Just wanted to take a chance to toot the horn for Jay Lee, a rising junior Math – Statistics major at Reed College who helped the Open Elections team finish wrangling the precinct level elections results from North Dakota.
Jay got interested in elections work after taking my class on US Elections in the Spring and taking my co-taught Election Sciences course, offered in partnership with Andrew Bray.
Those of you who have been following this blog may remember that Jay, along with Matthew Yancheff, has also released an R package, “RCV”, to help process and report on ranked choice voting results. They worked on the project in our Election Sciences class, and, supported by funding from the College, produced the R package this summer.
The first Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference is happening this week in Portland, OR!
I’d like to thank Phil Keisling and Paul Manson of the Center for Public Service at Portland State University for helping to organize, and the Reed College Department of Political Science, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, the National Science Foundation, and the Elections Team at the Democracy Fund for making this event possible.
Follow the link above, or point your browser to electionsciences.net for more information.
This announcement from Jay Lee, Matthew Yancheff, and Mia Leung, three Reed students who were in the Data and Election Sciences course that I taught along with Prof. Andrew Bray this spring. They have released the results of their work to CRAN.
Thanks to Rob Richie and Theo Landsman of FairVote for helping push this forward.
Hello,
install.packages("rcv")
library(rcv)
sf_cleaned <- clean_ballot(ballot = sf_bos_ballot, b_header = T, lookup = sf_bos_lookup, l_header = T, format = "WinEDS")
results7 <- rcv_tally(sf_cleaned, "Board of Supervisors, District 7")
results7
View(results7)
install.packages("networkD3")
library(networkD3)
d3_7 <- rcv::make_d3list(results = results7)
networkD3::sankeyNetwork(Links = d3_7$values, Nodes = d3_7$names, Source = "source", Target = "target", Value = "value", NodeID = "candidate", units = "voters", fontSize = 12, nodeWidth = 20)
AWARD NOTICE
Award Date: June 8, 2017
Award No. (FAIN): 1727461
Proposal No.: 1727461
Managing Division Abbreviation: SESThe National Science Foundation hereby awards a grant to Portland State University for support of the project described in the proposal referenced above as modified by revised budget dated June 2, 2017.
This project, entitled “Election Sciences Workshop,” is under the direction of Phil Keisling, in collaboration with the following proposals
Proposal No: PI Name/Institution
——————- ——————————————————————————————————-
1727458 Paul . Gronke, Reed College
I’ll let the OPB story speak for itself, since I was one of the co-authors of the report.
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
Over the next few weeks, I hope to be featuring on this blog postings from students who are in a new course being offered at Reed College: Data Sciences / Election Sciences.
The course is a collaborative effort with Andrew Bray, a statistics professor at Reed College, and is partially supported by a Student Digital Research grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation (more information about the grant and the projects it has supported at Reed is contained at this website.)
What better question to have these young scientists answer than the impact of Oregon’s innovative automatic registration system, aptly named “Oregon Motor Voter”? We hope to go beyond the reports provided by the Oregon Secretary of State to understand not just who is being registered via OMV, but who votes as a result of the law, and how the electorate has changed, and may change in the future, as a consequence of this reform.
Step one is going to be a set of pretty data visualizations to whet the appetite. Expect more very soon!
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.
