Papers that may be of interest to our readers, from the Southern Political Science Association meeting in New Orleans, Jan 10-12, 2008. Papers titles, authors, and abstracts are accessible by following the conference link at spsa.net.

“The Straight Ticket Option and Race: Implications for Roll-Off”, Douglas Feig (MissState).

“Racial Homogeneity, Geography, and turnout: A Hierarchical Linear Model.” Ernest McGowen (UTexas).

And a full panel titled “The Right to Vote and Election Law in the States”

“A Cobblestone of Eligible Electorates: The Elections Clause and the Implications of Variance and Comity in American Criminal Disenfranchisement Policy”. Derek Stafford (Michigan) .

“Taking State Constitutions Seriously” Daniel Katz (Michigan).

“Mediated Popular Sovereignty: Local Suffrage Practices and American Self-Rule”. Alex Ewald (UVt)

The long-awaited book by Paul S. Herrnson, Richard G. Niemi, Michael J. Hanmer, Benjamin B. Bederson, Frederick C. Conrad, and Michael W. Traugott, “Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting A Ballot” has just been released by Brookings Institution Press. This book summarizes a number of studies that this research team has conducted in the past few years on voting technologies.

I’ll leave it to Thad and Paul to provide more detailed reactions to this book. At this point, I’ll just note that I joined Paul DeGregorio, Ray Martinez and Henry Brady in providing “advance praise” for the book, on the book’s back jacket. My comments were “In the aftermath of the 2000 Florida recount, it became clear that academic research on voting technology had been inadequate. This book pushes the research frontier forward substantially and provides the foundation for a new generation of research on voting technologies and election administration.”

Anyone interested in voting technology and election reform ought give this book a read.

Recently the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) released a study of Asian Americans and their ability to participate in the 2006 elections, “Asian American Access to Democracy in the 2006 Elections.” The report is based on an exit poll of over 4,700 Asian American voters in 82 polling places throughout the nation, as well as monitoring efforts in 123 polling places.

Of the many points made in the report, I found results from the survey quite interesting as they shed some light on two problems of contemporary research interest.

First, on Page 7 of the report there is a table, “AALDEF Voter Survey, November 7, 2006”, which lists six different types of problems that voters in their exit survey encountered on election day, and their relative frequency. Of the 4,726 Asian American voters in the survey:

1. 148 stated “Voted by provisional ballot”
2. 133 stated “Name not on list of registered voters”
3. 100 stated “No interpreters – Translated materials”
4. 59 stated “Pollworkers poorly trained”
5. 51 stated “Directed to wrong poll site – precinct voting booth”
6. 30 stated “Pollworkers were rude – hostile”

These numbers help to quantify the respective problems facing Asian American voters.

Second, the report contains an entire section on “Improper Identification Checks” (Section D, starting on page 17). The report states: “In our survey, 954 voters were required to present identification. The vast majority of them, 78%, were not required to do so under HAVA” (page 17). Also on page 17 is a table (“Voter Complaints About Identification Checks”) listing the frequency of these identification checks in states where identification was not “generally required to vote”.

This latter analysis parallels the one on Hispanic voters that Atkeson et al. conducted recently in New Mexico, “New Barriers to Participation: Application of New Mexico’s Voter Identification Law.”

Of course, it would be wonderful to get more of the details about the AALDEF survey, and in particular, the data that the analysis is based on …

Obama’s name misspelled on 2,000 Fla. ballots From WKMG Local 6 Orlando

ORLANDO – As Florida’s primary approaches, there are already reported problems concerning ballots in Central Florida. Some 2,000 absentee ballots in Volusia County have been mailed with Barack Obama’s first name misspelled. On the ballot, the candidate’s name is spelled B-A-R-A-K, Local 6 News reported Sunday.

Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall assured people that the voting equipment will be able to read the ballots despite the error and all votes for the misspelled name will count for Obama.”

Just saw this story on electionline.org: some voters using absentee ballots in Florida may have to fork up 97 cents for mailling. The ballots are outsized. Postal officials say that they’ll deliver the ballots regardless, and charge the elections offices.

This reminds me of the 2004 California situation, where the ballots were so long that they were overweight. I don’t know if the USPS followed the same rule that year.

It would be nice to have some sort of standardized procedure …

The Washington Post has a great analysis showing that, if the Diebold-optical-scan-tabulators-stole-the-election-for-Hillary theory is correct, optical scanners were also stealing elections for Al Gore and John Kerry too. How vast conspiracies are (especially if you don’t care about statistics).

John Zogby on the Daily Show is really interesting explaining New Hampshire polling.

OK, that was a rhetorical headline. But it seems as though some people are shocked that polling in a primary can be wrong. The Dallas Morning News article says:

Curious about the “wildly inaccurate” polls that put Mr. Obama in a double-digit lead going into Tuesday’s primary, blogger Brad Friedman, a Los Angeles-based election-fraud watchdog, questioned the results as soon as they arrived, and all day Wednesday.

Humorously, there were several polls out that day and not all of them had a double digit lead for Obama. Also, the “track” on some of these polls tilted to Clinton on the last day. As Boston Globe noted:

“It was a total shock,” said Scott W. Rasmussen of the independent Rasmussen Reports, whose final three-day tracking poll – a total of 1,200 likely voters through primary eve – showed Obama ahead by seven points, down from 10 the day before. “I can’t remember a time when the entire polling industry showed a similar result and it was wrong,” he said. Rasmussen said his sample of women voters was smaller, and not quite as enthusiastic about Clinton as the primary day exit polls seemed to indicate. He had other theories: Clinton’s better field operation might have been more effective; the huge turnout may have swept up more casual voters who wouldn’t have passed through “a pretty tight screen” Rasmussen used to determine likely voters. “But nothing accounts for a 10-point swing,” Rasmussen said.

John Zogby of Zogby International, which recorded the biggest percentage margin before the primary – Obama by 13 points – offered several possible explanations on his website and promised additional study and explanation. Zogby conducted polling for the Reuters news service and the C-SPAN cable network. In New Hampshire, he theorized online, several factors came into play Tuesday: a large percentage of late-deciding voters; the compressed period of five, rather than the usual eight days, between the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary; and an apparent decision by many voters to not “endorse the Obama train without checking the engine.” His final night of a three-day sample showed Clinton bouncing back at the end, but that was more than offset by Obama’s swelling margins in samples the prior two nights, he said.

Zogby’s polling showed the volatility of the race: In the five days after Iowa, his New Hampshire tracks flipped from Clinton up by six points to Obama leading by 13 points. Other pollsters missing the mark with results showing Obama leading Clinton were American Research Group (a nine-point lead), Suffolk University for WHDH-TV (five points), the University of New Hampshire for CNN/WMUR-TV (nine points), Marist College (eight points), and CBS News (seven points). The previous Suffolk poll had Obama up by one point; the UNH poll had the race tied two days before the vote. UNH also conducts polls for the Globe.

For various reasons, I generally do not quote the New York Times opinion page. However, on days when they have the decency to cite research I have worked on, I make an exception. (Actually, kudos to our collaborator, Lonna Atkeson, a very distinguished political scientist at the University of New Mexico, who identified this issue and worked with Mike and I on a paper that is currently under review, where we discuss these findings in depth).

The editorial overall is interesting but the key sentence–where they reference our work–is below.

“Another problem is that such laws are often applied in a discriminatory way. A study in New Mexico found that Hispanic voters were significantly more likely than non-Hispanics to be asked to show the legally required ID.”

One of the really interesting issues here, to address the question many likely are thinking, is that this finding is independent of the race of the poll worker; Hispanic and White poll workers alike ID Hispanic voters more frequently than they ID white voters.

Here are a set of links about the Crawford case.

NPR Story this morning by Nina Totenberg.

NPR Day to Day Coverage of the actual argument.

A Panel Discussion from the Diane Rehm Show.

A transcript of the case should be available here or here on Thursday or Friday.