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.
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.
I’ve resisted posting much about early voting totals, but hat tip to Michael McDonald, Dan Smith, and others: these totals are astounding.
Thanks to Paul Manson and the students in Political Science 377 who worked with me on the graphic.
Early voting has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years.
While different data sources come up with slightly different estimates, the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration Supplement shows that the level of early voting has tripled since 1998 in midterm elections, and has gone up two and half times in presidential years.
If the levels this year are 30% or higher, it will be the most in any midterm. It’s unlikely that this year’s early voting rate will hit the 2016 level of 39%, but it’s possible that we might approach it.
New story in the Washington Post about which states may not have finalized returns on election night. Skip the No Doz go to sleep and wait until morning (or later)!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/voting-quirks/
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.
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