Election-Campaign Law

Alaska Senate race write-in ballot counting nearly done

Posted on November 18, 2010
It seems that the Alaska Senate race write-in ballot counting is nearly complete, and that the Murkowski camp is claiming victory in their write-in campaign. This is quite interesting, as it seems that Murkowski may be the first candidate to win a write-in campaign for the U...

Council of Europe presents New Documents on E-voting

Posted on November 17, 2010
The Council of Europe presented at the Bi-annual review meeting of electronic voting yesterday and today three new documents: an E-voting handbook (edited by Susanne Caarls from Council of Europe) Order it here Guidelines on the transparency of e-elections (edited by the member states of the CoE) “… These guidelines provide a practical tool to facilitate the implementation of [...

2nd Issue of ModernDemocracy 2010 out

Posted on November 16, 2010
The competence center for electronic voting and participation, E-Voting.CC has published the second issue 2010 of their free magazine ‘ModernDemocracy’. It includes a review of the EVOTE2010 conference that took place this summer. Subscribe to the paper copy by sending an e-mail to moderndemocracy@e-voting...

New Mexico Selects Random Precincts for Post Election Ballot Audit

Posted on November 15, 2010
On Friday, November 12, 2010, I observed the random sampling for the New Mexico post election ballot audit. It took about 2 hours to randomly select (using 7 differently colored 10 sided dice) the 42 statewide precincts to audit.  All ballots, including early, Election Day and absentee will be audited from each of the 42 [...

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International PhD Workshop on E-voting in Krems/Austria

Posted on November 12, 2010
My colleagues Melanie Volkamer (Technical University of Darmstadt) and Manuel Kripp (E-Voting.CC) are organizing a bi-annual PhD workshop, the next to be held in Krems/Austria on 7 and 8 May 2011.  Our fellow election updates co-author Thad will hopefully also be present to give some insights from his perspective...

Alaska recount ? voter intent standards

Posted on November 12, 2010
The LA Times has a story this morning, “Alaska Senate race could hinge on a legal wrangle”, discussing the brewing legal debate about voter intent standards in the counting of write-in ballots in the Alaska Senate race. It’ll be interesting to follow this to see how the legal debate develops.

Azerbaijan holds Internet Voting Shadow Election

Posted on November 11, 2010
Internet Voting The election monitoring alliance held a shadow election (non binding, more like an opinion poll) in parallel to the Azerbaijani Parliamentary election last week. 25,442 participated. Read more here. Election Observation of “Traditional” Voting Also on monday our Office for Democracy Institutions and Human rights released its preliminary report, saying ‘Azerbaijan’s elections, though peaceful with opposition [...

Election Administration, Voter Registration, and Mobility

Posted on November 11, 2010
Mike, Lonna Atkeson, and I are writing a book and as part of the research for it I looked at data on residential mobility from the Census. The data are pretty amazing and potentially have very important implications for voter registration and election administration...

Counting the write-in ballots in Alaska

Posted on November 11, 2010
The counting of write-in ballots in the Alaska Senate race continues … Buried within a story this morning from the LA Times, “Counting of write-in ballots underway in Alaska Senate election” was some interesting data: Still, early numbers showed that 89% of the write-in ballots counted by midday Wednesday were correctly filled in for Murkowski...

Alaska: An Argument for the Top Two?

Posted on November 11, 2010
Matt Bai has an article about the Alaska election and what is teaches us about the future of American politics. But is his argument convincing? No slight on Alaska I hope, but to presume that this extremely unique state and even more unique election is “actually telling us something about where American politics [...

E-voting in Tanzania?

Posted on November 09, 2010
Tensions around Tanzanias e-tabulation system

Don?t pick your office before they count your votes

Posted on November 08, 2010
The early voting edition… As we have been reporting at Earlyvoting.net, two races in Oregon are going to be decided by the “late” early voters. Most readers are probably familiar with the Oregon governor’s contest already. More than 91,000 ballots were delivered on election day in Multnomah County–about 25% of the total–and these ballots gave [...

Bilingual ballots and Latino turnout

Posted on November 07, 2010
Nice posting on the MonkeyCage: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/11/even_more_on_bilingualism_and_.html

A Tremendous Account of the Bridgeport Situation

Posted on November 05, 2010
(Thanks to my Moritz colleague Saul Zipkin for alerting me to this one.) Here is a great discussion of the situation in Bridgeport.  It highlights the difficulties of hand-counting paper ballots in Connecticut, which has special challenges, because of cross-endorsements...

Interesting election news on the international front

Posted on November 05, 2010
There are a number of interesting stories in the news this morning on the international elections front: In the UK: “Judges order election rerun in ex-minister’s seat” In Burma: “Burma hit by massive net attack ahead of election” In the Ivory Coast: “Ivory Coast set for presidential election run-off”

Alaska: ?Murkowski may make write-in history?

Posted on November 04, 2010
Here is an interesting update from the Washington Post.

Interesting article about the problem in Bridgeport

Posted on November 04, 2010
This article about the ballot shortage problem in Bridgeport is a rare example of a discussion of election costs in the press. Do the math: the amount saved by not printing ballots for all registered voters is trivial, which says a lot about how stingy local governments are in managing elections.

Evidence that the count in Washington should tighten

Posted on November 03, 2010
If the vote count and the unprocessed ballots count on the Washington state web page are in sync, then it looks like the current lead that Murray has over Rossi should shrink a bit as the unprocessed ballots are cleared.  This is based on a simple algorithm that uses the current vote share in each [...

Elections in the News

Posted on November 03, 2010
Most news sources informed that things went smoothly on Election Day, although there were several reports of isolated irregularities. The Wall Street Journal described the election as “largely free of high-profile voting problems or irregularities...

Guest blog: Jonathan Nagler, ?My NY City Voting Experience?

Posted on November 03, 2010
Here is a guest blog, from Jonathan Nagler: “My NY City Voting Experience” My NY City Voting Experience – Approx 9:15AM – 505 LaGuardia Place 1) Get handed the optical scan ballot (about 8.5×14) in a manilla folder to keep it private, and a card (which I think had my voter number on it)...

Poll watching in So Cal

Posted on November 02, 2010
I went to my first polling place of the day, up in Altadena at Loma Alta Park. The polling place was surprisingly crowded this morning, and a lot of people seemed to be taking advantage of the beautiful weather to get out and vote. Two of my students joined me, and we had [...

DC Elections

Posted on November 02, 2010
The DC Elections are pretty low key but the process for same day registration is not overly streamlined. There are two forms plus the data entry that have to be completed. This process takes 15 or 20 minutes per voter. Most voters are willing to wait but some have left...

Vote fraud app a fraud

Posted on November 02, 2010
This website (http://americanmajorityaction.org/voterfraudapp/) purports to allow voters to post real time claims of voting fraud. Don’t waste your time. I’ve scrolled through the first 50 or so and most are bogus. There may be voting fraud out there, but this website is not going to be the place to look for it.

Ballot problems in Bridgeport, CT

Posted on November 02, 2010
Bridgeport, a key Democratic stronghold in Connecticut, ran out of ballots at some precincts today; photocopied ballots were rushed out, but some people left polling places without voting. “We counted 47 voters that were turned away and just left,” a state representative said.

Santa Clara County ballot printing problem

Posted on November 02, 2010
Smudges on the ballots in Santa Clara County are likely to delay the count there. Here’s the report from Mountain View online. I’ve heard of remaking ballots with extraneous marks, but not erasing smudges and then running the original ballots through the counters.

Updates from Alaska: a snowdrift of absentee ballots

Posted on November 02, 2010
· The state Division of Elections reports more than 17,200 early voting ballots had been cast as of Sunday, a figure that includes absentee-in person votes. The early vote count for the 2006 general election was 8,455. The state also mailed out nearly 30,020 by-mail absentee ballots; [...

Dueling early vote projections for 2010

Posted on November 02, 2010
Michael McDonald has published his pre-election forecast of early vote at 28% of the total vote. This strikes me as far too low; early voting constituted 15% in 2000, 20% in 2002, 22% in 2004, 25% in 2006, and 33% in 2008. It strikes me as very unlikely that the percent of ballots cast early would [...

Elections in the News

Posted on November 01, 2010
In Boulder City, Nevada, a voter complained about electronic voting irregularities, claiming that the name of one of the candidates had been pre-selected. However, Larry Lomax, Clark County Registrar of Voters said that the problem “was never brought to the attention of the workers or poll watchers...

States to watch on Election Day, and why

Posted on November 01, 2010
Now is the time of the election season where pundits begin producing their ?what to watch? lists for Election Day.  Think of the following as the mishigas list for 2010, paying special attention to voting technology and other election administration issues that are bound to arise...

Wednesday?s reading assignment: ?Leapfrog Representation?

Posted on November 01, 2010
Seldom has an article in the American Political Science Review been as well timed as this one: Leapfrog Representation and Extremism: A Study of American Voters and Their Members in Congress. I suspect it is gated for many of our non academic readers, but I will write one of the co-authors today to see if they [...

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