Glenn County California now estimates it will take more than 24 hours to tabulate election results. However, the clerk there has an excellent solution to California’s problems: Be like Oregon and Washington and go to 100 percent vote-by-mail elections.

In the United States we take certain aspects about elections for granted. For example, some bloggers blog and give aid and comfort to their favorite candidates and most important interest groups try to shape the nature of debate. Reading this article from New Zealand about the potential impact of campaign finance limits makes one appreciate the openness of the American election process!

Here is an AP article about the New Mexico study we reported on yesterday.

This is just the sort of thing you encounter in those last minute deadlines leading up to a conference, so I thought I’d share this with any readers who may be using the ACE Project website to collect some comparative elections data.

Be careful! I think the “official” ACE website is here: http://aceproject.org

But you may encounter this site using Google: http://ace.at.org

No difference, right? Compare these two pages, which list the number of countries worldwide that allow advance/postal/early voting:

http://aceproject.org/epic-en/vo/Epic_view/VO06
http://ace.at.org/epic-en/vo/Epic_view/VO06

It seems obvious to use the first page, but the total country count doesn’t match up (122 vs. 141). Where, for example, is Algeria in the first webpage?

Above is a link to Governor Richardson’s statement about the report we did for him on the transition to optical scan voting in New Mexico. An excerpt is below.

Independent researchers from the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, the University of New Mexico and the University of Utah issued a report today on the administration of the 2006 General Election and the state’s transition to a paper ballot voting system. Over eight in 10 voters rated their voting experience excellent or good and the report concluded that “New Mexico is on the cutting edge of election administration and has executive and local leadership forging aggressively ahead with the intent of building a better, strong, efficacious and more voter confident voting system.”

“This independent report confirms that our state’s transition to a paper ballot system has been successful,” said Governor Bill Richardson. “Voters and poll workers favored the new voting process and gave it high marks for reliability, privacy and ease of use. Our experience clearly demonstrates that states can transition to paper ballot in less than a year and conduct accurate and transparent elections.

According to researchers, New Mexico is the first state to move from a predominantly electronic voting system to a single durable paper ballot system statewide, using optical scanners. Governor Richardson, working closely with New Mexico election reform groups and key state legislators passed legislation in 2005 requiring all state elections to be conducted with a voter verifiable paper trail, but could allow for continued use of Direct Recording Electronic voting systems (DREs). Recognizing state and national concerns over continued use of DREs, during the 2006 legislative session Governor Richardson pushed for a single state-wide voting system using durable paper ballots, which represent the official record of the vote. The paper ballot system allows for recounts of New Mexico elections, which the DRE systems did not, and it also allows elections to be audited for accuracy and provide an environment that promotes greater voter confidence, which the previous electronic systems could not accommodate.

According to Computer World:

Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) sold nearly 1,000 electronic-voting machines that were not certified to five California counties in 2006, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said Tuesday.

“Given that each machine costs about $5,000, it appears ES&S has taken $5 million out of the pockets of several California counties,” Bowen said in a statement.

ES&S sold 972 of its AutoMark Phase 2 Model A200 units, even though the company never submitted that version of the AutoMark machine to the secretary of state’s office for certification in California, Bowen said. ES&S delivered hundreds of the Model A200s to California counties before the model was certified by federal election officials in August 2006, she said.

Mike, Lonna Atkeson, and I wrote a report on the implementation of optical scan voting in the 2006 elections in New Mexico. The UNM press release to the report can be found here (I quote most below) and the report itself can be found here.

During the 2006 general election, researchers from the University of New Mexico, California Institute of Technology and the University of Utah studied the election. Today their studies were released as “The New Mexico Election Administration Report: The 2006 November General Election.”

This report is the product of three independent research projects that were focused on election administration in New Mexico during the 2006 election. The principal researchers in the report were UNM Political Science Professor Lonna Atkeson, Dr. R. Michael Alvarez from the California Institute of Technology and Dr. Thad Hall of the University of Utah.

The results of this study will be useful to the federal government when the U.S. Congress begins to debate moving from electronic voting and replacing those machines with optical scan paper ballots voting machines. With the passage of legislation mandating optical scan ballots in the state, New Mexico leads the nation from a predominantly electronic voting system to one that mandated optical scan paper ballots for elections.

“There is legislation in Congress pushing the country to move to a paper ballot system to provide a verifiable voting record. New Mexico has already taken that step and served as a test state in 2006 to show the effectiveness of this kind of voting technology in reaffirming confidence in the electoral process,” said Dr. Atkeson.

Prior to the 2006 election cycle, New Mexico implemented election reforms designed to create fairer, more accurate and voter-verifiable election administration. This new system was designed to provide a paper trail so future elections could be audited for greater accuracy and to enhance voter confidence in the New Mexico election system. The statewide implementation took place in the fall 2006 general election. Prior to this election at least six different voting technologies were used throughout New Mexico.

“New Mexico is on the cutting edge of election administration and has executive and local leadership forging aggressively ahead with the intent of building a better, stronger, efficacious and more voter-confident voting system,” according to the report.

Part one of the study focused on Election Day observations in three (3) N.M. counties: Bernalillo, Doña Ana and Santa Fe. The study found that overall the new voting technology worked on Election Day, but better training of poll workers and judges – as well as better education of poll workers, judges and voters – should enhance the accountability and quality of the election experience.

Part two examined the attitudes and experiences of a random sample of poll workers in Bernalillo, Doña Ana and Santa Fe counties. The survey showed that poll workers need the rules governing voter identification clarified, ensure that polling places are accessible to the disabled and to improve poll worker training to better reflect Election Day realities.

Part three looked at the experiences of a random sample of registered voters in New Mexico’s First Congressional District. The report examines factors associated with the voting experience, experience with the ballot, the polling site, voter interaction with poll workers, and voter confidence.
Copies of the report are available on the UNM Vote 2006 Web site at Vote2006 UNM.

Thad recently blogged about a provision in Ohio’s election law that may allow someone to reconstruct someone’s vote by taking advantage of two data reporting features. First, Ohio county election returns can be sorted by the order in which the ballots were cast. Second, Ohio law allows access to the voting machine paper trails–including time stamps.

Thad recommends just turning off this feature.

Now wait a second, Dr. Hall! Don’t you know anyone who would love to take advantage of this reporting feature in order to track early voting? How about anyone who might like to relate patterns of under -and over-votes to the time the ballot was cast?

Sound like anyone familiar? And don’t you think said individual might not have realized that voting machine tapes would be very useful??

Thanks Thad … for NOTHING!

The EAC issued two documents today related to their review of the AVS WINVote system. The first is a letter from AVS and the second is the EAC’s reply.

[From Robert Krimmer]

As said before, I’ve just finished editing the call for papers for next year’s conference. I do expect an increased interest in the conference – hopefully also from here in the US – we desperately need your input in the discussion! I tried to put together a quite international IPC who are from 15 different countries, so expect a truely international discussion.