In Kitsap County, WA, heavy stock used to produce the ballot means that two stamps will be needed to return it by mail.
Dirty not very well-kept secret: USPS will deliver it anyway, and the county office had pledged to make up the difference.
The one-stop absentee voting option has begun in North Carolina, and in-person votes are going to quickly swamp the no-excuse absentee by-mail ballots.
As of the close of balloting last night, the absentee ballot file includes 337,609 records. The breakdown of these by type of ballot is as follows:
However, as anyone who is familiar with by-mail and in-person voting knows, there are racial and partisan differences underlying these data.
As shown below, 92% of the by-mail absentee ballot requests were made by White voters while only 61.8% of the one-stop returns (thus far) have come from White voters. (By the way, 40%, or 60,957 White voters have returned their by-mail ballots compared to 34% or 4406 of Black voters.) This is the main reason that states that have tried to shorten the early in-person voting period without altering the absentee by-mail period have faced close scrutiny.
Image from www.pb.com
I just got off of a series of phone calls with reporters who are asking about absentee ballots and how they are treated by elections officials.
While the administrative rules and procedures vary by state (as with almost everything in American elections), there are some consistent patterns that reporters need to understand.
- Processing:
Absentee ballots go through a number of steps before they are fed into a counting machine. The signature on the external envelope needs to be verified. This is done either with a computer or with a human, and there are always backups when signatures are deemed questionable. The ballot is then separated from the external envelope–this is done to maintain the secrecy of the ballot (except in North Carolina where, at least in the past, it was possible to relink the two via a security code).A few states are “voter intent” states (California, Oregon, Washington, perhaps others), and in these states, the ballots are then examined and “remade” by ballot review boards. In other states (e.g. Arkansas) this process does not take place unless an absentee ballot is rejected by the ballot counting machine. - Scanning:
Ballots are then typically scanned using an optical character recognition machine. This information is stored on a memory card. - Tabulating:
Finally, at some point, an elections official hits the “tabulate” button that provides the candidate totals for the absentee ballots which have been scanned into the machine. There is not, of course, a big Staples type “total” button–what this practically means is that the machine creates a report that contains a number of pieces of information, such as total ballots counted, total ballots accepted, total votes for each candidate in each race, and, depending on the report, candidate totals by precinct.
(Here is an example of one such report from Bay County, FL from the November 2011 election.)
It’s important to understand these distinctions, because many journalists don’t realize that “scanning” is not the same as “tabulating.” Continue reading
I came across “The American Mosaic” data exploration tool that draws on tracking poll data from Reuters/IPSOS.
This is a really well-implemented tool, and I encourage everyone to look at it.
I’m not quite sure what to conclude from the early voting numbers, plotted here and available by clicking this link (bloggers who want to grab a permalink from this site–click on the “share” button and you can grab the URL).
On the one hand, they show a pretty consistent 15 point advantage in the Obama vote among those respondents who say they have cast an early vote.
I looked more closely at the data, and they show 36.9% of the respondent pool thus far say they are Democrats versus 31.7% Republican. That is 3% above (Dem) / below (GOP) Gallup’s current estimate of party affiliation among likely voters.
What makes this hard to evaluate is that the states which currently have sent out absentee ballots are not a random subset of the nation as a whole. Nonetheless, in another week or so, these figures might start to give us a real sense of how the early vote is shaping up.
A standard line in my opening lecture to new students of political science is some variant of this:
Studying politics can be exciting and can be frustrating because political actors are also strategic actors. They make the rules, the break the rules, and then they rewrite the rules. While you may be able to generalize about political actors, it’s very hard to generalize about political outcomes.
This lesson applies to this year’s coverage of early voting. Both campaigns have learned lessons from past elections. Both campaigns have been monitoring legal changes in the states. And both campaigns are spending millions of dollars trying to mobilize the early vote by whatever means necessary.
Image courtesy of Q2learning.com
Early voting is a moving target, and shooting at the bullseye in 2008 is almost surely going to miss the target in 2012.
Coverage a week ago was trumpeting a Democratic absentee advantage in Iowa. Today’s story in Politico? “GOP Gains Ground in Iowa Early Voting.”
If you line these and other stories up, it’s clear that the Obama campaign focused a lot of effort on recruiting more Democrats to apply for and cast absentee ballots in Iowa. Result: an early Democratic surge in absentee votes. Reaction: Romney campaign has redoubled their mobilization efforts in response.
As I posted a few days ago, the same thing appears to be happening in Florida. Given the uncertainty over the early in-person voting period, the Obama campaign redirected resources to encourage Democratic-leaning voters to request and cast absentee ballots. Result? An “advantage” for the Democrats in absentee ballots!
This is why I’ve been resisting making broad conclusions about what these early early voting numbers mean. Not every commentator has been so circumspect. This might make for a nice story that will be forgotten a week later (see: Iowa) but it doesn’t make for informed political commentary.
Image courtesy of the Pew Center on the States
I think Doug Chapin is seriously underselling the benefits online voter registration in his recent posting about Pew’s OVR initiative.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but online voter registration is not just about adding more citizens to the voter rolls. In fact, that might be it’s least important contribution.
OVR should result in registration rolls that are more accurate, more efficient, and cost a lot less money to maintain.
These are the takeaways from Pew’s report on the current voter registration systems: Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade. The report authors write:
At a time when government budgets are significantly strained, our antiquated paperbased system remains costly and inefficient…
The paper-based processes of most registration systems present several opportunities for error…
Election officials administer a system that is fundamentally inefficient in a number of ways
It may be the case that these new systems have resulted in a higher increase in the number of new registrants than we would have otherwise seen in a presidential election year, but until we can conduct some comparative analyses after the election, we won’t know the answer.
We do know for certain that the registration records added in the thirteen states are far less likely to be invalidated due to errors, can be quickly and easily cross-checked with other statewide data systems if a state chooses to do so, and have cost the states less money than the old paper forms.
Cheaper, less prone to error, less vulnerable to fraud. And maybe more registrations than before.
Just like voting by mail was initially misbranded only as a way to increase turnout, OVR is not only about more registrants. It’s about taking advantage of technology to modernize our elections system.
What’s not to like?
A Boise Public Radio story today describes Oregon and Washington, the only fully vote by mail states in the nation, as late to the party:
But the push for “early voting” across the country is making vote-by-mail states look like late arrivals to the party. In Idaho, voters in some counties have been going to the polls since late September.
Here’s an alternative interpretation: Oregon and Washington realize that it does not take two months to deliver a vote by mail ballot a few miles verssus the few thousand miles that it takes to deliver a UOCAVA ballot.
Perhaps Oregon and Washington are latecomers to the party. All that is left on the table are a few meager morsels. The bar closed long ago.
Perhaps they are not late to the party after all. Perhaps the thirty states that mailed their absentee ballots in September (led by North Carolina, a superbly administered state, yet mailed ballots way back on September 6th) are like those early arriving guests, knocking on your door when you don’t even have the hors d’oeuvres ready. Give them some cold cheese slices!
Somehow, Oregon and Washington manage to mail their ballots just over two weeks before Election Day yet still rank near the top in terms of voter participation. It seems to me that the two states time things just right, and it’s those states that encourage voters to cast a ballot two months before Election Day that may need to rethink things.
And now a quick look at party returns. Keep in mind that early in-person (“one stop absentee”) has only just begun in North Carolina. These first days should reveal a surge of African-American turnout for Obama, if patterns from 2008 hold. In four or five more days, we will finally have enough data to start to compare the mobilization efforts of Obama and Romney in the state.