Foley’s essay on Ohio

Ned Foley raises some excellent issues to watch in the lead up to Ohio’s presidential primary on March 4th.

I’d like to highlight two issues, both of which occurred in California, and are likely to reoccur in Ohio, in part due to the unintended consequences of decertification of electronic machines, the move to paper ballots, and the use of a central count.

(I received some criticism from the California Secretary of State’s office for raising these issues in California. Let me be clear: I’m not implying anything other than the best motives on the part of Secretaries of State who want to move to paper ballots. But, as was clear in California, and as Ned points out in Ohio, this move results in some major administrative challenges, and it’s not clear that some counties have the capacity, and they certainly have not received the funding, to deal with these challenges.)

But back to Ned’s essay:

  1. Central Counts:

    Ned worries about ballot transport issues related to central counts. An additional worry is that central counts will likely result in higher rates of residual votes (erroneous over and under votes) and consequently voter disenfranchisement.

    This is because the voter’s ballot is not run through the optical scanner at the precinct (and errors flagged), but ballots are just accumulated in a box. This problem may not be evident in the presidential primary because if there is only one race on the ballot, but will surely crop up in November.

  2. Absentee Voting:

    Ned is concerned about the spike on no-excuse absentee balloting, raising the issue of abusive practices. I add an administrative burden: if the number of absentee ballots doubles or triples, as we’ve seen in other jurisdictions that aggressively promoted this mode of balloting, then local offices can easily be overwhelmed with processing this paper, resulting in delays in the count.

    I don’t know if the rates of absentee usage in Ohio are anywhere near the 40-50% in California, but when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots, there is the sheer physical challenge of storing the envelopes, checking the signatures, opening the ballots, and getting them through the readers.

Polls Close, Counting Begins in Pakistan Elections

The Post has a great article about the trials and tribulations in the Pakistani elections, as well as a cool photo gallery, which you can access here.

The article discusses several problems that Americans can relate with, such as long lines and delays in figuring out who actually won.

“A final counting of the votes is several days away. Early indicators pointed to thin support at the polls for the ruling party of President Pervez Musharraf in several key urban hubs. Reports from around the country also suggested that security concerns could result in low voter turnout, particularly in urban areas, for the long awaited elections to Pakistan’s 342-seat National Assembly. Originally scheduled to take place on Jan. 8, the vote was postponed after the assassination of opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27, and has been mired in controversy amid fears of vote rigging and violence.

Early this morning in the densely populated military enclave of Rawalpindi, traffic on the northeastern city’s busy Circular Road flowed at a fast clip outside a men’s polling station at a public high school, but the flow of voters inside was snarled for more than an hour after election officials opened the polls late. “I arrived about an hour ago and I have been unable to vote because they did not open the polls and the election officials are saying that they do not have the list with my name on it,” said Hafiz ur-Rehman, a supporter of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party.

The Times of India expresses concerns about the government rigging the election.

Even with counting in progress, the opposition parties were fearful of rigging. If that happens, it will bring in more complications as indicated by US senator Joseph Biden. “If the majority of Pakistani people don’t think the election was fair, then I think we have a real problem,” said Biden, who is here as a poll observer.

Rules Matter

For people who study politics, there is a basic saying “Rules Matter.” The Electoral College is an example, as are the rules for open versus closed primaries. In this article in the Washington Post, we see that rules matter for the allocation of delegates and they suggest that Texas has rules for allocating Democratic Party delegates that can decouple statewide support and delegate allocations.

Washington State Primary — After the Caucus and Delegates….

Now here is a great story that illustrates everything weird about the presidential selection process. Washington State is having a meaningless primary after they already handed out delegates in their caucuses. As the NY Times reports:

As many as 1.5 million votes are projected to be cast in Washington State’s presidential primary on Tuesday. The question is whether they will count. The state is obliged to tally the numbers, of course, and the state Republican Party will award 19 of its 40 delegates based on the primary results. Yet Senator John McCain’s selection as the Republican nominee is pretty much assured. More problematic is that the state Democratic Party long ago said it would award its delegates based solely on the results of the statewide caucuses that were held on Feb. 9. The party says a record 250,000 people turned out for the caucuses, which Senator Barack Obama won by 36 percentage points.

So they are having an election, in which the winner gets….well, nothing.

And alas, below we get the gripes that voters have because they do not get that primary elections are, well, party elections that are run by party rules and they get to choose who they affiliate with.

People [in Washington] do not register to vote by party affiliation, but this year voters in the primary must check a box declaring a preferred party and sign an oath promising that they did not vote in a caucus for another party. There is no mechanism to ensure that people do so — just trust. But if a voter does not select a party and sign the oath, their vote will not be counted in the presidential primary. The changes have not gone over well.

“We’re hearing daily, in huge volumes, from voters who are angry with this style of primary,” said Bobbie Egan, a spokeswoman for the King County elections division. Ms. Egan said the department had received 50 to 75 complaints a day in recent weeks. Mail-in ballots received so far show that 25 percent of voters in King County, the largest in the state, are not checking the box. Many are writing notes on their ballots. “This is anti-democracy,” one voter wrote. “Political parties should not control who I can vote for.”

Pakistani Elections

There is an interesting story about the Pakistani elections today that discusses the concerns about vote fraud there. This paragraph is especially interesting.

Ms. Fruman, of the National Democratic Institute, described a litany of complaints, mostly from opposition parties, of bribery and the use of state resources for campaigns. The manufacturing of counterfeit identity cards was uncovered in the town of Quetta when a package of 3,000 fake cards split open, she said. Millions of names were found to have been missing from voter rolls, including, in one case, an entire village where support was strong for the Pakistan People’s Party, she said.

The problem with paper

Tennessee is only the most recent state mandating a move to paper balloting in an effort to insure the integrity of the ballot.

Here’s the problem: when combined with an increasing use of by-mail voting (primarily via no-excuse absentee balloting) and when some jurisdictions are moving to a central count, then this will almost certainly result in a dramatic increase in residual vote (under and over votes).

Since the high residual vote rates associated with punch card and lever machines were a primary reason we got rid of these after 2000, the move to paper is not without it’s own problems.

LA County Bubble-versity continues

The LA Times ran an editorial this morning regarding the “cross-over” or “decline-to-state” ballots in LA County that have not yet been tallied. One interesting thing was pointed out in the editorial:

Election officials are calling this a glitch, but the outcome was entirely foreseeable. In fact, it has happened before. In the March 2004 election, 44% of crossover ballots were unusable, and in June 2006, it was 42%. With numbers this high, the county registrar should have investigated this matter long before now.

Indeed, now that the complete magnitude of this problem is clear, and it is apparent that it just wasn’t just a glitch regarding the 2008 presidential primary in California, it’s time for the LA County primary election ballot for “decline-to-state” or “non-partisan” voters to be redesigned. Election officials will also need to revisit pollworker training, polling place procedures, and voter education programs to insure that problems like this don’t arise again in future California primary elections.

According to a story in the local papers (this was run in the Pasadena Star-News this morning), that’s what’s happening … They are working to redesign the ballot so that “decline-to-state” voters won’t have to ink that extra bubble to vote in a partisan primary:

For the 26 percent of non-partisan voters who did not fill in the party bubble, it’s impossible to know which side’s candidate they meant to choose, Logan said.

He said his office will redesign the ballot to eliminate the need for non-partisan voters to fill in a bubble specifying which party they were voting for.

Logan described this so-called “double bubble” as a “confusing layout of the ballot. He inherited the system when he came on board in January, and the double bubble had been used without controversy in three previous elections.

Also according to this same story, the LA County Board of Supervisors has asked Acting Registrar Dean Logan to see if there is a way to include the estimated 49,500 uncounted ballots from “decline-to-state” voters (or some fraction of them) in the final presidential primary voting tally. We’ll have to wait and see if that is feasible.