This story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s website caught my eye. The tone is breathless and the reporter levels a lot of broadsides. But it reads more like an editorial or commentary than a real news story. If it has legs, I expect we’ll hear more.
Interesting initiative by the Iowa GOP. I’m not sure why this even merits coverage, it’s legal and it’s probably a good idea.
Richard Borreca of The Honolulu Star Advertiser celebrates “thoughtful and engaged electorate“.
Sounds like good news, right? No, it’s a terribly done story on two grounds. First, “surveying” the electorate by hanging out for an hour outside of polling place is bad practice. The writer acknowledges that he is using an “admittedly small sample” (it’s not a SAMPLE for crying out loud!).
But worse, generalizing from early in person voters who were interested and engaged enough to vote on the first day of early in person voting to the full electorate is … is … really really bad.
“More accusations made in Alaska Senate primary contest” Anchorage Daily News(August 28)
“Efforts made to skew results” Washington Post “The Fix” (Aug 30)
“Observers watching absentee ballot count closely” Alaska Public Radio (audio) (Aug 27)
“Number of untallied votes rises in Alaska Senate Race” Anchorage Daily News courtesy of Miami Herald / Associated Press (Aug 29)
As I worried last week, the Miller camp has leveled charges of “ballot counting monkey business” in the closely contested Alaskan GOP Senate primary.
The Anchorage Daily News now tallies 23,472 uncounted or “question” ballots.
In another interesting twist, because the list of names of who requested an absentee ballot are public records (as in all states), Miller is also charging that voters who requested absentee ballots are being contacted and asked about their vote.
I am not familiar enough with how the system works in Alaska, but I would not be surprised to learn that candidates are able to get a list of the names of registered voters whose ballots had been counted up to any particular day. This means that a campaign can target specifically those absentee voters who ballots were requested but not yet counted.
This may be another unanticipated consequence of the postmark law.
A colleague in the elections community sent along this observation, which is pertinent to any state that requires ballots only be postmarked, but not delivered by Election Day.
They are sitting in post offices or they’re in postal bags somewhere.
What if somebody, who already knows the Murkowski/Miller race is close, wanted to try and affect the outcome of the election and decided not to deliver a batch of ballots or discarded them?
Allowing timely postmarked ballots adds a security threat to the election when there are ballots out there floating around and elections officials don’t even know where they are. It also adds an extra difficult issue of what to do when the postmark is unreadable or is totally missing.
Check your next stack of mail. There are almost always some items in there missing a postmark.
Todd Donovan of Western Washington University writes to me about alternative voting (or IRV) and how this can be impacted by large numbers of ballots being counted after Election Day:
The long count of votes in Australia is somewhat complicated by the Alternate Vote (AV) system used there.
Under AV (known as Instant Runoff Voting in the US), voters rank their preferences for all House of Representative candidates on their ballot. In the initial round of vote counts on election night only “ordinary votes” (cast at the polling place) are processed. The candidate with the least first preference votes is eliminated. A second round of counting then proceeds, with the eliminated candidate’s ballots being examined so that her supporters’ second preference votes may be transferred to the remaining candidates. These transfers continue until someone emerges with a majority.But as pre-poll, postal, absentee, and provisional ballots are received after election day, the process is ran again. Since the final count can be contingent on the order that lower-ranking candidates are eliminated, everything is ran again from scratch – even in districts where a candidate had reached a majority in previous counts. In the vast majority of districts, the leading candidate on election night will win the seat. In a seat where the margin is razor thin, additional ballots and new preference transfers can cause things to bounce around a bit.
This story in the Post is not a surprise to anyone who follows early voting.
All I can say to the Fenty and Gray forces is that early voting, in as much as we can generalize from other races in other states and localities, is more likely to reshuffle the electorate than change the electorate.
The fact that early voting is higher in Fenty strongholds may mean that Fenty has a better funded, better organized get out the vote operation. But it may also mean that areas where Fenty has more support are areas with voters who are, on average, whiter, better educated, and have higher incomes.
One important difference, however, is that this is a local race, and we have little empirical data on the turnout effects of early voting in local races. Many of us–me included–believe the impact is much greater in this contests. In addition, this is a relatively “high profile” contest, which will should only increase the turnout impact of early voting.
The reports of confrontations at the early voting stations is a cause for concern. I wonder what election day will bring. The next week should be interesting. Hope my friends Alysoun and Rokey at the DC office are hanging on. It will be a busy week.
Crossposted at http://electionupdates.caltech.edu