We are pleased to announce that the papers and presentations from the July 2017 Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference (ESRA Conference) are now available for wide release!
Please visit the ESRA website to view and download the great works presented.
The inaugural ESRA conference, co-organized by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College and the Center for Public Service at Portland State University, brings together scholars of political science and election administration to develop rigorous empirical approaches to the study of how laws and administrative procedures affect the quality of elections in the United States. They will identify major questions in the field, foster collaboration between election administrators and election scientists, and connect senior and junior scholars.
It’s not often that one gets to brag about knowing an academic whose work is cited in a Supreme Court opinion. But today, our friend and colleague Peter Miller has his very own SCOTUS citation:
Further media exposure for Peter can be found on Last Best News, a site dedicated to telling the stories about the people and culture of Billings and eastern Montana. Yes, Peter is from Billings, MT.
Congratulations, Peter. We’re excited to see where else your work will prove so useful.
Hillary Clinton plans to call for an early voting period of at least 20 days in every state, the Washington Post’s Anne Gearan reports. This is not a Democrat’s first foray into the voting wars this election season, but it is Clinton’s first specific policy recommendation about election administration reform. A recent Harvard Law Review note argues that federal early voting legislation may be viable, so we do well to view her announcement today at Texas Southern University as more than just liberal hand-waving.
If Clinton wins the election and Congress passes this legislation, what might be its impact?
Sixteen states already have early voting periods that begin at least 20 days before the election. This change would likely impact these states the least.
Twenty-four states and DC have early voting periods that are shorter than 20 days. Their election codes would need to be changed and they may need to redirect resources into early voting.
Ten states have no early voting at all. A federal mandate would significantly affect these states.
Would a standard of at least 20 early voting days increase turnout?
The Clinton proposal–at least what we can glean from the pre-release for the speech–leave many details unanswered. For early voting, the devil is very much in the details.
For example, what about weekend voting, notably early voting through the final Sunday before Election Day?
Would legislation mandate a minimum number of hours per day, or across the full 20 day period?
Would there be any formula to require a minimum number of early voting locations, and how would states calculate this formula–by CVAP? geographic dispersion? Commuting patterns?
Prior research shows that these details are critical when determining how much early voting costs and whether different segments of the population use this convenience voting method.
Nonetheless, two points seem clear. First, that if this legislation passes, it would significantly change the importance of early voting across the country, since campaigns would have much greater incentives to focus on the early vote nationwide
Second and related, this would create a uniform early voting period across the United States. Greater uniformity across our hyper-federalized system is not always a good thing, but in this case, it makes it easier for voters to know when to vote and may foster cooperation between election administrators across the states
Since at least last Monday, the Oregon Secretary of State’s website has published turnout numbers for the upcoming midterm. For whatever reason, however, they did not publish any data over the weekend, leaving me (and potentially many campaign managers) frustrated by the lack of information. Turnout is, probably, the most important issue in midterm elections, and leaving so many in the dark during such a crucial moment in the election is really unfortunate.
Thankfully, however, the office once again published their data earlier today. As in an earlier post, I’ve rank ordered the counties by overall turnout, democratic turnout, and republican turnout:
On Wednesday, the NYTimes wrote about the democratic party’s most recent attempt to get out the black vote this midterm. In North Carolina, the party has pushed an aggressive and racially charged ad campaign to remind their constituents why voting this election matters so much. While some may view this as a risky move, the NC democrats may need it. The article notes that, for democrats to have any chance this election, the black share of the electorate must increase from 19% (the share in 2010) to 21%.
Is their plan working? The below figure shows the percent early in-person black and nonblack turnout relative to all NC registrants in 2010, 2012, and 2014.
Figure 1
Oregon ballots are being returned in droves. As the Oregonian reported earlier today, one in five voters have already returned their ballots. The piece briefly mentions that return raters are higher in smaller counties, but doesn’t go any further. So, I quickly rank ordered the counties with respect to return rates for democrats, republicans, and all voters:
There were two structural–as opposed to political–reasons to worry about Senator Kay Hagan’s (D.) chances of winning reelection this midterm. The first? It’s a midterm election! This means lower turnout due to less educated voters foregoing the election. The quasi-technical term “less educated voters” usually means young voters and minority voters–the people who just so happen to vote for democrats.
The second? New election legislation in North Carolina has dramatically changed the voting landscape. One consequence is that the first week of early voting was cut off, which means that there are fewer days to use North Carolina’s very popular one-stop voting mode (in 2012, over 40% of voters returned their ballots before Election Day). It seemed unlikely, given this change, that early turnout would be as high as it could be, which would, in yet another way, hurt Hagan’s chances.
So: Bad tidings for Hagan, who also faces a tough challenge from her republican opponent Thom Tillis. 538’s forecast for this race has Hagan winning, but only by a hair, and the vote share is well within the margin of error.
Bad tides, maybe. But the first few days of early voting may tell a very different story. Check out figure 1, which presents the proportion of democrats, republicans, and unaffiliated voters who turned out in both 2010 and 2014. Two points stand out. First, voters in NC are turning out early at a much faster rate this year than in 2010. So much faster, in fact, that, with eight days until Election Day, the proportion of democrats to vote early this year is already the same as the proportion to vote eight days out in 2010. Again, that’s with five fewer days to vote (I made the same point in my previous post).
Now, republicans and unaffiliated voters aren’t too far behind, so clearly voters, in general, aren’t too perturbed by the change in the number of early voting days. But let’s consider what it means that (a) democrats are turning out at a fast rate this year, and (b) that their fast turnout rate is faster than the rate republicans and unaffiliated voters are turning out.
Figure 1
(This is a guest posting from Nick Solomon, Reed College senior in Mathematics)
One of our first assignments in our Election Sciences course was to take a look at the Oregon Motor Voter data and try and tease out any patterns we could find in it.
The figure displays party of registration among citizens registered via OMV. It’s important to remember when looking at the graphic that the OMV process initially categorizes all citizens as “NAV” (non-affiliated voters), and citizens must return a postcard designating a party. As of January 2017, as shown on the left, 78% of registrants did not return the card, and only 11% decided to select a party.
The county by county totals are fascinating. OMV voters constitute the highest percentage of registered voters in Malheur county. Many readers may recognize the name–the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was the site of a 41 day standoff between law enforcement and a small group of occupiers.
Malheur is located in the farthest southeast corner of the state. It’s rural, relatively poor, and much more Republican than the rest of the state. John McCain received 69% of the vote in Malheur in 2008.
In an upcoming blog post, another student will be posting a map of this county by county visualization, and it’s apparent that a number of rural counties have high percentages of OMV registrants.
At the recommendation of a few experts who looked at the graphic I decided to examine the percentage of OMV voters by county versus the total number of registered voters. This lets us get a sense of whether Malheur is an outlier caused by a very small sample size making the percentage value overly sensitive or if this is a number that we can trust.
Here, the total number of voters is plotted on a log scale, as many counties have smaller numbers of voters, while the Portland metro area has many more.
The log scale allows us to get a better sense of any relationship between number of voters and percent registered by OMV without the few large numbers dominating the plot.
This graphic shows that there are quite a few counties of similar size to Malheur, and some that are even smaller. Furthermore, we see that Malheur is not very far from other counties of its size.
Finally, to my eye, there seems to be no meaningful relationship between these two variables, so I find myself concluding that Malheur county, along with Umatilla and Morrow and Curry and Coos are experiencing a much greater benefit in access to voter registration than some larger, more urban counties.
For those interested, these graphics were made with R and ggplot2. I’ll be posting on my personal blog with more details about how I made them.
Eventually, I hope to learn more I was also curious about hoe OMV might be affecting party turnout at the polls. Keep tuned for future updates!