Election-Campaign Law

Gilded Age Corruption

Posted on September 22, 2010
Controversy over election reform and fraud are nothing new, of course. This fact was brought home to me recently when I chanced upon an 18-year-old article about vote fraud in the 1889 Jersey City elections, in which 56 people eventually went to jail because of irregularities...

Alaska

Posted on September 20, 2010
So Slate has an explainer piece about if you have to spell Lisa Murkowski’s name correctly for it to count.  The thing the story totally misses — and what will prove to be controversial — is not the name part but the Alaska law governing filling in the oval on optical scan ballots...

New York?s Elections and Voting Machines

Posted on September 20, 2010
So this is an op-ed of sorts for the blog, about the NY election. Here we are 10 years after the 2000 election debacle and New York has managed to have an array of administrative problems in their primary elections.  Given how much we know about elections today ? 10 years after the Florida 2000 elections [...

Election lawyers: Book those tickets to Anchorage now

Posted on September 19, 2010
I have given many talks about vote by mail / no excuse absentee voting in the past four years. One of the most interesting topics is always voter intent–a concept foreign to many Midwesterners and East Coasters (election officials are generally aware from professional contacts)...

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Welcome to election day?

Posted on September 18, 2010
We are working on an update to our 2008 Early Voting Calendar. The 2010 version should be available at earlyvoting.net soon, but already, we’ve discovered a substantial number of states who have moved up their no-excuse absentee mailing timeline to correspond to the 45 day MOVE ballot transit requirement...

When You Read ?Voting Machine Problems??..

Posted on September 15, 2010
They really mean to say “the election officials in this jurisdiction failed to train their poll workers, maintain their voting machines, or otherwise ensure that this technology that they are implementing to run an election will work correctly.” See this story from Fast Company as an example: New York State was one of several to [...

DC learns about the week-long ?election day?

Posted on September 08, 2010
This story in the Post is not a surprise to anyone who follows early voting. All I can say to the Fenty and Gray forces is that early voting, in as much as we can generalize from other races in other states and localities, is more likely to reshuffle the electorate than change the electorate...

A new entry for your ?bad example of journalistic analysis? files

Posted on September 08, 2010
Richard Borreca of The Honolulu Star Advertiser celebrates a “thoughtful and engaged electorate.“ Sounds like good news, right?  No, it’s a terribly done story on two grounds.  First, “surveying” the electorate by hanging out for an hour outside of polling place is bad practice...

27th Annual “Polmeth”

Posted on August 31, 2010
It’s been a busy summer, or I would have written about this before. But in July, the University of Iowa hosted the 27th Annual Summer Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology. The complete conference program is here, and a number of the papers and presentations might be of interest to readers...

Fukumoto and Horicuchi on electoral fraud in Japan

Posted on August 31, 2010
Here’s a new working paper on electoral fraud in Japan by Kentaro Fukumoto and Yusaku Horicuchi, “Making Outsiders’ Votes Count: Detecting Electoral Fraud through a Natural Experiment.” Here’s the paper’s abstract: In Japan, there is a popular belief that candidates and their supporters mobilize voters outside the district: they ask outsiders to bring their registered address to [...

Charges of ballot counting “monkey business” in AK Senate primary

Posted on August 30, 2010
As I worried <a href=”http://earlyvoting.net/blog/2010/08/more-alaska-and-australia-there-security-issue-postmark-states”>last week</a>, the Miller camp has leveled charges of “ballot counting monkey business” in the closely contested Alaskan GOP Senate primary...

Guest commentary: Donovan on IRV and the Slow Vote in Oz

Posted on August 26, 2010
Todd Donovan of Western Washington University writes to me about alternative voting or IRV and how this can be impacted by large numbers of ballots being counted after Election Day: The long count of votes in Australia is somewhat complicated by the Alternate Vote (AV) system used there...

The Long Count in Oz

Posted on August 26, 2010
Paul Gronke and James Hicks Early Voting Information Center August 26, 2010 Crossposted at earlyvoting.net I spent the end of last week in Bellingham, WA (a wonderful city by the way–but keep it a secret!) and experienced the impact of a "slow count" firsthand...

And still more on Alaska and Australia: Is there a security risk in “postmark” states?

Posted on August 26, 2010
A colleague of mine sent this note, which is pertinent to any state that requires ballots only be postmarked, but not delivered by Election Day. They are sitting in post offices or they’re in postal bags somewhere. What if somebody, who already knows the Murkowski/Miller race is close, wanted to try and affect the outcome of the [...

Technology makes everyone an election monitor in Kenya

Posted on August 06, 2010
Neat new story about how voters are using SMS and Twitter to act as individual “election monitors” in the Kenyan election. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2010/0804/Kenya-referendum-monitored-by-SMS-and-Twitter

Two new VTP working papers

Posted on August 02, 2010
In the past few weeks, two new VTP working papers have been made available on the VTP website: “Voter Opinions about Election Reform: Do They Support Making Voting More Convenient?”, (WP 98) by R. Michael Alvarez, Ines Levin, Thad E...

Ansolabehere, Hersh and Gerber: “Voter Registration List Quality Pilot Studies”

Posted on July 15, 2010
Stephen Ansolabehere and his colleagues recently released a report that details the results of their recent studies into voter registration list quality. It’s a good read, anyone who is interested in election administration will want to take a look at their study, “Voter Registration List Quality Pilot Studies: Report on Detailed Results...

Harris (1934), ?Election Administration in the United States?

Posted on June 30, 2010
As part of doing some research for a project, I stumbled upon this link that NIST has, where they have electronically reprinted the 1934 classic by Joseph P. Harris, “Election Administration in the United States.” This is a great historical reference for any student of elections and election administration, and it is wonderful to [...

More concerns about late mail ballots in California

Posted on June 25, 2010
There are additional concerns about late mail ballots from California’s recent statewide primary. The issue now regards about 12,500 mail ballots in Riverside County. Apparently they were delivered to a postal office in Moreno Valley (where the county registrar does not collect their mail), but were then forwarded to a postal office where the registrar’s [...

New research paper on fraud: Magaloni, ?The Game of Electoral Fraud and the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule?

Posted on June 22, 2010
Beatriz Magaloni (Stanford University) just published a paper in the current issue of the American Journal of Political Science, “The Game of Electoral Fraud an the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule.” Here is the paper’s abstract: How can autocrats be restrained from rigging elections when they hold a huge military advantage over their opponents? This article [...

Thousands of late mail ballots in California?

Posted on June 17, 2010
According to this report in the Sacramento Bee there are many mail ballots from the recent June primary in California that remain uncounted, most apparently because they were received after the deadline.

Slow count sparks calls for Dunmore?s resignation (Riverside County CA)

Posted on June 16, 2010
A delay in counting the “deluge” of mail in ballots in last Tuesday’s California primary has sparked calls for County Clerk Barbara Dunmore’s resignation.  Delays in counting ballots in California has been recognized for a long time...

The Top Two and CA Politics

Posted on June 10, 2010
The Top Two has now passed, and as Mike, Thad, and I have written (not completely joking) in a few Facebook conversations with other political scientists, at least this gives us all some natural experiments to study. I’ve been quoted as being against the top two in Oregon and in CA, mainly because it was sold [...

Few glitches reported in California primary

Posted on June 09, 2010
There were a few scattered glitches reported throughout the state in today’s primaries. One of the more interesting glitches arose when Governor Schwarzenegger apparently overvoted in the Republican Senate primary, had his ballot rejected, and cast another ballot...

Polling places that don?t open on time

Posted on June 09, 2010
There was this interesting story in today’s LA Times, a story about a polling place that failed to open in time, and what was done to resolve the situation: “Human error stokes confusion at one Venice polling station”.

Primary election in California today

Posted on June 08, 2010
Today’s another statewide election in California, and of course we were out visiting polling places. This morning our team visited five polling places in LA County, including one elementary school, a public library, and three churches. And if you count my adventure this morning in my own polling place, that makes for six (I [...

Elvis on Minnesota ballot?

Posted on June 05, 2010
On the lighter side of election administration news, apparently a man with Elvis as a nickname is seeking to get on the ballot in Minnesota for an upcoming election.

Absentee ballot snafu in New Jersey illustrates the need for careful ballot handling procedures

Posted on June 03, 2010
This story out of Passaic County is not another story about absentee ballots and vote fraud.  But it is a cautionary tale about how important ballot handling procedures can be when new voting systems are implemented. The basic summary is this: a county clerk found 49 uncounted mail in ballots while [...

Call for participation: Swiss evoting conference

Posted on June 03, 2010
Call for Participation SWISS E-VOTING WORKSHOP State-of-the-Art E-Voting Systems [...]

DOJ ?Questions and Answers? on NVRA

Posted on June 03, 2010
This was recently released by the US Department of Justice, on sections 5-8 of NVRA.

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