The Marion County, IN clerk reports that 65% of all early voters choose to cast ballots at satellite centers, rather than “fight traffic downtown, find a place to park, figure out how to get into a building. They wanted a flexible option.”

There will be no satellite early voting this year in Marion County, however.

Republican Patrick Dietrick blocked the sites for this election, saying he questions the security, oversight and organizational process.

“To satisfy me, we need to sit down and ask what happens once those votes are brought from the satellites to downtown to CCB and sent back to polling places to be counted. We need to get together and talk about it,” said Patrick Dietrick, election board.

Thad Hall particularly likes step 4 in this story: http://www.theonion.com/articles/city-of-chicago-to-modernize-outdated-graft-progra,17140/

Rick Hasen blogged on the nomination of Thomas Hicks to the EAC.  Like Rick, I’m a big fan of this nomination.  I’ve dealt with Tom at meetings of NASS and NASED over the years and he’s paid close attention to the work of the Elections Initiatives at Pew.

He always struck me as smart and fair-minded.  Personally, I’m pleased to see an appointee who did not rise through the ranks of election administration.  While election administrators are obviously a key stakeholder for the EAC, they are not the only stakeholder, and I think that Tom will recognize the investment that other communities can or do have in the Commission’s work.

This just came across the transom in electionline:

Same Day Voter Registration in Maryland – R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology; Jonathan Nagler, New York University, Demos, Briefing Paper, Winter 2010: In analyzing the potential impact if Maryland adopted same-day registration, the authors find that overall turnout could go up by 4.3 percent, turnout among those aged 18 to 25 could increase by 9.1 percent and turnout for those who have moved in the last six months could increase by 7.2 percent.

It’s a nice piece with a particularly well crafted Appendix.  If less technically sophisticated readers out there want to know how statisticians estimate the impact of voting reforms on turnout, look here.  Mike and Jonathan also show how you can take complex statistical results (in the Appendix) and translate them into policy recommendations.  Political Scientists take note!

One thing I’d add to the mix: Maryland would be implementing same day registration in combination with early voting.  Under the auspices of the Elections Initiative at the Pew Center on the States, a team of scholars and elections officials in Wisconsin have released a study analyzing how these two systems interact.  Their work can be found here, at the University of Wisconsin Election Administration project page.

Last

I just saw this abstract, for a paper in the new issue of Political Psychology on the possible influence of polling places on voting behavior:

Voting is perceived as free and rational. Citizens make whatever choices they wish, shielded from external influences by the privacy of the voting booth. The current paper, however, suggests that a subtle source of influence—polling places themselves—can impact voting behavior. In two elections, people voting in churches were more likely to support a conservative candidate and a ban on same-sex marriage, but not the restriction of eminent domain. A field experiment found that people completing questionnaires in a chapel awarded less money (relative to people in a secular building) to insurance claimants seeking compensation for abortion pills, but not to worker’s compensation claimants. A laboratory experiment found that people subliminally exposed to ecclesiastical images awarded less money (relative to people exposed to control images) to abortion pill claimants, but not to worker’s compensation claimants. Exposure to ecclesiastical images affected only Christians; non-Christians’ awards were unaffected by the prime. These findings show that polling locations can exert a powerful and precise influence on political attitudes and decision making.

I literally just saw the abstract, and haven’t read the paper yet. It looks interesting.

Yes, say some political observers in Hawaii and Secretary Mark Ritchie of Minnesota.

Thad and I are flying to Munich this week to speak at the OVF Summit on oveseas voting.    The Summit schedule is here: http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/initiatives-UOCAVAsummit-summit2010.  It looks like the impact of the MOVE act will animate a lot of the discussion.

Apropos of this, here is a story on National Guard voters being able to cast ballots over the Internet.

This story came across the transom, about the potential impact of internet voting on turnout.

I found this quote by Thad Kousser particularly interesting: “There’s no reason not to expect (mail-in voting) will lead to higher turnout,” said Thad Kousser, a visiting professor at Stanford University whose research was published in Political Analysis.

Michael Hanmer, in his newly released book on Cambridge, makes a different argument: turnout is a relatively marginal act, and none of the relatively minor reforms on the table, including internet voting and voting by mail, are likely to increase turnout very much.

I agree with Michael, as I suspect Thad K. does, but his quote seems a bit misleading. Maybe this is just about the message you send to a reporter.

I think Thad Hall gets it right:

“Don’t expect new people flooding into the system,” Hall said.  It appears Internet voting was mostly used as a convenience by people who would have gone to traditional polls.

Douglas M. Spencer and Zachary S. Markovits just published a study in the current issue of the Election Law Journal, “Long Lines at Polling Stations? Observations from an Election Day Field Study.” Here is their paper’s abstract:

This pilot study represents the first systematic attempt to determine how common lines are on Election Day, at what times of day lines are most likely to form, what are the bottlenecks in the voting process, and how long it takes an average citizen to cast his or her ballot. This study highlights the importance of evaluating polling station operations as a three-step process: arrival, check-in, and casting a ballot. We collected data during the 2008 presidential primary election in California, measuring the efficiency of the operational components of 30 polling stations across three counties. We found statistically significant, and meaningful, variation in the service rates of poll workers and voting technology. Our findings should better help election officials make critical decisions about the allocation of critical resources.

This video has nice visuals of how the election in Iraq is run. http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/03/06/world/middleeast/1247467285193/iraq-s-parliamentary-elections.html