Election-Campaign Law

Elections in the News

Posted on November 01, 2008
Election Administration in the Spotlight Given the mounting recognition of the importance of good election administration, it comes as no surprise that election administrators, most of them volunteer pollworkers,  are in the news spotlight. Georgia reports having 15,000 pollworkers statewide, with an average age of 72...

Elections in the News

Posted on November 01, 2008
Voting Technology Problems If it’s true that 90% of votes will be cast or counted by computer, it can be no surprise that there are a few technological glitches along the way.  This isn’t the first, or probably the last, report of problems with internet routers being down, making it impossible to [...

ELECTIONS IN THE NEWS

Posted on November 01, 2008
Long Lines Expected for Tuesday In spite of the intensity of early voting, high turnout is expected for Tuesday in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois (Chicago Tribune and AP), Michigan, and Texas. In Ohio, the Secretary of State announced that “if lines get “unreasonably long” on Election Day, voters in Franklin County and other counties using [...

Trick or Treat? Voting machine lands in woman?s driveway

Posted on November 01, 2008
This was too good to pass up … “Voting machine lands in driveway:” A Russell County woman had a voting machine delivered to her home Thursday. But she didn’t ask for it, couldn’t use it, and had no idea where it came from...

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Elections in the News

Posted on November 01, 2008
Be Prepared for Legal Battles Across the country, attorneys are gearing up for elections.  Florida reports the descent of federal attorneys from the Department of Justice, who are part of a team of 800 who will be monitoring election nationwide.  Georgia reports hundreds of lawyers on watch for the state and federal [...

EAC to suspend SysTest Lab?s accreditation

Posted on October 31, 2008
I heard about this yesterday, but didn’t get a chance to read the EAC materials on this accredition decision until this evening.

Elections in the News

Posted on October 31, 2008
In today’s news, there were numerous stories about intense early voting taking place in several states ? Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Washington D.C., and West Virginia . With this heavy amount of early voting, it’s not strange to find stories about [...

Election administration and voting technology news updates

Posted on October 31, 2008
There’s a great deal going on in the media now regarding election administration and voting technology in advance of next week’s elections. In order to try to gather, summarize and distribute this amazing flow of information, we’ve asked two fantastic students to help us out...

Delia Bailey, Guest Blogger: ?Voting in St. Louis City?

Posted on October 31, 2008
Editorial note: This is the second of our guest blogging, voting experience, essays. Delia is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Empirical Research in the Law at the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. RMA. By Delia Bailey After getting the call from Mike that I will be joining [...

Early voting in LA County ? over five hours?

Posted on October 31, 2008
Indeed, I have an eyewitness account, from someone who I hope will soon guest blog about the experience of standing in line for five hours and twenty minutes to early vote this afternoon in LA County.

A Funny Story with 2 Serious Implications

Posted on October 31, 2008
Cuyahoga County is a great place because every election, without fail, they give us good fodder for our blog.  In 2006, they had a voter assault a voting machine with a bat (and also screwed up their absentee and precinct voting in the same election)...

Vote flipping and the business of voting machines

Posted on October 31, 2008
Peeks into the business of voting machine development are rare, which is why this Computerworld article (”Are design issues to blame for vote ‘flipping’ in touch-screen machines?”) is so valuable.  Among the more interesting, and disappointing, quotes is this one, about DREs: [Chris] Riggall [spokesman for Premier Election Solutions] said he isn’t familiar with the design [...

Defending My Team

Posted on October 31, 2008
So there is a story today in the New York Times noting that the Colorado Secretary of State lost a lawsuit and has to restore voters to the voter registration list.  They also have a story with the headline “In a Tight Race, Victor May Be Ohio Lawyers...

Advocates win lawsuit in Colorado

Posted on October 30, 2008
This just in: “A win for purged voters.” It seems that the plaintiffs and Secretary of State reached an agreement about what to do with the large number of potentially purged voters in Colorado: The morning after the election, the state will generate a list of voters who were removed from the rolls since [...

LA County update: longer lines for early voting, possible mail ballot problems

Posted on October 30, 2008
See the story in this morning’s LA Times, “Mail ballot backlog poses problems for L.A. County voters.” First, the story says that the early voting line is now 90 minutes long in LA County. But second, here’s some about the potential mail ballot problems: Thousands of Los Angeles County voters may not receive their [...

CNN?s interactive early voting map

Posted on October 30, 2008
CNN has a pretty handy interactive map showing states doing early voting, and the current early voting stats from those states.

Will early voting enthusiasm translate down ballot?

Posted on October 29, 2008
All the excitement over early voting in the presidential contest has not addressed an issue that may be just as important: will this excitement translate into down ballot contests?  Does the high Democratic and African American turnout that Charles has blogged about in NC also help Kay Hagan in her run against incumbent Elizabeth Dole? I [...

Early voting ?exit? poll from Pew puts Obama up 19

Posted on October 29, 2008
http://people-press.org/report/465/mccain-support-declines Projecting who votes early is becoming REALLY important….

Preparing for election night (I)

Posted on October 29, 2008
If 2008 is like 2004, then the moment the polls close in six states at 7pm, speculation will start flying about the results and — most important for people reading this blog — problems emerging with the election returns.  So, as I get ready  to roll into analysis mode at that point (as I also [...

Be Ready for 130 Million Ballots!!!

Posted on October 29, 2008
This from Politico today: The pollster for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) predicted Monday that 130 million people ? the highest percentage of eligible voters in American history ? will turn out in this presidential election. ?Turn-out IS going to go through the roof,? McCain?s pollster, Bill McInturff, says in a strategy memo released to the press...

Long lines for early voting ? in LA County?

Posted on October 29, 2008
I was again on the Patt Morrison show yesterday, on KPCC in Southern California. We had a number of interesting calls, and for much of the show Dean Logan was on with me answering lots of voter questions and concerns. Dean, and one of the callers, said that there was a 40-50 minute [...

Working paper: ?What is the probability your vote will make a difference??

Posted on October 28, 2008
Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver and Aaron Edlin just posted a working paper, “What is the probability your vote will make a difference?” Here’s the abstract: One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability [...

California poised to break voter registration record

Posted on October 28, 2008
There’s a story in the Sacramento Bee, “California to break voter registration mark”. Some of the data in the story is of interest: The deadline for reporting pre-election registration is Friday, but preliminary counts already exceed 17 million - higher than the state’s previous best of 16...

Gronke ?nostalgic? for the polling place?

Posted on October 27, 2008
I am surprised that Michael didn’t highlight this quote, which comes directly from elections observation that I undertook along with Michael, Thad, Morgan Llewellyn, and Melissa Slemin: “I do admit some sort of nostalgia for the polling place,” said Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center...

Charles Stewart in the LA Times: ?Election fraud fears: the cure, states need better machinery and better voter registration procedures?

Posted on October 27, 2008
Charles has an op-ed in today’s LA Times that helps put some of the current debate about potential voter registration fraud into a bigger, historical context — and which argues that the cure for election fraud fears is getting serious about election reform.

Nearly half of votes this fall in California may be cast by mail

Posted on October 27, 2008
The LA Times has a story about the rising popularity of voting by mail in California, “Popularity of mail-in voting surges in California, elsewhere.” Most interesting to me in the story was the amount of variance across California counties in the popularity of voting by mail: Los Angeles County — the nation’s largest single voting [...

Lawsuit filed in Colorado over voter purges

Posted on October 27, 2008
Here’s an article about the lawsuit. A bit of data from the filing on the claim: The groups suing Coffman also estimate that as many as 26,931 voters were purged from the rolls between July 31 and Oct. 31 ? within 90 days of the general and primary election...

Contrary trends in NC early voting data

Posted on October 27, 2008
Although it looks like Democratic registrants are taking more advantage of in-person early voting than Republicans, what are we to make of the evidence from NC that (at least there) Republican registrants are taking even more advantage of mail-in absentee balloting than in 2004? In 2004, for instance, Republican registrants held a 9...

Insiders V. Outsiders View of Elections

Posted on October 26, 2008
There was a really interesting piece on NPR’s On the Media yesterday about “The Bradley Effect.” The interesting thing about the show is that it not only has good data presented about the effect (see link above).  The other aspect I found fascinating was that the cammpaigns both knew pretty quickly that the dynamics of [...

The Lawsuits: An Analysis

Posted on October 26, 2008
There is a great analysis in Politico about the lawsuits in the election, especially focusing on Ohio.

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