Absentee ballot returns are piling up in Florida, and both campaigns are trying to spin the numbers.
Bloomberg reports that 275,000 ballots have come back, 44% from registered Republicans and 40% from registered Democrats. As long time readers of this blog know, Republican voters have historically used the absentee / by mail option more than Democrats, so the fact that these numbers are so close leaves Dave Weldon, a former member of Congress working on the Romney campaign, “certainly concerned.”
You haven’t seen any analysis of these data here, however, because of an anomaly in Florida law. Absentee ballot requests and returns are
…exempt from state public records law. Political parties and candidates are able to obtain and release the information.
I describe this as anomalous because Florida early in-person voting returns are easily accessible on the Internet. There is no reason to provide one piece of information and not the other, since they are in essence the same thing–early ballot returns–and only vary by mode.
This makes it very difficult to assess the real information from the absentee returns. Both campaigns have surely compared the return rates to voter history files, which provide information on past voter turnout, including the mode of balloting. This same information is contained in the vote mobilization files assembled on the Dem side by Catalist and the GOP side by VoterVault. The rest of us are forced to rely on the information released by the campaigns and by overall totals released by the state.
And is there good reason to think there has been change since 2008?
Yes there is–as Bloomberg reports:
Democrats have closed the gap by targeting voters who might not have otherwise cast a ballot, said Eric Jotkoff, communications director for Obama in Florida. The Democrats’ focus on absentee voting followed a state law last year that cut early voting at the polls from 15 to eight days.
This makes it very difficult to draw any firm conclusions from the absentee voter data at this point.
Somehow I missed the publication of this article by Melanie Springer, “State Electoral Institutions and Voter Turnout In Presidential Elections, 1920–2000” in State Politics and Policy Quarterly (gated).
The abstract:
Expansive and restrictive state electoral institutions have been instrumental in structuring the vote throughout American history. Studies focused on a small number of reforms, years, or states lack the scope necessary to comprehensively evaluate the effects of institutional change over time. This work, however, places recent reforms in historical context and offers a long-term perspective. Using an original data set, it identifies the institutions that have generated the most substantial effects on state turnout rates during presidential elections from 1920 to 2000. Findings demonstrate that restrictive laws (those aiming to limit the vote or make voting more costly) produced large and consistently negative effects in the Southern and non-Southern states alike, but the effects associated with expansive reforms (those making participation more convenient or less costly) vary. Although a few expansive laws have increased turnout in the non-Southern states, they have had no effect in the Southern states where turnout rates are lowest.
My day in Nashville has been wonderful–thanks again to John Geer and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions for hosting me.
My lecture had one lowlight and one highlight. I wonder if the highlight is shared by my good friends in the elections community such as Doug Chapin, Charles Stewart, Dan Smith, and others.
The lowlight is easy: I never realized that this was a course on elections, not introductory American politics! When I answered in response to a question that the demographic profile of the early voter mirrored many of the biases in American politics that they have “read about in the interest groups chapter”–even using the “what accent the heavenly chorus” quote from Schattschneider–I wonder if the students knew what class they were in.
To Geer’s credit, he told me afterward that the students will probably be panicked, and maybe that’s a good thing! Continue reading
I am heading off to Vanderbilt University tomorrow to lecture to John Geer‘s introductory American politics class, and I am pretty sure there will be a relative in the audience!
I have been slashing away at the North Carolina absentee ballot file tonight, just to show the students what kind of ballot tracking goes in under the early voting regime.
One thing I stress at this point: there is not a lot to be learned. I know reporters love to see these early numbers as indicators of something about the campaign, but we are talking about only 134,00o total ballot requests, and as you can see by the figure, only about a quarter have been returned.
The total expected turnout in North Carolina is well over four million.
In short, this ain’t a lot of ballots. The pictures are pretty, but there is not a lot you can conclude.
P.S. To my Political Science 311 students: you’ll be generating these graphs after break!
I did some interviews in 2008… a LOT of interviews. We lost track eventually, but the contacts were well past 500 and total appearances past 1000. I’ve been doing a lot fewer this year, in part because I don’t have two assistants working for me–Eva is working in San Francisco for the World Affairs Council and James is at Boalt Law School.
A second reason, though, is that I’m fielding the same questions as I did four years ago. We used to have an Early Voting FAQ that seems to have gotten lost in our website redesign.
In that spirit, the most common questions I get: Continue reading
A front-page piece in the NY Times by Adam Liptak focuses on one of the more serious consequences of the rise in absentee voting.
First, absentee votes are more likely to fall prey to innocuous mistakes that lead to rejections. The article notes that “election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting”.
Second, fraud is both theoretically easier to commit through absentee voting, and there have been more documented instances of absentee voting fraud in the last several years than in person voting fraud. Several of the most notable instances of absentee voting fraud are included in the article.
The article does not withhold the irony that those who focus on making voting more efficient and fraud less likely for in person voting may be missing the point. The reality on the ground is that absentee voting is a growing phenomenon and is much more fertile ground for potential fraud and ballot mistakes
The article is a fine read. It touches for a moment upon the essential tension between the “elemental promises of democracy” that are questioned when voting can no longer be trusted, and the democratizing effects of a balloting system that makes voting available to so many more people. Since absentee voting appears to be a permanent fixture in US elections for the time being, this is a tension we need to continue dealing with
Image courtesy of ComicVine.com
abomination [əˌbɒmɪˈneɪʃən]
n
Image courtesy of the NY Times
There is a really cool graphic in today’s 538 blog at the NY TImes that is making its way around the internet. The graphic is creative and awfully pretty, but the focus on individual states as independent entities, “swinging” in response to individual presidential candidacies, is almost certainly wrong.
As Jim Stimson showed a decade ago in Tides of Consent, and Ben Page and Bob Shapiro (find me in the acknowledgements!) showed two decades ago in The Rational Public, the nation as a whole has swung in fairly consistent patterns between liberal and conservative policy positions.
Image courtesy of the Policy Mood project at UNC
What’s revealing to me in the Times figure is which states maintain a position consistently in the middle of the distribution, the consistent swing states, but also those states that move most in response to individual candidacies.
The ability to mouse over and view a state’s trajectory is very instructive. I can imagine every state politics instructor today is showing this to his students.
But let’s not overstate the independent movement of individual states, as the authors do at the start:
The nation as a whole is shifting slightly back to Romney. We only pay attention to Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana because they are on the cusp.
I don’t want to suggest that there are not unique, idiosyncratic policy issues and ideological responses tied to a states history or political culture, but what I see primarily in the graphic is a reflection of policy mood, not states swinging back and forth on individual trajectories.