Category Archives: voter registration

Will We See Record Turnout for the 2008 Presidential Election?

As were are talking about questions we get asked — and speculating about the election — here’s a good one. What will turnout be this fall? Will we see record voter turnout?

What I’ll offer at this point are some links to a variety of reports about state and local predictions about turnout:

Alabama: “Secretary of State Predicts Record Turnout.”

Chicago: “Clerk Braces for Record Turnout.”

Indiana: “Rokita Says 65 Percent Turnout Possible.”

Anyone want to venture a prediction about what national turnout will be in this fall’s presidential election?

Mass House appears to have failed to take up EDR bill

The Boston Globe is reporting this morning that the Mass House did not take up the EDR bill that the Mass Senate had passed:

Major items that lawmakers neglected to take up included whether to allow residents to register to vote on election days, whether the state should ban trans fat oils in restaurants, and whether Massachusetts should join a movement to decide presidential elections using a national popular vote instead of the Electoral College.

VR Interoperability represents a great leap forward

I hope Michael is able to post more about interoperability standards for state voter registration files. This touches upon a number of important issues in election reform, and I can think of only one potential fly in the ointment.

  1. Data exchange standards would make it far easier for states to help check the accuracy of their rolls, particularly with close by states and, as Secretary Ritchie points out, in metropolitan areas that cross state boundaries.
  2. Efforts to create data archives of election returns, voting technology, and voter registration information, following some of the proposals made at the Data for Democracy gathering, would be substantially eased if some sort of data exchange standards were established.
  3. The EAC Election Administration and Election Day survey would have far higher response rates and would be a far more valuable instrument to the states and to the federal government if states could use some sort of electronic “drop box” to respond to many of the items in the survey. If voter registration files could be output in some sort of standardized format, then writing a script to convert that format into the data elements needed in the EAC survey would be straightforward.

Some of these efforts may already be underway as part of the EAC Pilot program. The NAS Voter Registration report urges interoperability standards, and if you look in their footnotes, Neil McClure of Hart/InterCivic has issued a preliminary standard.

This train may finally get moving after the 2008 election, and I’m excited to see this move forward.

A few items from the newswire

Doug Chapin and I have been asked about this before–if you cast an early ballot and then die, is your ballot still counted?  I think we’ve agreed on a standard reply.  While everyone thinks this is an issue that can be dealt with using absentee ballots, what about early in person voting?  It seems to me that once you cast a ballot, that’s it.  (Of course, I’ve written before about the odd few states that have “do-over” provisions.

Am I the only one who does not see a problem with a private firm charging a small fee ($9.95) to process your voter registration?  Sure, it’s not necessary, but people pay for all kinds of things that they can get for free or low cost.

Enough about the professional skepticism–this story out of California does raise a point of concern.  If online voter registration is legalized, how do they check signatures on absentee ballots (as high as 40% in some California counties)?  The bill has a provision for capturing the digital signature from the DMV, but the Butte County recorder thinks these are badly out of date.  (Full disclosure: Pew and JEHT are funding a few studies of online voter registration systems.)

Controversy of Voter Registration law in New Mexico

This story in Politico just came across the wire, courtesy of Project Vote.

In brief, a law passed in 2005 meant to manage third party voter registration efforts is being challenged as overly restrictive and unconstitutional.

I am not sure about the constitutional arguments, but the defenders of the law are having a hard time defending some of its provisions, such as the requirement that voter registration forms be turned in in bundles of 50 and that all forms must be turned in within 48 hours of being collected. When asked where these requirements came from, one defender cited a single instance of 90 voter registration forms being stolen from an ACORN office in 2004. As to the bundling, no one seems to have a good reason for that requirement.

Violating the law does not only void the registration forms, but the individual or organization that collected the forms is subject to legal sanction.

Report on Denver electronic pollbook problems

Here’s a link to a copy of the report on the Denver electronic pollbook problems. We wrote about these problems as reported in the media in the 2006 midterm election in Denver.

Here’s the report’s executive summary:

The general election of November 7, 2006 in Denver was marred by significant technical and operational errors, as well as a seeming lack of needed oversight in some key areas. These errors and omissions led to unacceptably long waiting times for voters and an abandonment rate estimated at 18,000-20,000 voters (approximately 20% of the anticipated physical turnout on Election Day). In addition, seemingly preventable problems with the tabulation of absentee ballots led to significant operational stresses within the DEC and delayed reporting on key races and measures for several days.

The most direct cause of voter inconvenience on Election Day was the repeated failure of the “electronic poll book” (“ePollBook”) software, which hampered the efforts of election judges staffing voting centers to search for voters as they arrived, indicate that they had arrived to vote, and forward them to a machine to cast their votes. The ePollBook, developed exclusively for DEC use by Sequoia Voting Systems, is of decidedly sub-professional architecture and construction and appears never to have been tested in any meaningful manner by either the vendor or by the DEC. This software’s failure to accommodate Election Day traffic led to lengthy lines developing at the registration desks of voting centers while voting machines stood idle. Well-publicized media reports concerning line lengths were broadcast throughout the day and likely contributed to dampening turnout among voters without the time or determination to devote multiple hours to casting their votes.

While the ePollBook’s considerable shortcomings represent the most direct cause of Election Day angst in Denver, we must caution readers against assuming that merely repairing or replacing it will ensure the smooth conduct of future elections. That the ePollBook was deployed at all in such an unready state is symbolic of a consistent pattern of substandard information technology management within the DEC. Given the increasing dependence of election processes on technology, the state of technology management within the DEC must be recognized as an operational risk to the City and County as it looks toward future elections.

In addition to technology concerns, the DEC’s conduct of the 2006 elections suffered from inadequate contingency planning (some technical, some purely operational) and errors in logistical operations and assumptions, especially given the number of significant environmental changes with which the DEC was wrestling in preparing for this election. In 2006, the DEC was coping with new voting machines, new scanning equipment, software upgrades, vacant staff and leadership positions, new leadership, and a fundamental shift from traditional precinct-based polling places to voting centers, at which a voter from any part of the County may vote. These environmental changes, in addition to several others, represent an extremely complex problem set, and one might expect a cautious, if not ultra-cautious attitude to prevail among those responsible for the election’s conduct. Instead, planning and due diligence activities were less thorough than needed.

In analyzing the causes underlying the difficulties of 2006, it is tempting to search for a single factor, act, or error on which to place all blame. The purpose of this assessment, however, is not merely to diagnose what went wrong in 2006 but also to surface information of use to Denver in conducting future elections. In that light, it is critical that the failures of 2006 be viewed in an appropriately broad context that takes into account disparate factors such as planning, management, technology, interagency politics, and the degree of environmental change surrounding the conduct of the 2006 election cycle.

I’ve not seen an official response to this report from Sequoia Voting Systems, but I suspect at some point there will be a response and when it is available, I’ll post it here.

UPDATE (1-16-2007): Here is Sequoia’s response to the report.