When election geeks pray at night, we thank God for Florida. What now? A Tampa politician wants to offer voters free admission to a strip club if they have an “I Voted” sticker. And the guys is all over early voting too; you can get the discount if you early vote. Of course, you absentee voters in the greater Tampa area are probably out of luck. So bring back that civic moment of voting at the polls, then you and your neighbors can trudge down to the club and talk about voting.

I received a number of requests at the VTP Vendor’s Conference for the URL for my paper on Early Voting and Turnout. An updated version, to be published in PS: Political Science and Politics this July, is here.

I am sitting here, clapping for Melissa Slemin at the end of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project’s vendor conference.

More information soon, but my presentation, on Early Voting and Technology, is here.

Recently, Erik Antonsson and I gave a talk at the National Academy of Engineering Symposium on the Impact of Technology on Voting and Elections. Our slides from our talk, “Bridging Science, Technology and Politics in E-Voting,” are available from the VTP website.

Here’s another report on electronic voting from the GAO: “All Levels of Government Are Needed to Address Electronic Voting Challenges”, Statement of Randolph C. Hite, Director Information Technology Architecture and Systems.”

The Washington Post notes today that one issue that triggered the firing of eight US attorneys was the perceived failure of these people to vigorously pursue voting fraud cases. The Post says:

The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to a White House spokeswoman.

This is ironic, given the posting below about the lack of vote fraud in the US!

Richard Winger, of Ballot Access News, writes today of a House Judiciary Committee resolution (HJ4) introduced by Stephanie Tubbs Jones which would mandate same-day registration and no-excuse absentee balloting.

The press release from Tubbs’s office refers to it as the “Count Every Vote Act,” and it includes a substantial number of reforms, including:

• Voter verified paper records
• Standardized rules for provisional ballots
• Uniform training procedures for all poll workers, produced (and policed?) by the EAC
• Designates election day as a Federal holiday
• Mandates no-excuse absentee voting
• Requires day of election registration

Many of these reforms are laudable. I’ve argued before, for instance, that we should make election day a national holiday first as a way to enhance participation before we try out other “solutions” (such as widespread absentee balloting) which may other other unanticipated consequences.

There is a lot in there, however, and don’t think the chances for this legslation are good. The list of supporters is impressive: ” Senator Clinton and Representative Tubbs Jones announced the action today in a press conference joined by co-sponsors Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative John Lewis (D-GA) and voting rights advocates, including Ralph G. Neas, President of People For the American Way; Hilary Shelton, Director of the Washington Office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Barbara Arnwine, the Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director, the Brennan Center for Justice.”

Let’s hope they make some headway.

To see other election reform bills on the Congressional Agenda, just browse over to Thomas.gov.

There’s a report out from Project Vote, by Lorraine Minnite, studying voter fraud in the U.S. Here’s the full report.

Here’s a snip from the news release describing the report:

Claims of “Voter Fraud” Often Manufactured, Exaggerated for Political Purposes, Says New Report from Project Vote
Washington, DC – Widespread “voter fraud” is a myth promulgated to suppress voter participation, according to a new Project Vote report released this week. “The Politics of Voter Fraud” finds that fraudulent voting, or the intentional corruption of the voting process by voters, is extremely rare. Yet, false or exaggerated claims of fraudulent voting are commonly made in close electoral contests, and later cited by proponents of laws that restrict voting. The report is authored by Lorraine Minnite, Ph.D., Barnard College, Columbia University.

“I set out to study what situations generated incidents of voter fraud and, after researching the laws and examining the existing evidence, I found that voter fraud did not occur with enough frequency or was enough of a significant factor in elections to model or study,” Minnite said. “Instead, in this report, I examined circumstances in which claims of voter fraud were made and how they came to receive widespread public attention.”

Analysis of federal government records concludes that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of fraudulent voting, culled from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings paints a similar picture.

“We shouldn’t base public policy on urban legends but on sound facts. It’s clear from this report that fraudulent voting isn’t threatening the integrity of our elections; we do know that erecting additional bureaucratic obstacles to voting discourages legitimate voters,” said Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater.

The report includes case studies in which accusations of “voter fraud” received widespread media attention. Each one demonstrates the way in which partisan politics exploit administrative errors or minor problems to create the illusion of systemic fraud.

While there is little evidence of fraudulent voting, the case is clear that voting rules restrict voter turnout. A recent study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University found that laws requiring voters to show a document establishing identity reduce minority voter turnout. Researchers found that in the 2004 election, all voters, in states requiring voters to present documentation establishing their identity at the polls, were 2.7 percent less likely to vote than voters in states where no documentation was required. Latinos were 10 percent less likely to vote, Asian-Americans 8.5 percent less likely to vote and African Americans 5.7 percent less likely to vote.

…

I did an interview for a blogger here in Estonia that was made available to the Estonian media. You can watch it on Youtube. The first part is in explains the context of the interview and then I talk for a bit about Internet voting.

Last night, Mike and I watched poll workers count ballots after the polls closed at a precinct in a school in Tallinn. We will post some more pictures when we return from Estonia that show ballots and the post-election ballot process, but basically, the ballots contain a box in which the voter writes the three-digit number for the candidate of their choice. The poll workers then stack the ballots of like numbers and count and bundle them when the polls are closed.

In one stack were the ballots that were uncounted because of a problem. Three examples of problems were:

• a ballot cast with nothing written in the box.
• a ballot cast with XXX written in the box.
• a ballot cast with 000 written in the box.

These items were on hand-counted ballots for a single-race election.

We are gathering data on the frequency of this occurrence for our project we are doing with Alexander Trechsel, who is at the European University in Florence Italy, for the Council of Europe. The three of us, along with some others, are writing a report on the Estonian experience for the Council and we are likely to write a book about it as well.

By the way, this blog post was written from Double Coffee–the Estonian version of Starbucks–using free wireless access. This city is full of free wireless; hence the name E-stonia.