EVIC Updates – Page 11 – Elections & Voting Information Center

We are pleased to announce that the papers and presentations from the July 2017 Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference (ESRA Conference) are now available for wide release!

Please visit the ESRA website to view and download the great works presented.

The inaugural ESRA conference, co-organized by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College and the Center for Public Service at Portland State University, brings together scholars of political science and election administration to develop rigorous empirical approaches to the study of how laws and administrative procedures affect the quality of elections in the United States. They will identify major questions in the field, foster collaboration between election administrators and election scientists, and connect senior and junior scholars.

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,

Just wanted to let you know that the first version of our RCV package is now submitted to CRAN, the R package archive! Going forward we’ll be updating this work, so if you have any comments or bug fixes please feel free to submit a pull request or issue to our GitHub repository, or just email us directly.

I’ve included a few lines of code at the bottom of this email to install the package locally and go through an example election (San Francisco Board of Supervisors, District 7). You’ll need at least version 3.3 of R installed to run these. If you don’t have this installed and don’t want to, some of the examples are available at our GitHub repo (scroll down to the README).

Again, thank you so much for your interest in our work and any help you’ve given us in regards to this project. We look forward to hearing any comments or critiques you might have on your experience using our package.

Thank you,

Jay Lee

Reed College

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")

The results table for this election is stored in the `results7` object. It can be printed in the console with the first line of code provided below, or viewed in the RStudio window with the second line:

results7

View(results7)

We also have a functionality for producing an interactive type of flowchart called a Sankey diagram. This is done with the networkD3 package, which you must install separately to produce the visualization. The code for that is again provided here, but if you don’t want to install it we have an example on our GitHub repo.

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)

Maricopa County, AZ is the second largest election jurisdiction in the United States (after Los Angeles County) and is contemplating a move to all-mail ballot delivery, with ballot returns by mail, drop box, or use of a “ballot center.”

This story from the Arizona Republic is lengthy, and it illustrates a lot of the concerns that will be raised in other localities who may contemplate the switch:

Is it secure?
It is efficient?
Is it fair to everyone?
I like voting in person, can’t I continue to do so?

Here’s the link: http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2017/06/20/county-recorder-adrian-fontes-changes-voting-system-fall-2017/391279001/

EVIC (or at least a report we worked on) is in the news!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/opinion/increasing-voter-turnout-2018.html

I am pleased to announce NSF support of the Election Science, Reform, and Administration Conference (electionsciences.net), jointly offered by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College and the Center for Public Service at Portland State University.

Thanks to the staff at Reed and PSU who helped get the proposal out and to Brian Humes and Timothy Nokken of the NSF for supporting this new and important field of scientific inquiry.

AWARD NOTICE

Award Date: June 8, 2017
Award No. (FAIN): 1727461
Proposal No.: 1727461
Managing Division Abbreviation: SES

The 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.

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