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.
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/
The governor’s race in Georgia involving the current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has highlighted a longstanding concern of many in the election law, election science, and election administration community–electing those public officials who oversee and administer elections. Rick Hasen captures the spirit of these concerns in his quote to Governing magazine:
It is a problem that we have partisan-elected secretaries of state as the chief election officers,” says Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine.
Of course, this issue is magnified by having the chief elections officer running for higher office, simultaneous with sometimes important–and politically fraught– decisions that have to be made about eligibility for the registration rolls, times and places for early voting, allocation of election machines and poll workers, even potentially decisions about recounts (this latter issue is what caused a controversy in the Republican primary for Kansas governor involving Secretary of State Kris Kobach).
Very interesting work by Jean Schroedel and Melissa Rogers on the difficulties faced by Native Americans living on reservations and who wish to cast a ballot.
Their study found that voting by mail, seemingly a solution to the transportation problems faced by residents on reservations, may not work as well as we might assume because of distrust of mail balloting.
This is a portion of the population that faces many significant barriers to voting. Tova Wang documented many of these barriers in a report issued by Demos nearly a decade ago, and things don’t seem to have improved.
Steven Rosenfeld and the Independent Media Institute have created a nice Guide to Voting for 2018 targeted at new voters.
I hope everyone distributes this to younger and newly enfranchised voters!
Some enterprising news organizations have found this blog posting from September 2017: https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-voter-fraud-rife-with-inaccuracies/
A bit of nostalgia I would have thought, but apparently Kris Kobach still hasn’t figured this one out.
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.