Earlier this year, in March 2007, Internet voting was used in the Estonian parliamentary elections. Thad and I participated in a project studying this Internet voting application, sponsored by the Council of Europe, directed by Professor Alexander H. Trechsel (who directs the European Union Democracy Observatory at the European University Institute in Florence), and in collaboration with Guido Schwerdt and Fabian Breuer. The report that we wrote that analyses the results of the survey we conducted among Estonian voters has just been posted on the European Union Democracy Observatory website: “Internet voting in the March 2007 Parliamentary Elections in Estonia.” The report presents detailed analysis from our survey, and presents a number of important recommendations regarding the future use of Internet voting in Estonia.

Below is the entire statement from Conny McCormack regarding her retirement. Conny has been perhaps the single most influential person on me—and perhaps on Mike as well–in explaining the nuances of the actual implementation of elections in the real world. I will blog more on her tomorrow.

STATEMENT BY CONNY McCORMACK ANNOUNCING RETIREMENT AS LOS ANGELES COUNTY’S REGISTRAR-RECORDER/COUNTY CLERK

After 30 years of public service , I have decided to retire at the end of this year. It was a great honor when you chose me to serve as CACEO President and to serve the residents of Los Angeles County for the past 12 years as Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk and to lead a Department of exceptionally talented and dedicated employees committed to providing top quality service in all three diverse functional areas — from election administration to recording property deeds to maintaining the public’s official records regarding voting, property ownership, birth, death, marriage, and more.

My decision to leave at this time is based on several factors:

I have been approached by several foundations and, at this stage of life, am interested in shifting my energies and experience to election administration research and consulting both within the U.S. and worldwide. In the international arena, over the past several years I have been privileged to work with electoral commissions in six countries, sharing their passion and commitment to strengthening their democracies. I am eager to continue such work. Additionally, I am interested in bringing practical experience and knowledge into academic research in the area of electoral administration.

There is logic to the timing of my departure as it follows the Department’s recent achievement of key milestones. After five years of planning and development, two significant, very complex technology projects were successfully deployed during the past year, one involving Elections and the other Recorder operations. Both have enhanced service to the public in important ways.

Elections: Implementing the InkaVote Plus voting system for the first time at the November 2006 election, followed by a series of elections this year including three to fill vacancies in state and federal legislative districts, has greatly enhanced the voting experience. At each of the County’s 5,000 voting precincts, InkaVote Plus equipment alerts voters if they make a mistake, such as voting for more candidates than permitted in any contest. The system also allows voters with disabilities, including persons who are blind, to vote without assistance using audio-operated equipment. Tens of thousands of voters have expressed their appreciation for these new features. These improvements were not available at the precinct level for past Los Angeles County elections but have now been fully implemented in compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Recorder: This year the Department launched the new Enterprise Recording Archive (ERA) system. By eliminating many previous manual processes, ERA has resulted in much greater efficiency in the recording of up to three million property documents annually. The ERA system was internally developed by the Department’s talented information technology staff. It was also designed to accommodate electronic recording of property documents. With the passage of recent state legislation, followed by adoption last month of regulations by California’s Attorney General, in the near future ERA will be used to facilitate the transition to paperless electronic recording of millions of property documents.

The following statistics provide a snapshot of the work accomplished by the Department during my tenure as Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk:

ELECTIONS
• More than 25 million ballots were accurately and securely counted during the conduct of hundreds of elections.
• More than 10 million signatures were submitted on initiative and candidate petitions which staff subsequently examined and verified.
• More than 7 million voter registration forms were received and processed.
• More than 8,000 candidates filed nomination documents to run for office.

RECORDER/CLERK
• More than 19 million property documents were filed and officially recorded and 2.5 million copies issued of real estate records.
• More than 3.5 million vital records (birth, death and marriage) were recorded and 7.5 million copies issued to the public.
• More than ½ million marriage licenses were issued and 100,000 wedding ceremonies performed.
• More than 2 million filings were recorded to designate business names.
• More than 250,000 notary bonds and other statutory oaths were filed and copies provided.
• More than $3 billion in document recording fees was collected and distributed to multiple agencies ($250 – $400 million annually.)

I am proud to have contributed to significant improvements in the Department over the past dozen years. My primary focus has been optimizing the use of modern technology to streamline and ease the public’s access to vital services. Highlights of achievements under my direction include:

• Phasing-in multiple new voting systems after 35 years of punch card voting.
• Competitively bidding and contracting for the purchase of 10,000 units of new equipment for 5,000 voting precincts to improve the voting experience and to comply with the requirements of federal HAVA law (as noted above).
• Successfully implementing electronic touchscreen voting at multiple sites during the two weeks in advance of major elections. Over the past seven years, this system has provided hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles County voters with the opportunity to vote electronically prior to Election Day. This option has been especially valued by tens of thousands of voters who found out, after the deadline had passed to apply for an absentee ballot by mail, that they would be out of town or had a scheduling conflict which would prevent them from casting a ballot on Election Day.
• Opening three new branch offices to bring the Department’s multiple services closer to the public. The number of offices serving the public countywide expanded to seven, including the Department’s Norwalk HQs.
• Launching the Department’s user-friendly website with easy navigation to access information on the full range of diverse services provided (www.lavote.net). The website contains interactive features such as enabling voters to find their assigned voting locations, including a map, by keying in their residence addresses. It also provides interactive sample ballot content for each voter’s geographic area and displays information in seven languages.
• Converting property documents and birth, death and marriage records from microfilm to digital images to facilitate scanning, storing and retrieving more than 100 million records and to provide access to these records at all branch offices.
• Implementing a web-based system for online filing of business names and to research past and current business filings.
• Installing a new voter information management system to provide greater functionality and data processing of voter registration, absentee voting, poll worker file management, petition verification, and geographic functions (precincts/streets/election districts). Significant cost savings were realized.
• Automating verification of voters’ signatures on absentee ballots, resulting in speedier processing and significant cost savings.
• Developing creative avenues to recruit and train 25,000 volunteer pollworkers for each major election including supplementing experienced pollworkers with thousands of high school and college students as well as county employees.
• Expanding services to candidates by enabling online candidate filing as well as online, electronic campaign finance filings.
• En
  couraging involvement and partnering with external stakeholders via the formation of a Community Voter Outreach Committee (CVOC). CVOC provides an on-going forum for individuals and members of more than 100 community-based organizations to discuss key election issues and to disseminate information throughout the community. The goal is fostering civic engagement and enhancing voter education and participation.

Looking to the future: The timing of my retirement at the end of this year will allow for a smooth transition before next year’s major election cycle. Given the wide range of responsibilities of this Department impacting the most personal aspects of the lives of 10 million County residents – from records of birth, death, marriage, property and their votes – I believe it is vital that the leadership of the Department continues into the future with a Department Head who possesses top management experience in both Elections and Recorder/Clerk operations. I am committed to assisting the Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors and Chief Executive Officer in any way possible to assure the continuation of the exceptional services provided by staff at the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk and to sustain positive staff morale which is essential for successful delivery of vital public services.

This week, the American Political Science Association holds their annual meeting in Chicago. For long time members, this year is different because, for the first time in my memory, we aren’t using the two Hilton hotels, and instead are locating near the Riverfront at the Sheraton and the Hyatt. So much for those long, and often windy, walks along Michigan Avenue from the Palmer House to the Hilton. This also means you cannot rely on Murphy’s Pub to find your colleagues after dinner. How will APSA survive?

For readers of this blog, though, what has changed is that election administration and election reform has finally made it onto the agenda of the APSA membership.

Lee Sigelman, editor of the American Political Science Review, initiated the first strike with an excellent set of articles on elections. First, Cusack Iverson and Soskice have written what I think is a very important piece on the origins of election systems. If you were taught in school that rightist parties adopted PR in the early 20th century in order to forestall the growth of left wing / socialist parties, you need to read this article. Second, Eric Oliver and Shang Ha have a nice piece on local elections in suburban settings, showing how these elections are dominated (even more than usual in the US) by educated and affluent voters. Battaglini, Morton, and and Palfrey have a piece on simultaneous vs. sequential elections that I haven’t absorbed yet (it’s pretty heavy on formal theory). Finally, Matt Barretto has another excellent piece on Latino voting, Latino identity, and turnout.

For those who are interested in forthcoming research, point your browser here, http://apsanet.org/mtgs/program_2007/index.cfm, to APSA’s online program. These search terms work pretty well:

“election reform”
“election law”
“voting machines”
“turnout”

Many of these papers are available at “Proceedings”, which can be found here: http://apsanet.org/section_742.cfm. You need not be a member to search those archives.

The LA County registrar has produced an analysis of the Secretary of State’s decertification order and how it affects elections in LA. The analysis is interesting. For example, they note inconsistencies in the decertification orders and a lack of clarity regarding when or how the systems may be re-certified.

There is also a nice discussion of the costs associated with decertification orders. The report notes that acquiring a voting system can take 18 months or more; it would be impossible to field a voting system by the 2008 general elections. Also, the cost of doing a 100% recount of early votes in LA county could cost almost $1 million

Do not double vote in Wisconsin. And if you do, the “I forgot” defense seems like a bad idea!

Slate.com weighs in with an essay about why the electoral college is terrible, but why the proposed reforms are terrible too.

This story illustrates the problems created by the nature of system certification today. We clearly need better methods of doing certification and better plans for how to handle decertifications, now that they seem more likely to occur.

I am not even going to point out the various ironies in this story:

A month ago, Northampton County officials wanted to sell their lever voting machines for scrap and learned the 880-pound devices would be worth $9,000 total.

The machines’ value rose from junk to priceless Wednesday when County Executive John Stoffa announced the county will use them in the Nov. 6 election.

“We want to have an election voters have confidence in,” Stoffa said at a news conference in his office. “I don’t throw things out, even at home. If we had thrown those machines out, it would have been a disaster.”

For a couple of takes on the Field Poll regarding voter confidence in California, see this story or this one.

The most recent California Field Poll Finds that:

When voters are asked which of the state’s three main voting systems currently in use provided them with the greatest confidence that their vote would be counted accurately, remarkably, each voting system was preferred by almost identical proportions. About one in three voters (32%) place their greatest confidence in voting by means of a paper ballot in which they are asked to select their preference by filling a circle or oval. Another 31% have the greatest confidence in votes cast using a punch card system, while a similar proportion (31%) have the most confidence in voting electronically using a touch screen machine.