Paper proposals are being invited for a Summer Conference on Election Science, Reform, and Administration, hosted by Reed College and Portland State University, and co-sponsored by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College and the Election Data and Science Lab at MIT. The conference will be held in Portland, OR from July 27-28, 2017.  

The goals of the conference are, first, to provide a forum for scholars in political science, public administration, law, computer science, statistics, and other fields who are working to develop rigorous empirical approaches to the study of how laws and administrative procedures affect the quality of elections in the United States; and, second, to build scientific capacity by identifying major questions in the field, fostering collaboration, and connecting senior and junior scholars.

The conference is designed to facilitate close attention to the papers presented, including extensive feedback and discussion. Therefore, papers should represent new work, with early drafts of papers encouraged.

We hope that a wide variety of topics will be addressed at the conference. We are particularly interested in new and innovative projects that address long standing questions about the impact of election reforms on registration and turnout at both the state and federal level; how the voter experience has improved or eroded during the two recent waves of election reform; and the research design and methodological challenges in election science. The following is a list provides a few sample ideas, but should not be considered exhaustive:  

• How new or changed election laws affect the size and makeup of the pool of registered voters and the federal, state, and/or local electorates;
• Professionalization (or the lack thereof) and the quality of election administration;
• Evaluating the impact of voting centers, consolidated precincts, and convenience voting;
• How election reform has differentially impacted historically disadvantaged segments of the electorate;
• The analytical and methodological tools needed to work with voter registration and voter history files, and challenges in making causal inferences when working with these files;
• New methods for connecting other behavioral records (e.g. survey data) or geospatial data with voter history and voter turnout data
  

Airfare, lodging, and conference meals will be covered for paper presenters and discussants. Other scholars are welcome to attend if they can cover conference costs (details to be announced within a month).

Lonna Atkeson, University of New Mexico, and Bernard Fraga, Indiana University, will serve as program co-chairs, and Paul Gronke, Reed College and Phil Keisling, Center for Public Service at PSU, will act as conference organizers and hosts.

Paper proposals of no more than 250 words should be submitted by April 15, 2017.  Submit proposals at http://bit.ly/PDXelection – we expect to announce decisions by May 1.  Any questions can be sent to atkeson@umn.edu, bfraga@indiana.edu, or gronke@reed.edu.

Scholars wishing to attend without presenting a paper should also contact Emily Hebbron (hebbron@reed.edu) by May 1st.  Further details about the conference will posted on the conference Web site soon thereafter.

Please feel free to re-distribute this announcement to relevant individuals and e-mail lists. We look forward to reading your paper proposals!

Yours sincerely,

Lonna Atkeson, Bernard Fraga, and Paul Gronke

Yes, late, yes, spreadsheet not yet in public release, yes, I get it.  This is a fast and furious election!

EVIC’s 2016 Early Voting Calendar is up and running.  As with past year’s, the calendar provides easy visual displays of balloting periods for all early votes (no-excuse absentee and early in-person) as well as visualizations for each mode of balloting.

We partnered with Vote.org this year to coordinate some of our data collection, but we are responsible for everything published on the site.  Our focus is more on the time period for early voting, and less on the mechanisms by which an individual citizen requests and receives an early ballot.  Head on over to vote.org for that information.

One unique element in our calendar is that we have attempted to collect information on when no-excuse ballots are actually mailed.  In some cases, that’s required us to contact elections offices directly, and sometimes the answer has been “as soon as they are printed.”  We try to represent that timeline as best as possible.

I’m sure there are some miscodes and glitches still in the spreadsheet.  We’ll fix these as rapidly as we hear about them.