Professor Paul Gronke was honored to be part of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 2022 Post-Election Summit in Washington DC. This was an inspiring event that brought together elections officials, researchers, lawyers, journalists, policymakers, and others in the elections and democracy space to discuss lessons learned from 2022 and a path forward through 2024 to ensure safe, secure, accessible, and well-funded elections.
That latter point — funding — was the biggest takeaway from the meeting. As many panelists stressed, including secretaries of state, state elections directors, and state legislators — the window for funding the 2024 election is right now, in 2023. If funding doesn’t come out of the upcoming state and federal legislative sessions, then additional funding is likely to be too little and too late. Elections officials are already starting to think about 2024 preparations, and integrating new systems, new staff, and new administrative models in response to funding needs to take place this year.
EVIC presented results from our 2022 survey and could barely manage the traffic at our poster! It was heartening to see all the interest and comments and of course suggestions for new topics in upcoming surveys.
The poster is available by clicking on this link for a PDF if the image below is too small on your screen.
The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College hosted a second webinar on October 27th, 2021 sponsored by the Stewards of Democracy Initiative (SDI). The webinar, titled “Stewards of Democracy Initiative: Adaptation, Adjustment, and Learning from the 2020 Election, was attended by 70 election community stakeholders including academic researchers, state and local election officials, nonprofit representatives, election technology providers, and the media.
SDI is a multi-pronged collaborative research effort of EVIC consisting of webinar conversations, a cross-sector book publication, and a research convening of election science-focused academic researchers, local election official practitioners, and other election community stakeholders.
Continue readingThe Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College launched a new research effort, the Stewards of Democracy Initiative (SDI), on July 27th, 2021. An inaugural webinar introducing SDI was attended by 77 election community stakeholders including academic researchers, state and local election officials, nonprofit representatives, election technology providers, and the media.”
SDI is a multi-pronged collaborative research effort of EVIC consisting of webinar conversations, a cross-sector book publication, and a research convening of election science-focused academic researchers, local election official practitioners, and other election community stakeholders.
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The U.S. Census Bureau just released data tables from their 2020 Voting and Registration Supplement, a biannual supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey that focuses on election related topics – particularly in the wake of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. These tables show what we’ve known intuitively and from other sources for a while: vote-by-mail rates were higher in 2020 than any year previously, as states across the country updated their absentee voting policies and voters adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In our last post, we looked at ballot return methods among Multnomah County, Oregon voters in the November 2020 election. As the most populous county in the first state to adopt vote by mail in 2000, Multnomah is an interesting case to explore voter use and adaptation over two decades of voting by mail. November 2020 is also interesting because the state began to pay for return postage as of August 2019, leading one well-known advocacy group to describe Oregon as a state where “every mail box is a drop box.” But is this actually how voters responded?
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For a full vote-by-mail jurisdiction, Multnomah County voters love voting in person! Data from the county shows that over half of November 2020 voters returned their ballots by hand at a drop box (rather than through the mail), and voters in precincts near drop boxes are most likely to utilize official drop sites. Despite changes to people’s daily habits in the pandemic, voters here really enjoy the convenience and security of dropping their ballots off in person at a neighborhood drop box. This is the first of two posts exploring data from Multnomah County about where and when voters returned their ballots in November 2020.
By Phil Keisling, who served as Oregon Secretary of State from 1991-99. The opinions and observations are solely his own views, and he takes full personal responsibility for any errors of fact, not to mention any predictions that prove wildly inaccurate!
During much of 2020, I’ve been promoting efforts to expand voter access to mailed out ballots, and to encourage states to adopt the “Vote at Home” model pioneered by Oregon, Colorado, and Washington, where 100% of active registered voters are automatically mailed their ballots.
Largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 92 million voters this year received mailed out ballots — compared to just 42 million in 2016.
Some have asked what all this might mean for tonight’s election. How will these votes be counted? Will these votes be counted? How might the vote tallies tonight (and even later this week) change as votes are processed, counted and announced in key states’ widely varying election systems? So I thought I might share a few brief thoughts, which I’ve distilled into three categories: Continue reading
By Malen Cuturic ‘23 (exp.), EVIC Data Science Research Assistant and Paul Gronke, EVIC Director
Among the historic and unprecedented features of the November 2020 election was an enormous shift in the rate of voting by mail, from 21% in 2016 to 46% in 2020. As Nate Persily and Charles Stewart note, part of the “miracle” of 2020 was that local election administrators managed to adapt so rapidly to the demand for alternatives to in-person voting in the face of a global pandemic.
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