The text of a bill being shopped for co-sponsorship by Rep. Jeff Stone is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mLjnrnzcwYTxmG5gREKaFLD0sazb58DwZ4UgJjypIAk/edit
It’s not clear to me what the impact will be of the proposed changes to early voting. It appears that Madison and Milwaukee kept their early voting locations open longer hours and on holidays, while other counties did not. I’m generally not a fan of shortening early voting hours without a good rationale, but there is a reasonable argument to be made for standardized days statewide. The typical response, which also has some credence, is that different counties have different populations and different situations. I’d mostly prefer a floor on availability (a mandated level of equity if you will) while allowing counties the option to provide more times and places.
The proposal disallows early voting on the Saturday and Sunday before an election, a mistake in my judgment. A GAO report, among other sources, shows the positive impact on turnout and convenience of weekend voting, and eleven states seem to manage just fine with early voting ending on Monday while five more end it the last Saturday before Election Day.
Following Doug Chapin’s lead, re-disseminating Gary Bartlett’s wonderful parting comments in electionline weekly after his replacement after 20 years as Director of the North Carolina Board of Elections.
Gary has accomplished many things in two decades, but for scholars, NC has long been known as among the best states in terms of data availability and dissemination. I hope the new Board continues along this track.
I can’t resist giving this claim out of North Carolina special prominence. It has to be a contender for the phony baloney vote fraud claim of the year.
Among the changes being proposed in NC is an end to same-day registration during “one-stop” in-person absentee voting.
State Senate Pro Tem Phil Berger is quoted in the Greensboro News-Record supporting this change because of concerns over vote fraud (boldface added):
Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, R-Rockingham County, wants to look at shrinking early voting periods, which he said last week put stress on election workers and campaign coffers. He also wants to look at ending Sunday voting and same-day registration. Same-day registration raises concerns about voter fraud, and Sunday hasn’t traditionally been a voting day, he said.
The problem with this claim is that North Carolina already has in place the most fraud-proof system I am aware.
According to the State Board of Election website, and conforming to my own recollection, if a citizen shows up to a one-stop voting location and wants to register or change their registration and case at ballot at the same time. I quote from the SBOE website (the last sentence is key):
Within two business days of an one-stop registration, the county board of elections will attempt to verify the registrant’s North Carolina drivers license or Social Security number, update the statewide registration database and search for possible duplicate registrations, and proceed to verify the registrant’s address. The registrant’s vote will be counted unless the county board determines that the person, for some statutory reason, is not qualified to vote.
It bears repeating: in North Carolina, an early vote cast after a same day registration is not counted unless the county board of elections can verify the validity of the registration.
I would hope the SBOE is calling up Sen. Berger and informing him about the procedures in place in his own state.
A decade of reform since HAVA has led to many positive changes in American elections, not the least of which is that there are solid empirical data available to provide guidance to legislators and election officials who want to improve performance and conduct more efficient elections.
This is one of the goals of Doug Chapin and the team at the Election Academy and this is the topic of the Election Data Dispatches coming out of the Pew Center on the States. Charles Stewart of MIT and Barry Burden of Wisconsin have been leading an initiative on Measuring State Election Performance that puts many of these indicators to use.
I realize that election reforms are seldom if ever non-partisan. I am not naive about the intentions of political actors. But I would at least hope that if a legislator is proposing a major change to the election system in a state, he or she would try to at least pretend to have some facts and not just make things up.
Unfortunately, fairy land seems to have descended upon the Tarheel State this past week. I suppose it’s all because Duke, UNC, and NCSU are out of the NCAA tournament. (OK, that last comment was grossly unfair.)
Let’s take a selected list and ask if this claim can be substantiated:
Cook says his campaign took him to early voting sites in his rural district where there was rarely a line.
“I don’t think we need (the extra days),” he said. “The first week, you get lots of folks. The second week, nothing. It’s almost a desert.”
Claim: Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Rockingham County) says that “Sunday hasn’t traditionally been a voting day.”
Fact: No day has “traditionally been a voting day” other than Tuesday. 12 of the 32 states that provide early in-person voting mandate some voting on either Saturday or Sunda, while most other states allow local officials to make this choice. It’s impossible without collecting detailed information at the county level to know just how many jurisdictions nationwide allowed Sunday voting, but it’s certainly not uncommon. (The GAO issued a report on weekend voting just a few years ago on the topic of weekend voting.)
would encourage people to research candidates before they vote.
“It would energize people into taking more time to be invested into what they’re voting for,” he said.
Claim two is hard to parse; apparently, people who vote in the first week of early voting don’t have enough time to research candidates, but voters in the second week do have enough time. Steele expresses no concern about no-excuse absentee voters whose ballots are mailed out 45 days before the election. What we do know from extensive research into the early voter is that these are voters who have already made up their minds and show no lower levels of political information or interest than Election Day voters (in fact, in most cases, quite the opposite).
Early voting is no an unalloyed good. There are valid arguments that can be made against early voting.
The problem is that most of these reasons apply mainly to no-excuse absentee voting, not to early in-person voting, and the NC legislature seems unconcerned about by-mail ballots.
(This posting is a guest posting from Chelsea Brossard, research associate at the Early Voting Information Center.)
Two proposed bills in the North Carolina legislature. Senate Bill 428 seeks to shorten the early voting period from two weeks to one week, and House Bill 451 aims to outlaw voting on Sundays.[1]
Our analysis demonstrates the impact these changes would have on the electorate. We examined early voting data from 2008, 2010, and 2012. Our results show that 55.61% of the electorate voted early in 2008, compared with 33.67% of the electorate in 2010 and 58.98% of the electorate in 2012. Of those that voted early in 2008, 54.96% voted in first week of early voting, including the second to last Sunday. In 2010, 38.61% of the early voting electorate voted during this period, and 54.42% of early voters voted during this period in 2012.
| Year | % of electorate that voted early | % early voters affected by proposed changes (as a percentage of early voters) | % early voters affected by proposed changes (as a percentage of the total electorate) |
| 2008 | 55.61% | 54.96% | 26.04% |
| 2010 | 33.67% | 38.61% | 13.00% |
| 2012 | 58.98% | 54.42% | 30.77% |
These numbers show that a significant portion of the electorate would be negatively affected by the proposed changes, and would be forced to find other times to vote should these bills pass.
Even though 2010 shows a smaller portion of the electorate voting early, early voting has increased over the last decade. Information from the North Carolina Board of Elections web page shows that 13.04% of the electorate voted early in 2000, compared to 58.98% of the electorate in 2012.
More disturbing, there are racial differences in the use of these methods to curb opportunities for early voting. Despite surprising racial disparities in 2010 we have not yet fully investigated, 2008 and 2012 both showed African American voters significantly more likely to vote early than whites. 2010, a lower profile election with less stimulus, showed a more traditional pattern of whites being more likely to vote early. This shows that the proposed changes would result in racial disparities in presidential election years and would affect a large portion of the electorate. What’s more, even more voters vote in the last Sunday before the election, but North Carolina already does not open the polls on this day.
[1] Senate Bill 428 also proposes an elimination of same-day voter registration. For our purposes, we will not discuss the effects this would have on the electorate.
I tried to be nice the first time to True the Vote, but as Fairvote pointed out to me on Twitter, their revised report (linked here: http://www.truethevote.org/news/true-the-vote-report-proves-widespread-claims-of-voter-suppression-false) only makes things worse.
All the evidence on turnout (debunked first by me then more devastatingly by FairVote on the Election Law listerv) have been removed, yet the claims of turnout effects remain on pg. 4 of their report:
Pg 4: “Further, voter turnout rates should have demonstrated drops in participation.In both cases, our research proves otherwise.”
Necessary correction: The research as been removed and the previous research has been shown to be inaccurate.
This comment about lines in Florida may have been in the first draft of the report, but is also inaccurate. This is from pg. 5 of the report:
Pg. 5: “the combination of roll purges, early voting changes and photo ID requirements did not manifest any clear negative impacts in 2012. While some voters complained of long lines, especially during early voting, the average wait time was 50 minutes for Floridians.”
Necessary correction: The average wait time in Florida was the longest nationwide by far. It was nearly four times the national average of 14 minutes, and 50% higher than the next state on the list (Maryland, at 28.8 minutes).
Data are reported here http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/05/us/politics/how-long-it-took-groups-to-vote.html.
If this is evidence of no “negative impact,” I’d hate to see what a negative impact looks like!
What makes this frustrating for an academic is that the impact of voter ID requirements on turnout and on wait time remains an open question, at least as far as I read the scholarship thus far. The discussion isn’t helped along by badly misleading and poorly documented reports.
True the Vote provides a nice report with information on voter ID laws and the politics surrounding these laws. They do a service by aggregating the number of voter suppression reports by states and county.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that their conclusions about the relationship between voter ID and turnout are wrong, or more generously, unsupported by the evidence.
The report compares turnout in states in 2008 and 2012 and attributes EVERY CHANGE to the existence (or not) of a voter ID law.
Nothing else is considered, including those things that every observer knows are the primary drivers of voter turnout: the battleground status of the state, the competitiveness of other campaigns in the state, and overall campaign spending and election activity.
Compare two of the states they highlight: Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. In every state, total campaign spending was substantially higher. In every state save one (Nevada) the ratio of campaign spending was much closer, in some cases dramatically so.
Campaign spending in 2012: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2012/campaign-tracker/ and in 2008: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/map/ad.spending/
I don’t know what the impact of voter ID laws were on turnout, but I am confident that the True the Vote report doesn’t shed much light on the question.
A recently released GAO report titled “Voters with Disabilities: Challenges to Voter Accessibility” should be of interest to the election community and to the new Presidential commission.
While challenges remain, there is no way to read this report in my opinion other than as good news. HAVA and state and local responses to polling place problems identified in the debate over HAVA have clearly improved accessibility at the polls. From the summary:
Much of the data in the report is contained in two previous studies conducted during the 2008 election. It’s unfortunate that Congressional funding of elections-related research seems to be drying up. How useful would it have been to replicate the GAO’s random selection and observation of 730 polling places in 2008? That’s a election-science dream.