Election-Campaign Law

Reserved parking for voters in The OC

Posted on October 20, 2008
I was just reading through some of the information on the Orange County Registrar of Voters’ website on abstentee balloting, and saw this image. Turns out that “The Registrar of Voters office can reserve parking in certain precincts. Look for these signs...

NOT lines in Forsyth County, GA

Posted on October 20, 2008
I just got the heads up on a story coming out in tomorrow’s Atlanta Journal and Constitution. It shows just what elections officials can do if they are innovative and forward thinking in how they use their data. If you go to the Forsyth County Elections Website (www...

Strong early voting turnout reported in New Mexico

Posted on October 19, 2008
Our colleagues in New Mexico passed this along: strong early voting turnout is being seen in New Mexico. Some of the numbers in this story, “Officials report high early voting turnout”; are pretty interesting, and again point toward strong voter interest in this fall’s election In Bernalillo County, officials opened up 15 satellite voting locations to [...

Vote and get a reduced vacation hotel rate

Posted on October 19, 2008
This was in this morning’s LA Times Travel Section.  If you vote and bring your “I Voted” sticker along, you can get a reduced rate at the Moonstone Hotel Properties chain:  http://www.moonstonehotels.com/ivoted.

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Schools and Voting

Posted on October 19, 2008
The New York Times has a story today about schools closing on election day because of safety concerns.  I want to add three points about this issue. First, Mike and I had a long talk with a Southern California principal of an elementary school on election day and she was very very concerned about her school [...

Tennessee Tribune replicates ?Social pressure and voter turnout?

Posted on October 16, 2008
I learned this morning that a Nashville-area newspaper had published a list of voters who registered to vote in the last presidential election, but who have never voted. You can go to the Tennessee Tribune website and download the published list yourself...

Meredith and Maholtra paper

Posted on October 15, 2008
I read the Meredith and Maholtra paper cited by MIke, and while it’s a nice methodological effort, I think the authors significantly overreach on the conclusions. In essence, what the authors show is that the candidate totals differ between VBM precincts and non VBM precincts...

Thad on KQED: Talking About Elections

Posted on October 15, 2008
Here’s a link to Thad talking on KQED about elections and election administration issues.

New Working Paper: ?Can October Surprise: A Natural Experiment Assessing Late Campaign Effects?

Posted on October 15, 2008
This working paper from Marc Meredith and Neil Malhotra was just posted on the political methodology working paper archive. It’s an interesting effort to study the effects of vote-by-mail on election outcomes. I’ve only skimmed it, and also suspect that Paul and Thad might have some thoughts about this research project: Title: [...

The Political Geography of the 2008 Presidential Election

Posted on October 14, 2008
Last week Ruy Teixeira and William Frey presented data from their project on the political geography of the 2008 presidential election. Unfortunately, it was on the other coast, and I was not able to attend. But Ruy sent around the url to the presentation that he and Frey gave, “The Political Geography of [...

Report on human factors

Posted on October 14, 2008
This came into my email inbox from a number of different sources, including one of the authors: Eric F. Shaver and Curt C. Braun, “Voting is as simple as 1,2,4 … The Human Factors of Voting.” I’ve not had a chance to read it closely given all that is going on so close [...

Another indication of interest in the election ? lots of early voters

Posted on October 14, 2008
This story came in from Cook County yesterday, “More than 11,000 ballots cast in first 5 hours of early voting.” Here’s a bit from the story: Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen said 6,353 ballots were cast as of 1 p.m...

Election day registration to be considered in Oregon

Posted on October 13, 2008
According to a story in today’s Oregonian, the Oregon Senate will consider a change to the Oregon constitution that will allow same day registration.  If it passes the Senate, it has to be put to the voters. The current 21 day window is a consequence of the infamous “Rajneeshees” in 1984: The 1986 vote came after followers [...

100% of the Florida Early Voters are Democrats! (Wait, there is only one?)

Posted on October 13, 2008
Michael McDonald deserves credit for this.  He tracked down the first early in person voter in Florida!  It’s a person in Palm Beach County.  Mike thought it must be an absentee voter, but those files are not available to the general public.  I’m speculating that it is a handicapped or disabled voter, who are able [...

ACORN RAID IN NV: Why I hate the Media

Posted on October 11, 2008
So I griped about the ACORN raid last week, and now I want to gripe about the media.  It turns out ACORN turned in the people involved and it was their quality control system that identified the people.  Why the media didn’t pick up on this or why ACORN wasn’t able to get their message [...

LA County breaks registration record

Posted on October 10, 2008
According to a report on KPCC, LA County has broken it’s own registration record, and now has more registered voters than any other county in the country. And we still have ten more days for people to register to vote! Here’s the KPCC report: LA County breaks record for registered voters It?s official...

Call for papers: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Posted on October 10, 2008
I got this call for papers today: Call for Papers IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security: Special Issue on Electronic Voting Following the discovery of a wide variety of flaws in electronic voting technology used in the US and other parts of the world, there has recently been a spurt of research activity related to electronic voting...

Will surging registrations have a partisan effect this fall?

Posted on October 08, 2008
Perhaps. Here’s a story from the LA Times, “Voter registration trends appear to favor Democrats”. The story argues: A look at the voter registration numbers in some battleground states suggests trends that appear to favor Obama. Virginia, for example, has logged more than 300,000 new voters since the year began...

Washington State breaks voter registration record

Posted on October 08, 2008
The most recent number reported by the Washington Secretary of State’s Office is 3,515,393 — breaking their old record. This just adds more evidence to the argument that this fall’s presidential election is drawing a lot of attention, and that we could see a very high turnout throughout the nation.

NPR Coverage of Voter Registration Issues

Posted on October 08, 2008
I am listening to my old friend and colleague, Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin and pollster.com, on an NPR story right now about a voter registration lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Wisconsin.  The program is Day to Day. A tag line announced that Tova Wang, Vice President for Research at Common Cause, [...

ACORN RAIDED

Posted on October 08, 2008
CBS News, and most other news organizations, have this story. The Las Vegas headquarters of the nation?s largest grassroots community organization for low-income people was raided today by Nevada state authorities as part of a voter-fraud probe. The raid was initiated by Nevada?s Secretary of State, Ross Miller, after a series of accusations that the Association of [...

Long lines at early voting sites in Florida? A possible unintended consequence of voting equipment switch

Posted on October 08, 2008
The move from touch screen voting technology to printing paper ballots on demand could potentially lead to long lines of voters at early voting sites in Florida, according to a recent report researched and written by Conny McCormack, an elections consultant to the Pew Charitable Trusts and JEHT Foundation’s Make Voting Work initiative...

McCain v. Obama: October 20, Georgetown Law

Posted on October 06, 2008
I just received an invitation to this interesting event, McCain v. Obama. Recently when we were at workshop sponsored by the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project; Ned Foley led a very interesting discussion of such a hypothetical case … and this looks like a very interesting event.

Groups Aim To Ease Overseas Voting For Americans

Posted on October 05, 2008
Pam Fessler did a story on NPR about overseas voting.   She notes that most people listening to her report have 48 more days before they vote in this year’s elections. But for an estimated 6 million Americans living overseas or serving in the military, deadlines to receive and cast a ballot are rapidly approaching, and [...

Thoughts on voter confidence

Posted on October 03, 2008
I just finished reading the Hall, Monson, and Patterson piece cited below by Mike.  It’s a nice, multi-state, multi-time point treatment of poll worker performance and how it affects voter confidence, but the paucity of the results at the end raises a concern for me...

California Governor signs into law online voter registration for California

Posted on October 01, 2008
Yesterday California Governor Schwarzenegger signed SB 381, which will lead eventually to online voter registration for Californians. At this point, the system sounds a lot like those now being used for online registration in Arizona and California. For more about SB 381, see the Secretary of State’s press release, or read the version [...

Traffic study claims that driving to vote could be hazardous

Posted on October 01, 2008
Here’s a link to a story about this study, to be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that claims that traffic deaths are higher than expected otherwise on Election Day. Here’s a quick summary of the study: The researchers looked at traffic-related deaths during polling hours on presidential Election Days and [...

New election administration and voting technology research in Political Research Quarterly

Posted on October 01, 2008
I was just trolling the “early access” (preprint) articles that are forthcoming at Political Research Quarterly and noticed that there are a number of articles of interest to readers of Election Updates. First, there is a paper by Thad, Quin Monson and Kelly Patterson, “The Human Dimension of Elections: How Poll Workers Shape Public Confidence [...

All you ever wanted to know about election forecasting

Posted on October 01, 2008
There’s a symposium in the just-released issue of the political science journal, PS: Political Science & Politics. Pretty much everyone who has written recently on the question of presidential election forecasting is represented in this symposium.

Early voting and registration begins in Ohio

Posted on September 30, 2008
There’s been a fair bit in the media about disputes over early voting in Ohio; see, for example, stories from the AP, or the BBC. The interesting aspect of what they are doing this week in Ohio is allowing people to register and cast an absentee ballot during this early registration and voting period [...

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