A new report released today by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College provides a roadmap to state election officials when developing a systematic election-performance auditing process for the State of Oregon. The report is a collaboration between Reed College and Caltech, with funding provided by the Oregon Secretary of State, Elections Division.
“The report demonstrates the integrity of Oregon’s registration system, but also that the system needs to be modernized to be able to take advantage of modern technology tools and analysis. The performance audit process innovated by Caltech is an invaluable tool for election administrators to pressure test registration and balloting systems.”
— Paul Gronke, Director, Early Voting Information Center
Vote by Mail during COVID-19: Insights from Oregon
As we learn all the ways the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting our lives, one looming concern is our elections. Sixteen states have already postponed in-person primaries to protect voters from gatherings that could expose them and poll workers to the spread of the virus. This has in turn resulted in a growing call for legislative action to address the health threat created by in-person balloting.
As we look ahead to the upcoming primaries and the general election this fall, there are a series of possible election tools that might mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. One of these tools is vote by mail (VBM), which increasingly is simply vote at home with most voters in some states personally returning ballots to drop boxes.
What should election administrators worry about if this shift proceeds? What are the possible challenges or barriers to running a new vote by mail election? And what can be learned from states that have already shifted to this system?
To answer these questions, we turn to one of the country’s most experienced administrators running a full by-mail election system, Multnomah County, Oregon’s Director of Elections, Tim Scott.
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By Ellen Seljan, Paul Gronke, and Matthew Yancheff.
Abstract:
Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) systems register to vote all eligible individuals who transact with proscribed government agencies, most commonly the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMVs). Many individuals interact with the DMV due to the need to renew their drivers’ licenses. Because licences expire on birthdays, an individual’s birth date can be used as an exogenous reason why some individuals are registered to vote in time for an election, whereas others are not. Our analysis compares registration and voting rates for individuals with birth dates prior and subsequent to the voter registration deadline. After calculating a causal effect of AVR on turnout at the individual level, we extrapolate this effect to the overall effect of AVR on total voter turnout by state.
Download the paper here.
I posted this query on the Political Methdology listserv:
Hello all, I have some students in an election sciences class who want to do some visualizations using CCES data. I’d like them to use the survey weights if possible, but don’t know an easy way to do this in R.
I have come across this package that claims to support graphics and complex survey weights, but can’t find a reference or vignette that uses any graphics: http://r-survey.r-forge.r-project.org/survey/
Thanks!
Paul Gronke
Reed College
And have provided a review of the answers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VmVeVJ5kzj7OBhWRmH7VHOW4DxGBQ4KYNeTqDSTOaoE/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks to Jay Lee of Reed College for helping me assemble this.
Thanks to those participants in the Political Methodology listserv who responded to a query that I posted a month ago about how to produce survey “toplines” using either Stata or R. The attached document provides a detailed summary of the responses; I have posted the most useful reply here.
Original Question
From: Paul Gronke <gronkep@reed.edu>
Quick question for the list: Lisa Bryant (CU Fresno) and I are preparing some “top lines” and “tabs” for a client with whom we conducted a survey.
If you have seen these before, they are usually organized so that categorial survey responses are reported on the rows, and the columns report the overall responses, then responses “tabbed” or “crossed” by various demographic and political categories. Roll your eyes if you will that this is just a big set of exploratory cross tabs, but a lot of folks expect to see them to help digest the survey results.
A typical “tab” looks like this:
VARIABLE Total GOP IND DEM MEN WOMEN …
Category 1 N % N % N % N % N % N %
Category 2 N % …
TOP SOLUTION
Stata Special
From: Jonathan Mendelson
Hi Paul,
I posted a response to the list, but it hasn’t gone through yet, so I thought I’d reply directly. I encountered the same issue as you and wrote a Stata package that essentially creates “tabs” in spreadsheet form. You can install it in Stata via “ssc install tabsheet” or view information at https://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s458128.html; there are examples in the documentation so you should be able to get started fairly quickly.
The program is not particularly flexible, but it is easy to use, and some colleagues at my survey firm have found it very useful. Although it doesn’t currently output to anything other than tab-delimited file (which can be opened in a spreadsheet), with some clever formatting in Excel, you could print the resulting spreadsheet to PDF for something nicer looking.
If you need something more flexible in Stata, I’d recommend tabout, although that may require more work to set up. If you find out about any R packages that do something similar, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Best,
Jonathan
The complete list of responses, including various R and Stata solutions, is provided in this PDF: polmeth-question-survey-tabs
This article is a brief overview of the place that election law scholarship can play in undergraduate education.
Some 8,000 local election officials guide elections across the United States. These local officials work to assure the safety, security, and legitimacy of our elections. These Stewards of Democracy are a critical group in our nation – yet they do not receive much attention.
In 2018, the Early Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College, in partnership with the Democracy Fund, initiated an annual survey of local elections officials to learn more, and to share the perspectives of these public servants. This is the first in a series of posts sharing our 2019 results, reflecting on what we have learned in the first two years of our polling.
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