The New York Times is reporting that there have been significant problems printing ballots in advance of New York’s upcoming primary elections. The article, “A $200,000 Ballot Error and Other Misprints at New York City’s Board of Elections”, reports that various incorrect mailings have been sent to voters, ranging from notices of upcoming elections with incorrect dates to errors in the printing of absentee ballots. How many lost votes these errors might generate in the state’s primary is difficult to estimate at this point, but once the primary elections are over and data is available it might be possible to determine whether these mistakes misled primary election voters.

This morning’s New York Times has a story, “Angry Arizona Voters Demand: Why Such Long Lines at Polling Sites?”

The answer seems simple, the problems seem to have arisen because of funding cuts, which led to a reduction in the number of polling places. For example, the story reports that in Maricopa County, “officials cut the number of polling places by 70 percent to save money — to 60 from 200 in the last presidential election. That translated to a single polling place for every 108,000 residents in Phoenix, a majority-minority city that had exceptional turnout in Tuesday’s Democratic and Republican primaries.”

While we are still a long way from November, it’s clear that in many of the caucuses and primaries so far there has been strong voter participation, and there is a lot of interest in the nomination campaigns. For some data and discussion of why turnout has been strong, especially in the Republican primaries so far, Lonna Atkeson just published this on presidential primary turnout over at Vox.

If this interest in the elections carry over to the fall, election officials should brace for a heavy turnout in the November general election.

There’s a story in this morning’s New York Times that discusses how North Carolina has become ground zero for the struggle over various important laws regulating elections — especially voter identification and redistricting. How those cases are decided will have important ramifications for similar questions in other states, and no doubt, will be part of the debate about election administration as we head into this fall’s presidential election.

Here’s the story, “North Carolina Exemplifies National Battles Over Voting Laws.”

Annually, political scientists gather at the Palmer House in Chicago for the spring Midwest Political Science Association conference. This year’s conference, April 7-10, has a number of panel sessions that readers might find of interest. This is not meant as a comprehensive list, but just what I’ve found so far for panels and discussions that look interesting to scholars who study election administration and voting technology.

• Thursday:
  • Assessing the Impact of Election Integrity Policies
  • Why Don’t Americans Vote? Meet the Authors.
• Friday:
  • Assessing the Effects of Innovation in U.S. Election Administration.
• Saturday:
  • Author Meets Critics: “Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States” by Edward Foley.
• Sunday:
  • Attitudes Toward and Effects of Election Laws.

There was an article in this morning’s New York Times on allegations of vote buying in Argentina. The story recounted a number of stories of possible vote buying schemes, in particular in Tucuman.

This brought to mind the fact that social scientists (including my colleague Julia Pomares who is quoted in the NY Times story, who I have written a number of papers with regarding election integrity and the use of voting technologies to increase voter confidence) have written extensively in recent years on the topic of election fraud, in particular focusing on the development of tool that can be used to detect potential fraud in elections data.

Much of the earlier work on election forensics is presented in the book that I edited with Thad Hall and Susan Hyde, “Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation.” More recently, Ines Levin and I co-edited a Political Analysis virtual issue that summarized a number of papers that have been published in that journal about this topic, “Election Fraud and Electoral Integrity.” The current issue of Political Analysis has two new papers in it on election forensics, by Montgomery, Olivella, Potter and Crisp, and another by Medzihorsky.

A number of colleagues who follow Argentine elections, and those who study election fraud and integrity, will be following the current elections closely. There’s no doubt that the tools and techniques that social scientists have developed in recent years will be applied to the current elections in Argentina, and elections throughout the world in coming years, to help improve our understanding of elections and their integrity.

There’s a new call for papers, for what looks like a really interesting workshop: the “1st Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting.”

The submissions deadline is quite soon, November 1, 2015. It looks like it will be an interesting workshop!

California’s Governor Brown over the weekend signed into law new steps to automatically register eligible voters when they get their driver’s license in the state. Here’s a link to a NY Times story on the legislation.

The new automatic registration process won’t take effect until sometime next year, after California’s new voter registration system is fully functional. However, once the automatic registration procedures are enacted, though, this will mean that many eligible voters will be added to the state’s voter registration database and thus they won’t have to take any extra steps in order to register to vote. By being in the voter registration system, these new voters will start to get information from state and local election officials about upcoming elections, and no doubt they will also start to get communications from campaigns urging them to vote.

The longer-term effects of this new automatic voter registration procedure will no doubt be the subject of lots of research in the future. We’ll of course want to study changes in voter registration and turnout in the state, but also it will be important to determine what this new automatic registration system might imply for the workflow for local election administrators in California.

This morning two new research articles on elections were published electronically by Political Analysis, one on election forensics and the other on measuring the competitiveness of elections. Both should be of interest to Election Updates readers.

The first is by Jacob Montgomery, Santiago Olivella, Joshua Potter and Brian Crisp, “An Informed Forensics Approach to Detecting Vote Irregularies.” Here’s the abstract of their paper:

Electoral forensics involves examining election results for anomalies to efficiently identify patterns indicative of electoral irregularities. However, there is disagreement about which, if any, forensics tool is most effective at identifying fraud, and there is no method for integrating multiple tools. Moreover, forensic efforts have failed to systematically take advantage of country-specific details that might aid in diagnosing fraud. We deploy a Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) model—a machine-learning technique—on a large cross-national data set to explore the dense network of potential relationships between various forensic indicators of anomalies and electoral fraud risk factors, on the one hand, and the likelihood of fraud, on the other. This approach allows us to arbitrate between the relative importance of different forensic and contextual features for identifying electoral fraud and results in a diagnostic tool that can be relatively easily implemented in cross-national research.

This paper contributes to a series of papers published in PA that develop and text new methodologies for the detection of election irregularities and potential fraud.

The second paper is by Kai Quek and Michael Sances, “Closeness Counts: Increasing Precision and Reducing Errors in Mass Election Predictions.” Measuring the closeness of election contests is important for those who study elections, so this is a paper that readers of this blog should find of considerable interest. Here is the paper’s abstract:

Mass election predictions are increasingly used by election forecasters and public opinion scholars. While they are potentially powerful tools for answering a variety of social science questions, existing measures are limited in that they ask about victors rather than voteshares. We show that asking survey respondents to predict voteshares is a viable and superior alternative to asking them to predict winners. After showing respondents can make sensible quantitative predictions, we demonstrate how traditional qualitative forecasts lead to mistaken inferences. In particular, qualitative predictions vastly overstate the degree of partisan bias in election forecasts, and lead to wrong conclusions regarding how political knowledge exacerbates this bias. We also show how election predictions can aid in the use of elections as natural experiments, using the effect of the 2012 election on partisan economic perceptions as an example. Our results have implications for multiple constituencies, from methodologists and pollsters to political scientists and interdisciplinary scholars of collective intelligence.