I am shocked! shocked! to hear someone say that election codes are full of contradictions (see the Hasen quote below). Having spent last year reading all 50 state election codes for the EAC Vote Count and Recount Study, I can tell you that almost all states have contradictions in their election codes. Moreover, many states have big gaping holes in their election codes too–for instance, some don’t define key terms–and at least one state has never repealed a single section of their election code, as far as we could tell.

Were Florida to happen again in 2008, most states would be able to resolve the problems, but many also have election codes that would leave the losers very very upset.

The stories are coming fast and furious.

Missoula MT wants to move to by mail municipal elections to save money and increase turnout.

Island County, WA moves to by mail, leaving Washington state with only four remaining counties using precinct place voting.

The Hawaiian House Judiciary committee explicitly rejected an all vote by mail option, but endorsed no-excuse absentee balloting.

Rep. Susan Davis (CA) is still active on this front, introducing this week the “Mail In Ballot Tracking Act”. The US Postal Service also announced an “Intelligent Mail” system that could provide ballot tracking.

Seeking to save money and avoid administrative headaches, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors are investigating an all by-mail presidential primary in February, 2008.

This story originated on this blog. It also caused me to ask Mike to restore the search function for the blog (now in the upper left hand corner of the site).

Early Voting and Presidential Primaries

The LA Times has a story, following up on the recount controversy in the OC. The legal issue involves how electronic votes in California should be recounted in a situation like this, quoting from the story:

Trung Nguyen sued, contending, in part, that there wasn’t a full recount because the paper records of election-day electronic votes weren’t counted by hand, as one section of the election code requires. Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley allowed Janet Nguyen to choose how the electronic vote was counted based on another section of the code that leaves the decision up to the candidate paying for the recount.

Rick Hasen is later quoted in this piece as saying about the California election code, “The election code is full of contradictions.” That’s an accurate assessment, and a great quote to keep on hand!

Last fall, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP) sponsored a two-day conference on voter authentication and registration. This morning, we have released a report on the conference. The report contains a summary of the conference, but more important, it also contains a series of recommendations in nine specific areas:

1. Data and metrics: standards for reporting election administration data; historical and contemporary research on voter authentication and registration procedures in the United States and abroad.
2. Communication: academics, vendors and election officials should seek out ways to develop collaborative research efforts and to build better methods of communication about research questions and results; academics need to work to develop an “election science” discipline.
3. Standards: we need more research on voter authentication systems, as well as the development of standards for both voter authentication and statewide voter registration systems.
4. Interoperability: we need more research on voting system interoperability; we need the development of standards for data transactions.
5. Transparency: we need easy-to-use systems for voters to check their registration status; we also need the development of best practices for voter registration transparency.
6. Fraud: research, research, research (and the development of reporting standards so that we have real data in the future on allegations of fraud, and how those allegations were resolved).
7. Research and development: we need more money, from both the public and private sector, to fuel additional research and technology development efforts regarding voter registration and authentication.

These proposals are discussed in detail in the report. Thanks to all of the conference participants who devoted their time, effort and ideas to this project.

Today the Iowa House passed (53 yea, 45 nay, 2 abstaining) a bill that would institute election day voter registration in Iowa. The bill is HF 653, and it is off to the Iowa Senate.

I have received a number of requests from reporters for my reactions to the emerging February 5th “Super” primary.

I wrote about how early voting will impact the strategic calculus of campaigners and voters on November 20th, 2006.

In that posting, you can find a link to a press release on the same topic.

I can be contacted at paul.gronke@reed.edu if reporters want to talk more about early voting and the 2008 presidential primary calendar.

Last week, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project hosted a unique workshop, where we brought a small number of academic researchers together with a small group of representatives from the voting technology industry. We have begun to build a website based on the workshop, where we present the workshop agenda and have archived some of the presentations. We’ll add other information to this website as we obtain it, and we are hoping to release a report from this workshop in the near future.

The goals of the workshop were to generate discussion of important research problems (from the perspective of academia and industry) and to work to foster better academic-industry interaction and possible collaborations. I think the workshop was very successful, as we had a fantastic and open discussion of research questions, and since many conversations were initiated between academics and industry representatives. We’ll just have to see where these conversations head in the near future; the VTP will continue to work to help these conversations evolve in a productive manner.

Following the example of California (see a nice posting by Thad and Mike here), the Oregon House is considering a piece of legislation (HB 3270) that would mandate a hand recount of a “statistically significant sample of ballot counted by each vote tally system used to tally ballots in the county.”

California’s current law requires a 1% recount. In some ways, Oregon’s proposed law is superior, since the 1% standard is not based on any statistical standard that I know of. In fact, over dinner a few days ago, Mike commented on how many ballots this really meant for Los Angeles county. Given the margin of some of contests, LA could, in fact, get by with a lot less than 1% of all ballots.

But I’m wondering what Mike and Thad think about hand recounts generally. Thad is current PI on an EAC-funded project examining best practices in count-recounts. I’d always assumed that the hand recount would create more problems than it would solve, but perhaps it increases voter confidence and serves as an important check on the electronic vote tallying systems.