As noted in today’s Electionline, legislation has been introduced to eliminate the EAC.

The full text of the bill is here: HR672. I’ll try to look more carefully at this over the next week or two, but at first blush, I think it transfers the NVRA and UOCAVA reporting requirements to the Federal Election Commission and VVSG and certification to NIST.

My own quick reaction is that the EAVS (NVRA, UOCAVA, and the Election Day Survey) are invaluable and need to continue in some fashion.  Whether the EAC or some agency ends up administering these, I’d prefer that they be contracted out to an academic institution, following the very successful National Election Study and General Social Survey models.

This week’s Electionline Weekly does a superb job pulling together the various threads of the fiscal debate over photo ID at the polling place.  As author Sean Greene notes, the costs of implementation are squarely part of the debate in most states, not surprising given widespread fiscal retrenchment.

Particularly helpful in the weekly are citations to “fiscal notes,” defined by the Colorado legislative handbook (sic)  as “the estimated amount of increase or decrease in revenue or expenditure that enactment of the bill. Each bill with fiscal implications must have a fiscal note before being acted upon by a committee of reference.stat(ing) the estimated amount of increase or decrease in revenue or expenditure.”  (Electionline provides a link to a study by NCSL on state fiscal note processes that should be of interest to anyone who studies state and local politics and policy.)

Nice job, Sean.  Now get off to Kazakhstan!

I know one of the things about academics that drives policy makers batty is that we pick and criticize,but often don’t propose.  I plead guilty, however, this story from the Charlotte Observer on the arguments for voter ID is just too easy of a target.

The money quotes:

But state Democratic Chairman David Parker of Statesville sees the legislation as an effort to disenfranchise 600,000 to 1 million North Carolina voters who do not hold driver’s licenses.  “Why the Republican Party wants to dishonor the flag and the principles of the Constitution is beyond me,” Parker said.

Not sure why the flag got in there, but I think the Supreme Court has already ruled on the constitutionality of voter ID.

Continue reading →

There is a nice article in the new Political Research Quarterly (gated) by Shanna Reilly and Sean Richey on the relationship between “roll off” (voters not completing a ballot) and complex ballot questions.

The takeaway quote should be of interest to our readers in state legislatures and others working on state and local referenda and initiatives:

Our research suggests that an obvious policy solution to decrease roll-off is requiring ballot propositions to be written in a way that is easier to understand. It is already governmental policy for institutional review boards to require researchers to write informed consent forms in an easy-to-read manner. In a similar way, state election offices could require those writing ballot questions to write them in an easy-to-read fashion.

The paper has some very nice policy prescriptions that should be of interest to our readers in state legislatures.  The authors include examples of “easy” and “difficult” propositions, and provide a technology (the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Score) that can be easily tested using Microsoft Word.

For our academic readers, I had a few questions after reading the article, most importantly, what impact do complex ballot questions have on the composition of the electorate who do not roll off (e.g. do we end up with wealthier and more educated “initiative electorates”) and what impact might that have on what kinds of initiatives pass or fail?  The authors may already be investigating these questions.

I referred to these in my previous posting; here are graphics of the effective number of parties, based on seat shares, then on vote shares, for Latvia.  One of the fascinating features in the graphic is the district of Riga, which follows the rest of the country closely in vote shares, but is far less responsive as far as seat shares.

I have been teaching my elections class this semester, and we are at that point when the students have to calculate the “effective number of parties” in a number of different countries.  The effective number of parties is defined in a number of places; the assignment has them update tables from Taagpera and Shugart’s book Seats and Votes, Ch. 8.  The ENP is an attempt to estimate, in a way comparable across countries, what Sartori called the number of “relevant” parties.

The calculation is pretty simple: you take the percentage of votes a party received, square it, and sum across parties. This number has the elegant name of the “Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index”.  Take the reciprocal, and you have the effective number of parties.

For the assignment, I ask students to update Taagpera and Shugart for a set of countries.  Since the book was published in 1989, eastern Europe is one of the most interesting areas.  I generated some figures myself for Latvia using the very helpful archive of constituency level results (CLE) provided by Dawn Brancati of Washington University.

Here’s my question for Thad, though: I am pretty sure I found some errors and anomalies for Estonia.  The errors are in the district names (for example: “Voru maakond, Valga maakond, Polva maakond” is listed in 1992 and “Voru-,Valga, Polva maakond” in 1995–I am pretty sure these are the same).

But is it the case that the magnitude changed in many Estonian electoral districts from 1992-2003?  The aforementioned “Voru-,Valga, Polva maakond” is listed as M=6 (1992), 5(1995), 5(1999), and 10 (2003).

I was fascinated by the story that Charles posted out of Napa Valley.

I just got back from DC where I testified in front of Mary Cheh’s committee of the DC Council on the costs of conducting an upcoming special election.  Rokey Suleman estimated that a vbm election in the District would cost nearly double (1.6 million vs. $800,000) of a traditional precinct place election.

Is this because Napa already mails out so many absentee ballots?  Because they already have to mail out sample ballots?  Keep in mind that however Napa gears up for a precinct place election, the costs will not be comparable to the 2010 election because turnout will likely be so much lower.