Philip Stark sent me a manuscript on election audits. I haven’t read it yet, but the URL is below. I blogged on Stark’s research last week; he believes that he has a set of guidelines that would improve the auditing process in California.

statistics.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/conservativeElectionAudits07.pdf

The Pew Charitable Trusts will host an event Oct 25 at their offices in Washington, DC focusing on the Make Voting Work project and the Overseas Vote Foundation.
From the release:

Make Voting Work:
Demonstrating innovative solutions to the unique issues faced by overseas and uniformed services voters
Thursday, Oct 25, 2007
An estimated 6 million Americans living abroad — many serving in the U.S. armed forces — will rely on absentee ballots to cast their votes in the upcoming presidential primary and general elections. Unfortunately, many will face a morass of laws and logistical hurdles when trying to register to vote and successfully cast a ballot in their home states.

Make Voting Work, an initiative of Pew’s Center on the States, and the Overseas Vote Foundation will unveil a new collection of voter-friendly online resources that will streamline the complex process by which overseas and uniformed services voters register, acquire their absentee ballots and get information about voting.

In addition, Make Voting Work will release new analysis from electionline.org about the problems facing overseas voters and discuss promising solutions for individuals covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).

Speakers include:

Jennifer Brunner, Secretary of State, Ohio
Robert Carey, Senior Fellow, National Defense Committee
Michael Caudell-Feagan, Project Director, Make Voting Work
Beth Chapman, Secretary of State, Alabama
Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, President and CEO, Overseas Vote Foundation

For more information, please visit www.pewtrusts.org.

Space is limited. R.S.V.P. by Oct 22 to mvwevent@pewtrusts.org.

There are five jobs currently listed at the Pew Center on the States in DC (and some jobs in Philly). Pew’s “Making Voting Work” initiative is administered through the DC Center.

Go here: http://www.pewtrusts.org/about_us_careers.aspx

We’ve finally had an opportunity to revise our paper on voter identification laws, after all of the comments and suggestions we received during recent presentations. The paper is available now as a working paper.

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

Since the passage of the “Help America Vote Act” in 2002, nearly half of the states have adopted a variety of new identification requirements for voter registration and participation by the 2006 general election. There has been little analysis of whether these requirements reduce voter participation, especially among certain classes of voters. In this paper we document the effect of voter identification requirements on registered voters as they were imposed in states in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and in the 2002 and 2006 midterm elections. Looking first at trends in the aggregate data, we find no evidence that voter identification requirements reduce participation. Using individual-level data from the Current Population Survey across these elections, however, we find that the strictest forms of voter identification requirements — combination requirements of presenting an identification card and positively matching one’s signature with a signature either on file or on the identification card, as well as requirements to show picture identification — have a negative impact on the participation of registered voters relative to the weakest requirement, stating one’s name. We also find find evidence that the stricter voter identification requirements depress turnout to a greater extent for less educated and lower income populations, but no racial differences.

There is a great article today in the New York Times about the upcoming elections in Russia. The elections are not likely to be fair but there will be no vote stealing going on on election day either. As the Times, notes:

Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with the Kremlin’s dominance over the news media and government agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than its current one.

The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the politics of the old days. Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner.

In the parliamentary election on Dec. 2, Russians will vote only for parties, not for candidates. What is more, parties now need 7 percent of the national vote to gain seats in Parliament, up from 5 percent. They also need to submit proof that they have at least 50,000 members to be recognized as official parties, up from 10,000.

It now seems possible that United Russia’s advantages are so great that it will be the only party to surpass 7 percent. In that case, the Constitution requires at least one other party in Parliament, so some token seats will be allocated to the second most popular one.

The Russian experience strongly suggests that the concerns about election day can override our concerns about other aspects of the election, such as whether the campaign is fair, the voter registration process is fair, and the drawing of districts is fair.

I attended an interesting talk by Professor Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at Cal Berkeley, called “Urning Voter Confidence.” His talk focused on ways to develop an efficient and effective post-election auditing rules, drawing on insights from probability and statistics.

The talk title is a bit misleading–Philip did not talk about voter confidence in the way many of us think about it, e.g. voter confidence that their ballot was counted correctly or voter confidence that the election result is accurate. (For the purposes of this post, I’ll call this latter quantity legitimacy.)

Confidence in the context of the talk, I think, means drawing on the insights of statistics to generate a confidence interval, and then not wasting our time on auditing procedures when there is no reasonable chance that the election result (even if there was miscounting or fraud) could be overturned. I suspect that Philip will argue that legitimacy is related to appropriate post-election auditing, but he didn’t make that link in the talk.

The math is pretty forbidding, but his main point is intuitive: in a close election, say one decided by 1%, you may have to do a much more extensive audit to make sure that any miscounts could not change the outcome. On the other hand, in a lopsided election, say 80-20, you can do a much less extensive audit. Philip provides a methodological solution, based on random draws from an “urn”, which gives guidelines for auditing.

Why is this important? It’s important because most of the auditing procedures that are in place (e.g. California) or are being proposed (e.g. Holt Bill) don’t take confidence intervals into account. They just establish some number (although Stark points out that the Holt bill at least adjust the size of the audit based on the closeness of the race.)

I was also surprised to find out that in California, the rules don’t specify what you do if (as is almost certain to happen), the 1% audit shows a discrepancy from the initial tally.

Stark’s method establishes very specific steps to follow in the post-election audit. If enough errors are found, and the election is close enough, ultimately you end up completely recounting the election, but this is very unlikely. On the other hand, if your 1% audit does not give you enough confidence, surely you need some guidelines about where to go next.

There’s a great issue of the American Political Science Association journal, PS: Political Science and Politics, that is now out. Anyone interested in election reform, voting technology, and election administration should find a copy of the October 2007 issue of PS. In addition to an introduction by Caroline Tolbert, here are the articles in the October 2007 issue of PS:

Reform Studies: Political Science on the Firing Line
Bruce E. Cain

Early Voting and Turnout
Paul Gronke, Eva Galanes-Rosenbaum, and Peter A. Miller

Poll Workers and the Vitality of Democracy: An Early Assessment
Thad Hall, J. Quin Monson, and Kelly D. Patterson

The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence: A Local Matter?
Lonna Rae Atkeson and Kyle L. Saunders

Public Election Funding, Competition, and Candidate Gender
Timothy Werner and Kenneth R. Mayer

Ballot Regulations and Multiparty Politics in the States
Barry C. Burden

Regulating Redistricting
Michael P. McDonald

A Goal for Reform: Make Elections Worth Stealing
Todd Donovan

I’ll scout around and see if these are available online. Hopefully my colleagues Thad and Paul will have some additional comments about their contributions to this issue of PS!

A losing candidate is writing as a write-in because she alleges that she lost because the electronic voting machines were tampered with. I hope she realizes people have to type her name on the DRE, which is actually a bit slow but more accurate than doing it on paper!

No official announcement yet, but reports are that Robert Pastor, Vice President for International Affairs at American University and the moving force behind the Carter/Barker Commission on Federal Election Reform, is leaving American University. I expect that Pastor will pursue his interests in democratic development and election administration in other nations, an area of interest since his year’s as executive director of the Carter Center.

What this will mean for the various democratic development and election centers at AU is not clear.