Image courtesy of Channel 13 News, Orlando FL
This report came across my news feed, courtesy of Channel 13 news in Orlando. I have looked but cannot find the referenced report at the Division of Elections.
One point of interest in the report is the longstanding concern of many political scientists with the way turnout is reported in this country. When 64,000 voters choose not to vote the top of the ticket in battleground state during a highly contested presidential contest, it’s pretty obvious that turnout should include all voters who showed up and cast (or attempted to cast) a ballot.
“Top of the ticket” totals are inaccurate.
I hope that that the report includes a breakdown by mode of balloting. There is reference in the report to higher undervote and overvote rates among absentee voters, something Charles Stewart and I found in a 2010 report. More coming soon!
A slideshow from Slate (hat tip to Rick Hasen).
Another source for sample ballots (albeit not as attractively presented as Slate) is the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network. The cool thing about the ACE archive is that it contains materials from the past 20 years and from many countries.
Andrew Reynolds at UNC has a nice selection of ballot papers (the Mongolian one on the right is from his site).
And to close, an example of the “monster” paper ballot in Florida 2012 that caused voters to wait in six hour lines. Turn the color intensity down on your monitor!
http://www.miamidade.gov/elections/s_ballots/11-6-12_sb.pdf
I stumbled across this cool map that displays election law changes in the United States since 2006, put together as part of a class project by Professor Carol Nackenoff at Swarthmore.
I think it relies a bit too heavily on commentary from Brennan Center reports to describe election law changes (scroll over Tennessee for instance), and in the area of early voting, there are definitely some missing entries. It’s still a really nice pilot that could be built on by other scholars.
I appeared along with a number of poll workers, local election officials, advocates, and academics at a full day post-election meeting organized by the Election Assistance Commission.
You can watch the full day webcast here. Each segment is 90 minutes long and it’s pretty easy to pick and choose according to your interest.
(Crossposted from electionupdates.caltech.edu)
Chiming in on Michael’s post, credit for sparking the idea in my head was a comment by a poll worker. I apologize for not writing down his name, but it was either Clyde David (Prince George’s County MD) or Stephen Graham (District of Columbia).
He discussed the need for ongoing poll worker training, which got me to think of the poll worker training studies at the the Pew Center on the States (including an online component) that never really got off the ground.
This led me to reflect about how online learning has changed in the last five years, and how ongoing training might be revived, and even how young people could be encouraged to be poll workers… and all this led to MOOCs (massive open online courses).
As Michael notes, there has been a lot written about MOOCs, from breathless commentary that compares them to the disruptive impact of the Internet on newspapers to a recent story that claims real profits from MOOCs are a decade off. We in higher education really don’t know how online learning will affect our lives, but nearly everyone is paying attention. (This link takes you to a wholesection at the NY Times website on MOOCs.) Continue reading
Crist calls Florida elections a “late night TV joke” (Miami Herald)
Ned Foley and Rick Hasen say GOP in Florida disenfranchised voters. (AP)
Gov. Rick Scott agrees that Florida laws need to be reconsidered (Tampa Bay Times) and called for a bipartisan solution. (Sarasota Tribune)
From the Miami Herald:
Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, sponsored the law that included the provisional ballot changes. Despite the national criticism he’s received for supporting it, Baxley said the changes were needed.
Baxley said he pushed to have the out-of-county requirement after talking with a friend, Alachua County GOP chairman Stafford Jones. …
Jones said he has no proof to support his claim, only recollections of liberal blog posts that people were moving to vote.
Will Boyett, Alachua’s chief deputy supervisor, said his office researched the claims and found nothing to back Jones’ claims.
Read more here:
Congratulations to Zach Markovits, Charles Stewart, and the Pew team that has been working on the Election Performance Index for a number of years. It’s been a long road, and there will inevitably be complaints from states who think they are ranked unfairly, and from advocates who think the rankings are insufficiently detailed or use the wrong measures.
From my perch inside this machine, it has been educational–and frustrating–to discover how difficult it still remains to collect comparable, consistent, and relatively complete measures of election performance for 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many of the rankings are driven upwards and downwards not by performance but by simple reporting. That will remain the case until states feel some pressure to collect and report a relatively complete set of indicators after each election. (This kind of pressure is one of the rationales behind the index first proposed by Heather Gerken.)
If anyone wants a sense of how much forward progress has been made in a few short years, compare this report to the first exploratory effort, the Data for Democracy report that I assembled along with Dan Seligson in late 2008. It is encouraging to see how much progress has been made between the two presidential election cycles.