission in Rīga, said during an Oct. 6 press conference. He also suggested voters who need eyeglasses should remember them.

Interestingly, the overseas vote was different than the domestic vote, according to a different story in Latvians Online:

With all 1,006 districts in Latvia and abroad reporting by 1:37 p.m. local time in Latvia, Tautas partija had earned 19.49 percent of the vote; Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība, 16.69 percent; Jaunais laiks, 16.38 percent; Saskaņas Centrs, 14.42 percent; Latvijas Pirmā partija and Latvijas Ceļš, 8.59 percent; TB/LNNK, 6.95 percent, and PCTVL, 6.02 percent.

Under the Latvian electoral system, parties must earn at least 5 percent of the vote to get seats in the parliament. Which candidates actually got seats in the parliament will be clear in about three weeks, the Central Election Commission said. Ballots first need to be reviewed and notation made of candidates whose names were crossed out or who earned addtional points by voters adding a “+” next to a name.

Voters abroad disagreed with those in Latvia, giving nearly 38 percent of their ballots to Jaunais laiks, 17 percent to TB/LNNK and just under 14 percent to Tautas partija. A total of 7,530 ballots were cast at 53 polling stations abroad, with 7,490 of those counting as valid, according to provisional results compiled by the Central Election Commission in Rīga.

Interesting data, both on the participation of Latvians abroad, and on how their voting preferences differed from the domestic voters. Now if the Latvians can produce data like this, it really begs the question as to why we can’t get data like this in the United States!

I’ll have more to write about in the near future about a few of the specific presentations, as some of the later presentations on voter identification raised some interesting questions and presented some provocative data.

But CNET had a nice summary story covering the conference:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–The government was quick to trust the Internet with tax returns, but it still has not managed to organize a paperless voting system. What’s the holdup?

Many voting citizens, whether they consider themselves red, blue or green, have been asking that question since the 2000 election shed light on how inconsistent, and often low-tech, the voting systems are in the United States.

Standardization of data fields, interoperability between counties and states, and an unwillingness on the part of local municipalities to embrace change are some of the major obstacles, according to panelists here at the Voter Identification/Registration Conference, hosted by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday and Friday.

Politicians and election officials have been scrambling to put together high-tech solutions, but the potential for voter fraud, coupled with the exposure of security flaws in e-voting systems and voter databases, has slowed down the conversion.

The panel put aside legal issues concerning e-voting machines and, instead, concentrated on how technology could be used to ensure that electronic voter registration and identification is valid and consistently maintained.

Ann McGeehan, director of elections for Texas, Kim Brace of Election Data Services, and Thad Hall an assistant professor at the University of Utah who co-wrote “Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting,” shared their experiences and examples of why, six years later, there is still no system in place.

One of the most basic problems across the states, Brace said, is trying to match and verify data when there is no standardization for reporting voter registration rolls or for constructing data fields. Some states keep both active and inactive voters on the rolls, some states retain only active voters, and some leave the decision up to individual counties. The differences lie not just between states, or between various departments of motor vehicles and voter registration systems, but between counties within the same state.

“These driver’s license files are not as good as everybody thought they were,” Brace said.

Names, for example, which should be broken out into first-, middle- and last-name fields, appear as one name field in many data sets, according to Brace. Suffixes like Jr. and Sr., and the modern use of hyphenated or two-word last names, has also added to the confusion. Some counties even collapse street address, town, ZIP code and state into one address field rather than breaking them out.

McGeehen has been overseeing the implementation of the Texas Election Administration Management (TEAM) System, a Web-based voting system that Texas counties can access through the Internet. TEAM, scheduled to be in place by the end of 2006, will electronically enable counties to add local election information to a state-provided ballot, have the ballot certified and send voting results.

The TEAM site allows citizens to confirm registration, get directions to their polling locations and find out what’s on their ballot. If a voter moves within the state, TEAM will cancel the voter in the former county and register them in the new county, McGeehan said. But before any information can be imported into the system, the state has had to clean up disorganized data from existing motor vehicle and voter registries.

“In some counties, the data is ‘dirty.’ For example, my husband and I are registered at the same address and yet registered in different precincts,” McGeehan said, referring to her own state’s problems. “TEAM has stronger address standards that match the postal standards, so it will not allow for mistakes like that. But we can’t deploy until mistakes like that in old data systems are brought forward, cleaned up.”

Thanks to CNET for covering the conference, and for focusing on the substance of the conference!

The FEC issued a ruling yesterday about the disclosure of funds used to finance recounts. As the AP story in the New York Times says:

Changing nearly 30 years of election policy, federal regulators said Wednesday that money used to pay for vote recounts and legal challenges was subject to campaign finance restrictions on contributions and expenditures.

In making its decision, the commission recognized that recounts were expensive. As a result, the contributions that candidates raise from individuals for their recount accounts will not count against their fund-raising for the election. Under current law, a candidate can receive donations up to $2,100 from an individual for each election. Now a contributor who had already reached the donation limit with a candidate could contribute also to the recount account. Similarly, while the state parties would have to abide by the $10,000 contribution limits that apply to them, they would not have to live within limitations on spending for so-called coordinated expenditures with federal candidates.

Yesterday, I did a presentation at the VTP Voter Registration-Voter Identifcation Conference about the interoperability of voting systems. This presentation focused on voter registration data interoperability. You can see the slides from the presentation and you can download the report “The Next Big Election Challenge” from the IBM Center for the Business of Government. There was a great interest in this issue, especially since voter registration is such a large issue today in election reform.

This morning, to open the second day of the VTP conference, Spencer Overton gave an interesting talk on the need for research on voter identification requirements. Overton’s talk focused on the need for developing and undertaking a robust research agenda on the various dimensions of the voter identification debate — especially on election fraud, and on the extent to which voting-eligible citizens have government-issued photo identification (and the extent to which they actually carry them around and would bring them to a polling place).

Overton noted that much of the policy and public debate so far as relied on anecedotal evidence, and arguments by analogy. He made a strong case for moving beyond this form of argument, toward a research-based policy debate. He’s absolutely correct!

However, his talk raises a structural question for the academic and research community. Academic research, especially in the area of voting technology and election reform, is not as proactive as necessary; trying to quickly redirect a research agenda is like turning an aircraft carrier on a dime (difficult if not impossible!). A large part of the difficult here for academic researchers involves our procedures and processes for peer-review and publication, where it now can take well over a year, if you are lucky, to get a piece through peer review and into the pages of a good academic journal. There has been much discussion of how to get academic research on voting technology and election administration moving more quickly and more proactively; clearly we need some outside-the-box approaches for getting research and facts into the policy debates in a rapid — but scientific — manner.

There’s a new report out from our friends at electionline.org, “Translating the Vote: The Impact of the Language Minority Provision of the Voting Rights Act.” Section 203 of the VRA was debated recently as part of the VRA renewal, but there have been few studies of how it is implemented and of it’s effects on election administration and on voter behavior. This report should help spark new research on this important question.

Ann McGeehan, Director of Elections in Texas, spoke at the conference this afternoon about their experiences with the development and implementation of their statewide voter registration system in Texas. During her presentation, she made three very interesting points:

1. Data matching: McGeehan gave some data on the matching rate they are finding with their new system. (Caveat: I jotted these down as quickly as I could; if there are any changes to these numbers I’ll repost.) She stated that somewhere between 50 and 60% of their registrations or re-registrations are coming from Texans in drivers’ license offices (“DPS” in Texas). For all of those registration requests, DPS verifies the drivers’ license, not the election officials. For the rest, 85% give a drivers’ license number; 6% give the last four digits of of their social security number; and the remainder have neither form of identification. When they verify the license number or social security number, they get a 2% match failure rate with the drivers’ licenses, but over 50% fail when they match the last four digits of the social security number.
2. Process when verification fails: McGeehan stated that Texas developed a procedure for when this happens, which was unforseen under HAVA. She noted that since the failure to match might be due to problems in the databases, they are treating those who try to register but can’t be matched as first-time registrants (meaning they have to show identification when they show up to vote). It would be interesting to see what the other states have developed as procedures for this eventuality.
3. Hurdles to implementation: McGeehan noted that they were having troubles with implementation of their new statewide file. She said that it was a hugely complex task, and that one of the greatest problems has come from “dirty data” from the counties.

Now to the presentations by Kim Brace and Thad Hall on data matching and interoperability.

The morning session of the VTP conference today focused on the historical background of voter registration in the United States, and the research that has been conducted so far on the effects of voter registration. Tova Wang (The Century Foundation) spoke about recent developments regarding voter registration, especially NVRA and HAVA. Alexander Keyssar (Harvard University) spoke about the history of voter registration in the United States, briefly covering many of the issues covered in his wonderful book, The Right to Vote. Then, in the second session, Stephen Ansolabehere (MIT) and Jonathan Nagler (NYU) talked about the social science perspectives on what is known about voter registration and it’s impact on political behavior.

In these two sessions, there were three different discussions that I found very interesting.

First, Keyssar stressed repeatedly that in the United States there is no right to vote in the constitution. In his opinion, this is the root cause for many of the basic issues with the electoral process in the United States. As he noted repeatedly, if there were a constitutional right to vote, that would mean that the many administrative failures that we now see in elections (and the various problems they cause) would be much less likely to occur, as they would be a violation of a constitutional right. He also pointed out that in many nations there is a constitutional right to vote, and that in these nations there is in his opinion a more centralized and uniform (and effective?) election administration process. I’m not aware of research that takes this approach to study election administration, but I do think it might be an interesting perspective to study.

Second, Ansolabehere stated that in his opinion the new statewide voter files that are now being used throughout the United States would fundamentally change the nature of political comunications. He noted that they are more current and should have fewer errors than the old lists, they are electronic and highly accessible. As Stephen noted, they are “dynamite” — a conclusion that might be correct. This is well worth studying as parties and candidates beging to use these new files in their efforts to contact voters.

Third, I posed a question to Ansolabehere and Nagler: if they had $5 million to spend on a five-year research agenda to understand voter registration, what would they do? Nagler said that he would spend the money collecting data on the procedures and laws regarding voter registration throughout thates, focusing on perhaps the past two or three decades. He also said that he would invest in collecting data on how how voter registration laws are being implemented, today and in the near future. Ansolabehere had a different take: he said that he would spend the money developing large-scale survey instruments measuring the barriers to voting (and on fixing the basic question that the Census CPS uses to measure barriers to voting). Stephen also said he would develop resources to developing methods to measure fraud, especially voter registration fraud.

The early voting snafus keep coming. It’s too early to draw any firm conclusions, but a review of the stories from last spring and this fall reveal some reoccurring problems.

• Early voting for administrators. We often think of early voting as a longer window within which voters can cast their ballot and review campaign information. But early voting also pushes back the deadline by which election officials must prepare ballots, voter information guides, program machines, etc.
• Early voting and state laws. At the same time, some states may need to modify their constitutional arrangements, to force petitions signers to get their petitions in earlier, hold primaries earlier, and generally set deadlines that correspond to the new early voting window.
• Keep it simple. Problems often crop up when states and localities try to change too many things at once, adding both early voting, new voting machines, relax absentee requirements, etc. To the degree possible, states should try to phase in requirements, particularly using lower profile local contests and primaries as a way to test out new balloting methods.

In Ohio, absentee ballots are not ready because the signatures for two ballot issues were not certified in time. The ballots are stuck at the printer.

In Cook County, IL, some are charging that early voting ballots are not being secured, and are simply being “tossed into an unlocked file cabinet drawer”. (Thad, Mike, and I heard similar descriptions after the April primary.)

These cases are not unusual, and we’ll have more to come, I’m sure, in the next few weeks.

Here’s a last reminder that the VTP conference on voter identification and registration is this Thursday and Friday. The conference website is here. The conference agenda is full of interesting speakers, covering the range of topics that are now of interest in these two critical aspects of the election process. Both Thad and I will be at this conference, and we’ll be writing about the conference as it occurs here on Election Updates!