California Secretary of State Alex Padilla has a new mantra for California voters: “no stamp, no problem.”
That’s great for equity and voter access, but it will be fascinating to see how this changes voter behavior. In California, voters may choose to return ballots to a local precinct place or the county office, in addition to using the mail. How many will continue to use these options when postage is provided? It will be interesting to see how many do so in the next few election cycles, and how this alters ballot processing across the state.
The Texas returns are pretty easy to deal with, because they are reported in one place and the webpage has the results in a well formatted table.
The code below requires that you have tidyverse, rvest, and ggplot2 packages for R installed.
library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)
# Dates to scrape
dates18 <- c(“oct22”, “oct23”, “oct24”, “oct25”, “oct26”, “oct27”, “oct28”, “oct29”, “oct30”, “oct31”)
dates14 <- c(“oct20”, “oct21”, “oct22”, “oct23”, “oct24”, “oct25”, “oct26”, “oct27”, “oct28”, “oct29”, “oct30”, “oct31”)# Look at the website and see how the columns are set up, create an empty data frame to load the selected dates into and name columns as you like.
Early Voting Rates in Texas’s 30 Largest Counties Approaching 200% of 2014 Totals
I’ve resisted posting much about early voting totals, but hat tip to Michael McDonald, Dan Smith, and others: these totals are astounding.
Thanks to Paul Manson and the students in Political Science 377 who worked with me on the graphic.
Early Voting over the past 20 years
Early voting has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years.
While different data sources come up with slightly different estimates, the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration Supplement shows that the level of early voting has tripled since 1998 in midterm elections, and has gone up two and half times in presidential years.
If the levels this year are 30% or higher, it will be the most in any midterm. It’s unlikely that this year’s early voting rate will hit the 2016 level of 39%, but it’s possible that we might approach it.
New story in the Washington Post about which states may not have finalized returns on election night. Skip the No Doz go to sleep and wait until morning (or later)!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/voting-quirks/
The governor’s race in Georgia involving the current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has highlighted a longstanding concern of many in the election law, election science, and election administration community–electing those public officials who oversee and administer elections. Rick Hasen captures the spirit of these concerns in his quote to Governing magazine:
It is a problem that we have partisan-elected secretaries of state as the chief election officers,” says Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine.
Of course, this issue is magnified by having the chief elections officer running for higher office, simultaneous with sometimes important–and politically fraught– decisions that have to be made about eligibility for the registration rolls, times and places for early voting, allocation of election machines and poll workers, even potentially decisions about recounts (this latter issue is what caused a controversy in the Republican primary for Kansas governor involving Secretary of State Kris Kobach).
We are nearing a final release of the 2018 Democracy Fund / Reed College Local Election Official survey. Our current discussion is all about the “bins”. In other words, what is the best way to categorize local election officials, and by implication local election jurisdictions, so as to provide some meaningful categories for comparison but not lump together very disparate locations.
Continue reading →