By Ellen Seljan, Paul Gronke, and Matthew Yancheff.
Abstract:
Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) systems register to vote all eligible individuals who transact with proscribed government agencies, most commonly the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMVs). Many individuals interact with the DMV due to the need to renew their drivers’ licenses. Because licences expire on birthdays, an individual’s birth date can be used as an exogenous reason why some individuals are registered to vote in time for an election, whereas others are not. Our analysis compares registration and voting rates for individuals with birth dates prior and subsequent to the voter registration deadline. After calculating a causal effect of AVR on turnout at the individual level, we extrapolate this effect to the overall effect of AVR on total voter turnout by state.
Download the paper here.
The Early Voting Information Center, in collaboration with Democracy Fund, is proud to announce the release of the Stewards of Democracy, a report based on our 2018 Survey of Local Election Officials. Conducted in the summer of 2018, this survey obtained responses from over 1,000 officials across the country, serving jurisdictions ranging in size from under 250 voters to over 1 million voters.
A lot more information is contained in the full report, but a brief list of the takeaways:
- LEOs were prepared for the 2018 midterm election, although most expressed low confidence in obtaining sufficient numbers of bilingual poll workers.
Hot off the presses! https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/avr-impact-state-voter-registration
The National Vote at Home Institute has brought together a “powerful, diverse, bipartisan and non-partisan group of election reformers… to strengthen American democracy”.
Vote at Home announced that Paul Gronke, EVIC Founder and Director, will now serve on their Circle of Advisors. Gronke reacts to the news:
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla has a new mantra for California voters: “no stamp, no problem.”
That’s great for equity and voter access, but it will be fascinating to see how this changes voter behavior. In California, voters may choose to return ballots to a local precinct place or the county office, in addition to using the mail. How many will continue to use these options when postage is provided? It will be interesting to see how many do so in the next few election cycles, and how this alters ballot processing across the state.
Today’s electionline story describes 25 houses in Hamden, CT that have been incorrectly assigned to election districts since the last redistricting cycle in 2011, and have been the wrong ballots. There are charges that voters have been “disenfranchised” though it’s unclear whether the ballots were counted for the “wrong” race, or only some races were counted.
The process obviously needs to be investigated, and Secretary of State Denise Merrill is calling not just for a detailed investigation of Hamden’s procedures, but a statewide audit when it became clear that there were additional districting errors, including candidates who were elected in districts where they were not residents.
The Texas returns are pretty easy to deal with, because they are reported in one place and the webpage has the results in a well formatted table.
The code below requires that you have tidyverse, rvest, and ggplot2 packages for R installed.
library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)
# Dates to scrape
dates18 <- c(“oct22”, “oct23”, “oct24”, “oct25”, “oct26”, “oct27”, “oct28”, “oct29”, “oct30”, “oct31”)
dates14 <- c(“oct20”, “oct21”, “oct22”, “oct23”, “oct24”, “oct25”, “oct26”, “oct27”, “oct28”, “oct29”, “oct30”, “oct31”)# Look at the website and see how the columns are set up, create an empty data frame to load the selected dates into and name columns as you like.
We are nearing a final release of the 2018 Democracy Fund / Reed College Local Election Official survey. Our current discussion is all about the “bins”. In other words, what is the best way to categorize local election officials, and by implication local election jurisdictions, so as to provide some meaningful categories for comparison but not lump together very disparate locations.
Continue reading →