Political scientist Chuck Bullock notes that a longer, early voting period in Georgia did not result in an increase in turnout (full story is in the Moultrie Observer).
Chuck’s quote:
It seems logical if you extend the voting time you increase voting,” he said. “It turns out it doesn’t work that way. The early research suggested it did bump up participation. All the later research discounts that. More convenience and increasing the time didn’t increase the vote.”
A story in The Plain Dealer notes that voting errors increase as the use of vote by mail increases.
What’s interesting about this story is that it focuses on a basic mechanical “mistake,” meaning that voters failed to include a proper form of identification or did not use the secrecy envelope. The much more common error results from voters mis-marking the ballot (over and undervotes). Residual vote studies have long shown higher rates of voter errors whenever a central count system is used, where voters are not given real-time feedback on the accuracy of their use of the ballot.
This story out of Passaic County is not another story about absentee ballots and vote fraud. But it is a cautionary tale about how important ballot handling procedures can be when new voting systems are implemented.
The basic summary is this: a county clerk found 49 uncounted mail in ballots while “handling” the ballots after the election. Even though the envelopes had been time-stamped indicating that they had arrived on time, the clerk chose not to count them because the election results had already been announced. A judge overturned this decision, and once counted, a different winner was declared.
What I found most curious, and disturbing, about the story is this quote:
Ken Hirrman, an office administrator with the Passaic County Board of Elections, said he discovered the 49 ballots Tuesday while handling the mail-in ballots.
Hirmann said he noticed the uncounted ballots because they were enclosed in thicker envelopes, indicating that they had not been opened and counted.
I have witnessed a lot of vote by mail and absentee balloting systems and have interviewed dozens of election officials about their administrative procedures. I can’t imagine putting in place a system whereby the situation above could possibly occur. This means that the ballot, still inside the secrecy sleeve, and then still inside the stamped envelope, somehow made it through the slicing process, the signature verification process, the separation of the outside envelope from the inner ballot process, and finally the tallying process, and no one noticed that there were still intact envelopes in the batch?
New Jersey has only recently gone to no-excuse absentee and permanent absentee. I hope they have also paid attention to some of the long established ballot handling procedures put in place in CA, OR, WA, IA, and many other states.
Paul Gronke, Director of EVIC, was quoted in the New York Times today on the potential problems with a top-two primary system in California.
There have been accusations of absentee vote fraud in Lincoln County, WV, when 75% of absentee ballots that were requested were returned, and 90% of those favored one group of candidates.
The response of county officials is not encouraging:
“Our office encouraged every voter to participate in the democratic process, whether it be early voting at the courthouse, at local voting precincts or absentee voting,” Scraggs read from the statement. “An increase in any of the options is an encouraging sign that the democratic process is alive and well.
“Therefore, who would think that having more people vote is a bad thing?” Scraggs read.
This is a wonderful example of how election forensics can detect likely election fraud. While the technology is complicated (see Walter Mebane’s papers and Alvarez, Hall, and Hyde’s book), the intuition behind the statistics is simple.
In short, 75% absentee ballot return is not “high” or “low” unless you compare it to some standard. The problem is that it’s impossible to discover absentee ballot return rates from the state’s website. Since overall turnout was juist 42.99% in 2008, however, that 75% return rate does seem high (keep in mind that absentee voters have actively requested a ballot, already indicating their preference for voting).
As to the totals for one faction vs. the other, the county elections website shows no vote totals at all for 2008! This makes judging the 2010 results a bit sketchy.
Data = transparency!
A longer commentary will follow on Monday. For now, the story is below. Wyden and other senators introduced a bill this week that would make it easier for states to adopt VBM and no-excuse absentee voting, citing turnout boosts and cost savings.
Wisconsin Attorney General JB Van Hollen has criticized new provisions in a bill moving through the legislature, arguing that making voter registration automatic when citizens establish or change a drivers license opens the system up to fraud. By not requiring citizens to sign a form confirming their information, Van Hollen says the bill will “create many problems.”
I may be missing something, but I’m not sure how having voter registration information match the information on a drivers license is an invitation to fraud.
A delay in counting the “deluge” of mail in ballots in last Tuesday’s California primary has sparked calls for County Clerk Barbara Dunmore’s resignation. Delays in counting ballots in California has been recognized for a long time. One of the main causes is that California allows citizens to drop off their absentee ballots “in person” on election day at any local precinct. Administratively, this means that, at the end of the day, all of these ballots need to be transported to the central counting location, validated, opened, and processed.
CA is also a voter-intent state, which only further slows the processing of vote by mail ballots, where citizens are more prone to make stray marks and errors that are not flagged by optical scanning readers.
I can’t imagine how this could be done in any large county by the next morning, as some state legislators apparently want. There is a clear tension between a speedy final count and a very generous, vote anywhere and in any way system like currently exists in many California counties.
Full story here.