Our friends at Electionline have just released their 2006 election preview. As usual, a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to find out what is going on with changes in voting technology and election administration as we head into the final two weeks of this contested election cycle.

Of particular utility in this report is the discussion of “states to watch”: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington.

The Los Angeles Times has a good story this morning on how changes in election rules, procedures, and voting systems might create headaches and problems in this fall’s elections. This is especially true in parts of the country that will have competitive elections, according to Caltech professor Michael Alvarez:

But Caltech political science professor Michael Alvarez said election systems in most states remain works in progress, and goals for preventing another debacle like Florida’s ballot counting in the 2000 presidential election have yet to be reached.

“States have made some progress, and you continue to see some improvement. But it doesn’t appear that we have fully fixed a lot of the problems with voting,” said Alvarez, who is co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project.

“The bottom line here is that we are in a period of closely contested elections in the American body politic,” Alvarez added. “Nobody would care about this if elections weren’t so close.”

ABC News reported–actually, a group confessed to ABC–to hacking into the Chicago Election Board’s voter registration system. This story is pretty interesting because of the claims made by the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project about what they could have done to the database if they had wanted to be evil. Here is the lead from the story.

As if there weren’t enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.

Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project — which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies — tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.

In reading the story, several questions come to mind. First, did this guy commit a crime hacking into the database? Second, what will it take before Congress empowers the EAC to create real standards for voter registration systems? (Or even gives them money to create some voluntary standards?) Third, what if someone actually did hack an delate a state VR system? What would happen? Could it happen?

There was a nice story today on All Things Considered about the toll that election reforms and election complexity are taking on the ranks of poll workers. The blurb for the story says:

States around the country are trying to find and train enough poll-workers to staff the Nov. 7 midterm elections. The increasing complexity of voting procedures and equipment makes it harder to recruit. Maryland and Ohio are providing refresher courses after problems in their primaries were attributed in part to poll-workers.

There is interesting data on poll workers in the ESI report on Cuyahoga County and we are currently doing research on poll workers around the country in the 2006 elections. One thing that is clear: training is key to making sure poll workers are confident that they are doing their job effectively.

There is a story in the Oregonian about Senator Ron Wyden’s attempt to get the Federal government to fund states which choose to move to voting by mail.

I wrote a letter to the editor, shown below. We’ll see if it gets published.

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October 23, 2006

To the Editor:

It is important to separate the facts from the hype regarding voting by mail. Few of the arguments for voting by mail are unique to this system of voting, and could easily be incorporated into traditional election day voting.

Secretary of State Bradbury points to signature verification as protection against fraud–but
signature checks could easily be included in any method of voting. Others like the paper trail provided by voting by mail, yet paper trails can readily be provided by many election systems.

Even Senator Ron Wyden joins in the hype. He rightly points out that voters can wait until election day to vote, but how could voters possibly know about last minute events that might change the election?

The facts are that voting by mail was adopted for convenience and for cost. By the early 1990s, large numbers of Oregonians were already voting absentee. It is more expensive to run a dual-system than it is to go fully voting by mail–which is why Washington State is likely to go fully vote by mail. Furthermore, the long and complicated ballot–this year’s election guide runs into two compelling volumes!–makes Voting by mail attractive to Oregonians.

Oregon is rightly proud of its reformist spirit. But voting by mail is one reform that, while it works well here, in a state with a well-informed and highly participative citizenry, may work far less well in other states and localities. We should not push a one-size-fits-all solution on the rest of the nation without fully understanding both the costs and the benefits.

Paul Gronke
Director, Early Voting Information Center
Reed College

This story came across my computer today. Everyone is thinking about Internet voting…..

THE Commission on Elections is “seriously considering” Internet voting for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Italy, it was learned Monday.

In a phone interview, commissioner Florentino Tuason said Filipinos in these three areas, which also have among the largest number of registered overseas voters, have access to the Internet.

“We are seriously considering Internet voting for overseas Filipinos (in these areas),” he said.

Tuason, commissioner in charge of the overseas absentee voting (OAV), said he has already met with the Spanish supplier of the software for Internet voting twice and had been impressed by the security features of the program.

“It’s a software that ensures secure voting,” he said, adding that the software costs much less — P25 million per 500,000 voters — compared to snail or surface mail, which costs P57 million per 250,000 voters.

I didn’t notice this quote: “Experts estimate that more than 20 percent of voters nationwide will cast their ballots before Election Day by mail or at early-voting locations, a proportion of the electorate that is rising with each election. Some states and counties open the ballots before Election Day and keep the results secret; others count them with regular ballots.”

I’m one of the experts quoted in the article (and I supplied information for the graphic). My 2006 estimate is higher, though. A conservative guess would be 25%, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see 30% of ballot cast early this election.

Early voting rates are proportionately higher in lower profile contests. There are two reasons why this is the case. First, in lower profile contests, a larger proportion of turnout consists of habitual voters, and habitual voters, who are also more likely to vote early. So if we take the trendline (14% in 2000 and 20% in 2004), and further adjust for the midterm, that’s how I get to 30%.

But there is a second reason that there are a higher number of voters during low profile contests–though due to the lack of good survey evidence, here we are more in the realm of informed speculation. [Note: some of these ideas rely on Mike Alvarez’s excellent “Information and Elections”, U of Michigan press, 2000].

In a lower profile contest, there is less political information available to the electorate. The result is that many citizens opt not to vote at all. But among those highly informed citizens, the low profile contest makes less of a difference. The highly informed seek out political information on their own and are less influenced by media coverage. And these highly informed voters are more likely to vote.

Are the highly informed voters the same as the habitual voters? The groups overlap, but not as much as you might expect. Some vote habitually even though they are not well informed, relying on such information shortcuts as partisanship, incumbency, or evaluations of the “state of the times.” And some vote habitually because they care a lot about, and are informed a lot about, politics. But the two groups are not identical.

This is what makes 2006 difficult to predict. I have noticed some tendency among voters to hold their ballots during especially hard fought contests, presumably because they are contending with two-sided information flows from competing candidates, and are waiting until the last moment to make their decision. I have no idea what proportion of “late” voters are “informed but conflicted” late voters, and what proportion are simply disinterested or not paying attention. I hope to look at this question in the future.

Regardless, 2006 is, compared to the last few midterm contests, a hard fought, nationalized election. So it may look a lot more like a presidential contest than a typical midterm. While the trendline on early voting is rising, the impact of a hard fought campaign in 2006 may reduce early voting slightly.

We’ll find out a lot more in the next two weeks. My call?

30% early voting in 2006. If I overestimate, I’ll buy Hall and Alvarez a Goose Island in Chicago. They’ll hold me to that for sure!

We hear about turnout all of the time leading out to the election, as reporters fixate on the fact that the side that turns out the most voters win the election. But today I came across a story in BBC-Bulgaria that illustrates a case where turnout really does matter.

Incumbent Georgi Parvanov won a first round of Bulgarian presidential polls on Sunday, but low turnout forced a runoff against a nationalist who has fought against the country’s drive to join the European Union. A Gallup exit poll for private television station BTV showed Parvanov, the former head of Bulgaria’s ruling Socialist party, won 63.69 percent of ballots cast.

Under Bulgarian law, at least 50 percent of voters must cast ballots for a candidate to win in the first round, so Parvanov and Siderov must face off in an October 29 showdown.

Here is an example where you really do have to turnout voters to win; if you don’t have a high enough turnout, the margin of victory does not matter!

…Well, for absentee and early voters, it is. The New York Times has a nice story detailing early voting in America.

The article notes that:

Experts estimate that more than 20 percent of voters nationwide will cast their ballots before Election Day by mail or at early-voting locations, a proportion of the electorate that is rising with each election. Some states and counties open the ballots before Election Day and keep the results secret; others count them with regular ballots.

Analysts and party officials who study early voting trends say that a decade ago those who took advantage of absentee ballots tended to be relatively well off and highly educated, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost two to one. But as the ease of early voting has spread, the ratio is slipping and some analysts say that nearly as many Democrats as Republicans now vote early.

Those who favor the practice say it is convenient for voters and increases turnout. Most elections officials welcome the trend because it reduces the strain on polling places and poll workers on Election Day.

But some experts say there is no proof that early voting increases turnout and may well have the opposite effect because some voters request absentee ballots and then neglect to send them in. They are also concerned that absentee ballots are more open to fraud than votes cast at established polling places.

The article also has interactive links to graphics about early voting nationally.

This is from the Seattle Times:

About 1,100 King County residents are not eligible to vote in the November election because a box containing their voter-registration forms was sent by UPS rather than U.S. mail, election officials said Friday.

The signed forms, collected in Pierce County during a drive to register more minority and low-income voters, were picked up by UPS one day before the Oct. 7 deadline for mailing registration forms. They arrived at election headquarters Oct. 9.

Because state law allows registrations to be processed only if there is a “postal cancellation” by the deadline, officials say these registrations arrived too late.

“They didn’t have a U.S. postmark that was posted in time,” Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Janine Joly said.

Elections spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said there was nothing on the package that confirmed the claim by the organizers of the voter-registration drive that they mailed the box before Oct. 7. The only date on a UPS shipping tag was Oct. 9.

But the tag also showed a UPS tracking number. UPS records showed the package was initially picked up in Fife at 2:05 p.m. Oct. 6.

The voter-registration drive, funded by Project Vote, was conducted by Washington ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Registration forms from Pierce County residents were hand-delivered to election officials there, said Michael Slater, director of Project Vote’s election administration program.
…

We’ve written in the past about problems like these involving third-party efforts to register voters; we typically have little data on the extent to which administrative errors like these may disenfranchise voters.