Election-Campaign Law

Election Day Update From California

Posted on November 03, 2020
It’s a beautiful Election Day, at least here in Southern California! A few quick morning updates. The California Secretary of State’s latest updates (as of 11/1/2020) notes that 11,161,493 vote-by-mail ballots have been returned (with 22,388,716 issued)...

What?s Michigan to Expect with Early Voting?

Posted on October 28, 2020
Charles Stewart III The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in a half dozen battleground states, asking how voters intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves...

What?s Arizona to Expect with Early Voting?

Posted on October 27, 2020
Charles Stewart III One week to go. The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in a half dozen battleground states, asking how voters intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves...

What?s Pennsylvania to Expect with Early Voting?

Posted on October 27, 2020
Charles Stewart III   The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in a half dozen battleground states, asking how voters intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves...

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What?s Georgia to Expect with Early Voting?

Posted on October 26, 2020
Charles Stewart III I?ve been working on estimates about the number of mail ballots and early ballots we can expect in the battleground states where the Healthy Elections Project has been surveying about voter intentions.  I?ve published estimates for North Carolina and Wisconsin, and should have estimates for Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and Ohio shortly...

What?s Florida to Expect with Early Voting?

Posted on October 26, 2020
Charles Stewart III It?s just over a week before the election.  The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in half a dozen battleground states, asking the intention of registered voters about how they intend to cast their ballots...

What?s Wisconsin to Expect with Early Voting?

Posted on October 21, 2020
Charles Stewart III It?s now twelve days to the general election.  The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in half a dozen battleground states, asking the intention of registered voters about how they intend to cast their ballots...

North Carolina Is on Track to More than 1.3M Mail Ballots and 2.1M Early Votes

Posted on October 19, 2020
What?s North Carolina to expect? Charles Stewart III It?s now two weeks and a day to the general election.  The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in half a dozen battleground states, asking the intention of registered voters about how they intend to cast their ballots...

Monitoring the Election Twitter Tracker

Posted on October 16, 2020
The Monitoring the Election project has launched our Twitter election monitoring tracker. You’ll see real-time data for tweets about election day voting, voter fraud, remote voting, election challenges, voter ID, and polling places. We also break the Twitter day down daily, and by state...

Early Election Problems

Posted on October 13, 2020
Last week, I gave a public presentation at Caltech, “Can American Have a Safe and Secure Presidential Election?” You can now watch it on YouTube! One of the things I discussed in the talk were the many real issues that are likely to arise in this fall’s general election, things like long lines in early […]

VTP launches voter guide for November 2020

Posted on October 07, 2020
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has just launched a voter guide for November 2020. You can download the pdf of the voter guide from the VTP website. Or here’s fun animated graphic (just click on the image, and it’ll launch the interactive voter guide in an informative and fun animated image)! Special thanks to Silvia […]

What to Make of President Trump?s Tweets?

Posted on July 30, 2020
Charles Stewart III President Trump is apparently exercised that some states, especially battleground states, might be mailing absentee ballot applications to all their voters, so that they can request a mail ballot be sent to them. In fairness to the president, many of these states are new to the large-scale mail-ballot game, and have been […]

Nine Thoughts about Lost Votes by Mail

Posted on July 27, 2020
By Charles Stewart III A ?lost vote? occurs when a voter does all that is asked of her, and yet her vote is uncounted in the final tally. Estimating the magnitude of lost votes in American presidential elections has followed the work of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP), which initially estimated the magnitude of […]

LA County March 2020 Primary Election Vote Center Evaluation Study

Posted on July 13, 2020
Today we are releasing our preliminary report that looks at the performance of vote centers in the March 2020 primary election in LA County. Our study, the “Preliminary Evaluation of Los Angeles County Vote Center Performance in the March 2020 Primary Elections”, was researched and written by Daniel Guth, Claudia Kann, Seo-young Silvia Kim, and […]

Mail Ballot Watch

Posted on July 06, 2020
By Charles Stewart III The MIT branch of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project has started a time series to follow the fraction of ballots cast by mail in the primaries.  We will be updating on a regular basis and posting the graph to Twitter and here...

Resilient Elections

Posted on June 18, 2020
I’m excited to announce that I’ve started a video series with Paul Gronke, who runs the Early Voting Information Center (EVIC) up at Reed College. We just posted our first video, in which Paul and I give a brief introduction to the series...

Five Wisconsin Take-Aways

Posted on April 14, 2020
By Charles Stewart III, MIT The following is a list of take-aways from the Wisconsin primary. I will be elaborating on these points in the following days, but I wanted to get these down before the day got too far out of hand. It is possible to rapidly expand vote-by-mail even when you?re not prepared […]

What ?Should? We Expect Turnout to Be in Wisconsin?

Posted on April 13, 2020
By Charles Stewart III, MIT While we wait for the election results to be released later tonight, it would be useful to predict a priori what we would expect turnout to end up being. With an expectation established, based on past voting patterns in Wisconsin, it will be easier to assess how the unusual circumstances […]

Seo-young Silvia Kim: The Benefits of In-Person Election Observation

Posted on April 06, 2020
Guest Blog by Seo-young Silvia Kim Silvia Kim is a PhD candidate at Caltech, currently finishing her dissertation research on American Politics and Political Methodology. Silvia has been a key collaborator on the Monitoring the Election project. She’ll be starting her new position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at American University […]

The Blue Shift in California Elections

Posted on March 30, 2020
Guest Blog by Michelle Hyun Michelle is an undergraduate student at Caltech. In the summer of 2019, she was a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) at Caltech. Her research was conducted in collaboration with Yimeng Li and R. Michael Alvarz. We have recently released a working paper, it’s now available online, “Why Do Election Results […]

Will Expanded Early Voting Help with Social Distancing? Maybe Not

Posted on March 25, 2020
By Charles Stewart III, MIT The most promising solution to instill physical distancing in elections during the current COVID-19 crisis is increasing the availability of vote-by-mail options. Another suggested strategy has been increased early voting. The idea behind both is to ?dedensify? polling places...

VBM and the costs of elections: updates from CO, IN, and WA

Posted on March 28, 2011
Changes to early voting are on the administrative and legislative calendar in many states and jurisdictions.  A brief update from the mail bag: In Colorado, many counties have absentee ballot rates exceeding 70%.  This was the threshold, by the way, that encouraged Oregon and Washington to move to full vote by mail...

Awards at Election Verification Network Conference

Posted on March 26, 2011
The Election Verification Network gave 3 awards last night to individuals working on important areas relating to election reform and election administration. The first person was Professor J. Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan. He is a computer scientists who demonstrated the first (known) voting machine virus and recently with his students participated in [...

Election Verification Network Conference

Posted on March 25, 2011
I’m at the Election Verification Network Conference in Chicago. This is a very interesting conference with lots of different types of folks, including election officials, election administrators, activists, interest groups, EAC and NIST staff, attorneys, and academics from a variety of fields...

Legislation introduced to eliminate the EAC

Posted on March 24, 2011
As noted in today’s Electionline, legislation has been introduced to eliminate the EAC. The full text of the bill is here: HR672. I’ll try to look more carefully at this over the next week or two, but at first blush, I think it transfers the NVRA and UOCAVA reporting requirements to the Federal Election Commission and [...

Three New Articles on Convenience Voting and Participation

Posted on March 21, 2011
The latest issue of Election Law Journal includes three interesting articles on mobile polling, permanent vote-by-mail, all-mail voting, and the impact of convenience voting innovations on voter turnout. The first article, by Jason Karlawish, Charlie Sabatino, Deborah Markowitz, Jonathan Rubright, Ellen Klem, and Robert Boruch, is titled “Bringing the Vote to Residents of Long-Term Care Facilities: [...

New study on mobile voting and seniors in long term care facilities

Posted on March 20, 2011
As co-editor of the Election Law Journal, I am pleased to this press release on media newswire: Mobile Polling Breaks down Barriers to Voting for Seniors in Long Term Care Facilities, Penn Study Shows Cross posted at earlyvoting.net

The ?new normal? and the costs of photo ID

Posted on March 18, 2011
This week’s Electionline Weekly does a superb job pulling together the various threads of the fiscal debate over photo ID at the polling place.  As author Sean Greene notes, the costs of implementation are squarely part of the debate in most states, not surprising given widespread fiscal retrenchment...

New research paper published by Brady and McNulty, ?Turning Out to Vote?

Posted on March 17, 2011
There is a paper that is now available electronically from the American Political Science Review, by Henry E. Brady and John E. McNulty, “Turning Out to Vote: The Costs of Finding and Getting to the Polling Place.” Here’s their abstract: Could changing the locations of polling places affect the outcome of an election by increasing the [...

VTP and colleagues at MPSA

Posted on March 16, 2011
The Midwest Political Science Association annual meetings in Chicago are coming up, and there will be a variety of presentations by VTP faculty, research affiliates and students. A listing is on the VTP website.

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