Author Archives: gronke

Chapin’s new blog asks: when does Election Day *really* start in 2012?

Doug Chapin has a blog as part of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration.  Given Doug’s knowledge of the field, I think this has to be an addition to the daily RSS feed.

In a recent posting, Chapin blogged about the challenging 2012 presidential primary calendar, and how constant shifting deadlines (and rosters of candidates) create administrative and budgetary challenges for administrators.

I’ll add a little spice to the mix: early voting makes the question of “when exactly is election day again” even more complicated.  With the Federal Voting Assistance Program taking a muscular role in making sure that the MOVE Act is  being fully implemented, Bob Carey is sure to pay close attention to presidential primary ballots.

“Election Day” starts 45 days before the first announced primary.  If, as is being proposed, Florida moves its primary to January 31st, then the first presidential primary ballots will be mailed out on December 17th, and obviously prepared earlier than that.

The number of UOCAVA voters in NH is tiny–4221 in the 2008 EAVS.  But Florida reported 121,395 UOCAVA ballots transmitted in 2008 (largest in the nation).  When *exactly* is Election Day, again, Doug asks?  I have an answer: right around January 1st, 2012, when the first UOCAVA ballots are likely to start to arrive.

Crossposted to earlyvoting.net

Choosing our metaphors wisely

I like the story but I don’t like the metaphor used in this week’s Electionline.

Mindy Moretti writes:

Like alcohol during prohibition, it turns out that many Ohio voters actually liked many of the elections procedures recently banned by the state legislature.

The point is well-taken; the Ohio Legislature eliminated times and places for voting that we taken advantage of by 234,000 citizens in Franklin County alone.  Like the changes being made in a number of other states, including Florida, Texas, and Georgia, legislators argue that these changes will save money.  The fiscal impact note accompanying the bill, however, provides only slim evidence:

This provision shortens the amount of time for in-person absentee voting, which could reduce some costs for county boards of elections for operating these absent voter locations. Continue reading →

Budget woes imperil vote by mail access in CA

Budgetary woes in California may limit citizen access to by-mail options to register and vote.

Electionline weekly reports that the new state budget cuts reimbursements to county clerks for these services.  At least some clerks are negotiating with their local county boards to see if they can shoulder the cost.

One twist on the story: this change may make it easier to identify the full costs of conducting elections in a “mixed” system since the costs will all be funded from a single pot.  Always looking for that silver lining …

Polling Place Photo Project

This email was sent to me by a colleague:

Good morning,

So I’m having a conversation with the development officer from AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) yesterday and she tells me about a project one of their members started.  I was surprised that I wasn’t aware of it so if you all know about this forgive me for being late to the party.

Volunteers have now submitted more than 6,000 photographs from polling places around the country and anybody can look at them online. The provide insight into both the differences and similarities of the voting experience for Americans on election day.  One thing that is clear to me is that polling place signage really sucks just about everywhere – particularly the seemingly simple task of letting people know from the outside of a building that there is a polling place inside.  I also was struck by the pictures of polling places that are inside churches.  When I was an elections administrator I heard arguments that churches must be made available for voting because they’re the only buildings in many precincts that are accessible and have suitable parking.  After looking at these I’m more sympathetic to voters who complain about voting in a church.

If, like me, you weren’t aware of this resource I encourage you to take a look. I found it oddly mesmerizing to keep moving through the photo sets. At times I was disturbed and at times I was gratified by what I saw.

http://www.pollingplacephotoproject.org/

Google Trends in Absentee and Early Voting

I subscribe to a lot of listserv’s full of nerdy statistical types, and a recent distraction for us is Google Correlate, which lets you enter a search term and returns other search terms that correlate with your term.  (You can even make drawings here and see what search phrase correlates with your drawing.  I wonder what programmer figured that one out!)

This got me thinking about Google trends and what it might tell us about early and absentee voting.  I did a quick search on “absentee ballots”, limiting the domain to the United States, and it returned this: Continue reading →

Marin County, CA turnout increase due to VBM?

A surprisingly balanced editorial in the Marin, CA Independent Journal lauds a vote by mail for encouraging turnout in a local school bond election.  Turnout was 56%, 11% higher than the last local election held in 2009.

However, the rest of the story notes that Marin has one of the highest turnout rates in most elections, and that the campaign for this election was very well-financed, including multiple calls to registered voters encouraging them to return the by-mail ballot.   The editorial ends by once again attributing all the turnout increase to the administrative change (including a completely invalid comparison to turnout in LA County), nonetheless, overall it’s a pretty nuanced account.

Will the end of cursive imperil vote by mail?

Under newly proposed national standards, cursive writing will no longer being taught.  Few under the age of 18 write in cursive any more, and it’s likely that we’ll have a growing proportion of the population that either types or uses block printing.

What does this mean for the signature, the main method of verifying vote by mail ballots, and which rely on unique patterns in handwriting?  Do these patterns hold up if individuals use block printing?  I don’t know, but I’d love to hear from any election officials who have thought about this problem.

Stories on the end of cursive in the NY Times and Washington Post.