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Interview: Doug Chapin, University of Minnesota

Election Law Society · February 20, 2013 ·

by Jacob Derr & Tony Glosson, Editors

Doug Chapin is the Director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. His Election Academy seeks to provide education and research to help election administrators improve and adapt their performance in the future. He spent ten years at the Pew Charitable Trusts working for voting reform at the national and state level, and to improve voting technology, including internet and mobile applications. He will be moderating panelists at the Seventh Annual Election Law Symposium at William & Mary Law School this Thursday, February 21, 2013. We asked him a few questions in advance of his appearance….

You’ve looked at the issue of election day delays for a while now. What approach do you think state election administrators should take to address the issue?

I think the biggest thing that election officials need to do is get a handle on how many voters they expect on Election Day and how long it will take those voters to cast a ballot. So many of the problems we saw in 2012 were the result of underestimating the number of voters who would turn out – and in a few cases (like Florida) underestimating how long it would take voters to navigate a lengthy ballot. I even heard reports that in some jurisdictions where pollworkers were using e-pollbooks, pollworkers’ unfamiliarity with mouse and keyboard (as opposed to printed greenbar) created delays at the front of the line. Knowing a little more about these factors in advance can reduce the possibility of surprises on Election Day.

Do you think state election administrators could be using the Internet better than they currently are? While Internet voting might be a ways off, can the Internet better serve elections in other ways?

Internet voting is an issue that will generate huge disagreement in the election community … I often joke that everyone agrees that we’ll have Internet voting “someday”, but that consensus evaporates the minute you try to define when “someday” will be. That said, we are already seeing huge strides in the ways in which election officials are using the Internet to help voters with the voting process like online voter registration and polling place locators available via smartphone (even text message). In addition, military and overseas voters can now get unvoted ballots electronically; while this doesn’t include electronic return, it does cut considerably the time it takes for these voters to cast a timely and valid ballot.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, some jurisdictions loosed rules for voting location and even experimented with Internet voting (albeit imperfectly). Do you think these examples have anything to teach election administrators about running elections?

I think the biggest thing we learned from Sandy was the importance of contingency planning for election administration. The affected states did a heroic job making the best of a very bad situation, but probably would have liked to have had a better sense of what to do if the standard election infrastructure was damaged or unavailable. As bad as things were, the country is lucky that Sandy didn’t make landfall closer to Election Day. I know for a fact that election officials across the nation are thinking much harder about contingency planning because of what they saw happen during Sandy.

 

Interestingly enough, flemings key companions in his last months were other writers: william plomer, alan ross and student essays online  cyril connolly?

Review: Election Law Symposium at William and Mary

Election Law Society · February 26, 2013 ·

Doug Chapin kindly permitted State of Elections to cross post this entry, which originally appeared at his Election Academy here.

I was honored to be a participant in a a symposium yesterday in Williamsburg at William and Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law. The event was the annual symposium of the school’s Election Law Society, which is led by Professor Rebecca Green and filled with a seemingly endless supply of enthusiastic and capable students.

The topic for yesterday’s symposium was election delays – including but not limited to long lines. In the morning, students and a handful of Virginia election officials met in small discussions with three visiting experts:

  • + Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, who discussed event management for elections (or “party planning”, as it was called throughout the day);
  • + University of Maryland professor Paul Herrnson, who shared his knowledge and expertise on voting technology; and
  • + John Fortier of the Bipartisan Policy Coalition, who delved into his considerable academic and professional experience to lead a discussion on voting flexibility.

[Read more…] about Review: Election Law Symposium at William and Mary

Non-Precinct Place Voting and Election Administration

Election Law Society · February 26, 2013 ·

The following post has been cross-posted from the Election Law Journal with the generous permission of author Doug Chapin:

The growing enthusiasm across the country for non-precinct place voting (NPPV) presents the election administration field with a series of challenges and opportunities with respect to the design and implementation of jurisdiction-specific programs to put NPPV into practice. Much of the impact of NPPV has been temporal—i.e., tied to the expansion of the notion of Election Day. Traditionally, Election Day marked the only opportunity for the vast majority of voters to cast their ballots; today, Election Day is merely the last day a voter can cast a ballot. Much of the popular scrutiny of NPPV to date, then, has focused on this temporal expansion, along with its attendant effects on candidate and voter behavior. Equally important, though, is NPPV’s spatial expansion of election administration. NPPV has inexorably eroded the traditional equivalence between electoral geography—that unique combination of candidate and non-candidate contests that comprise a voter’s ballot style—and the physical location where a voter actually casts that ballot. NPPV’s temporal and spatial effects have combined to create a modal expansion for voters and election officials alike. Because voters now have more choices about when and where to vote, election administration has had to evolve to become an increasingly complex system to cope with ballots cast at different times and at different places, but also in different forms.

This three-dimensional expansion has created a series of policy challenges for the field. [Read more…] about Non-Precinct Place Voting and Election Administration

This Week: Seventh Annual W & M Election Law Symposium

Election Law Society · February 18, 2013 ·

by Jacob Derr & Tony Glosson, Editors

This Thursday, February 21, the William & Mary Election Law Society and Election Law Program are proud to present the Seventh Annual Election Law Symposium. The symposium features prominent election law attorneys, the Colorado Secretary of State, election law scholars, and Virginia registrars. The symposium centers upon voting delays and is titled “We Have to Fix That: Bipartisan Solutions to Election Day Delays.”

In advance of the event, State of Elections will be publishing special entries all week. We will have advance interviews with Paul Herrnson and Doug Chapin, two of Thursday’s panelists. We will take an in-depth look at the Wisconsin War Game conducted by the Election Law Program last December, which will be discussed at Thursday’s event. We will also highlight and outline the issues for Thursday’s panelists, including a look at what states around the country have been doing in the wake of election delays last year.

We hope you will join us in conversation by commenting on our coverage this week, and we hope you will participate in the Seventh Annual Election Law Symposium at William & Mary Law School this Thursday, February 21, 2013.

 

 

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William & Mary Law School to Host Seventh Annual Election Law Symposium

Election Law Society · February 12, 2013 ·

FINAL Symposium Press Release

WILLIAMSBURG, VA – The Election Law Society and the Election Law Program at William
& Mary Law School announce the Seventh Annual Election Law Symposium to take place on
Thursday, February 21st. The event will feature prominent election law attorneys, the Colorado
Secretary of State, election law scholars, and Virginia registrars. The symposium centers upon
voting delays and is titled “We Have to Fix That: Bipartisan Solutions to Election Day Delays.”

The symposium was inspired by President Obama’s speech following the election when he said,
“I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the
very first time or waited in line for a very long time…. by the way, we have to fix that.“ This
event will draw upon various panelists’ expertise in election law in an attempt to formulate
concrete ideas and bipartisan solutions for how to manage elections and limit voting delays. [Read more…] about William & Mary Law School to Host Seventh Annual Election Law Symposium

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