All States

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

By Jim Ogorzalek

William & Mary’s recent Election Law Symposium played host to several of the leading luminaries in election administration, focusing upon issues of election delays, including but not limited to long lines.  On more than one occasion, participants discussed Election Day vote centers—large voting “big boxes” of sorts at which voters from multiple different precincts may vote—as a potential instrument to combat Election Day delays (see here for a brief discussion of voting at non-precinct polling places).  The subject was particularly appropriate for the panel assembled at W&M, as it included Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a lightning rod for controversy in election administration, whose state has had valuable experience with Election Day vote centers.

A recent study by political scientists Robert Stein of Rice University and Greg Vonnahme of the University of Alabama has shown that use of such vote centers can increase voter turnout. Some at the conference expressed concerns about vote centers.   Panelists referred to the logistical difficulties of operating voting centers—notably that the centers must have the capacity to provide several different ballots for different precincts, including situations in which different ballots require different paper sizes (a problem rendered moot where sophisticated voting machines are used, as they can easily be programmed to contain multiple electronic ballots).

Voting centers supplement or even operate in place of the local precinct.  Implicit in the conception of the voting center, then, is the sentiment that use of the traditional precinct is not a necessary ingredient for successful election administration.  Is the precinct an anachronism in Twenty-first Century election administration?

Perhaps the chief virtue of the precinct model is that it allows local citizens to verify the identity of potential electors.  Neighbors could vouch for each other as residents of the locale who ought to be voting at that particular precinct.  Precincts were also a reasonable means to organize Election Day activities in a world in which voters lived, worked, and socialized within a small geographic radius; voters could be expected to go to a convenient location near to their home.  Finally, to the extent to which Election Day is a social exercise in which communities gather together, the local precinct served an important function in providing a physical space for neighbors to gather and exercise their franchise.

In contemporary society, does the local precinct model of election administrations serve these values?  Or, more precisely, does it serve these values more so than would another model (perhaps one that embraces Election Day vote centers)?  With sophisticated identification cards, election administrators now have the ability to instantly verify a voter’s identity.  The advent of the automobile and expansion of suburban America guaranteed that many—if not most—voters no longer live and work and socialize in the geographic area where their precinct might be located.  And the rapid growth of social media has shifted the locus of community participation from the physical space to the world wide web.  The modern community—and the place where voters are increasingly putting their “I voted” stickers—is now Facebook and Twitter.

The precinct model decentralizes the election administration process.  Decentralization is not a virtue in and of itself.  It may serve other virtues, such as accuracy and efficiency in the voting process.  But the changing nature of modern society calls into question the efficacy of precincts in serving those virtues.  When concentrating the election administration processes into more flexible centers (additionally, dare states experiment with internet voting or voter registration reforms that capture the myriad technological advances since the current systems were broadly constructed?) may serve our values most, ought we desist from digging in our heels in defense of the precinct model?  Politicians and election administrators might reflect upon whether we are operating on a fundamentally outdated method of election administration and whether election administration reforms might best be served not by simply buying newer and more expensive voting machines and poll books but by revolutionizing the basic contours of Election Day administration.

Permalink: http://stateofelections.pages.wm.edu/?p=4988

by Jacob Derr, Editor

One of the biggest stories talked about in the wake of Election Day 2012 were the long lines at the polls. As Election Night played out in real time on television, people were able to see firsthand–or not see, as the case was–the votes come in from districts in states that had closed their polls hours ago. Jump over to any local station in these areas, and you could probably find a local reporter talking to prospective voters, many of whom said they had been waiting in line for hours. President Obama, speaking the day after, declared: “we have to fix that.”

Some states have already started to address these problems. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner filed a report earlier this month with his findings as to the best ways to reduce long lines and streamline elections. Florida saw some of the worst lines last year. Chief among Detzner’s proposed solutions include requiring county commissioners to pay for technological upgrades, giving election administrators greater leeway to make decisions that will shorten lines, and requiring that legislators have a word limit for the constitutional amendments they place on the ballot. He also suggested that, besides unpreparedness among election officials, one of the greatest problems leading to Election Day lines was the cutback passed by the state legislature on the number of early voting days and locations. He says that, despite the budget concerns that led to these being cut back after the 2010 election, they remain a pivotal reason why lines were so long. [Read more…] about “Fixing that”: States identify technological, personnel solutions to election delays

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.