So far, most of the coverage of BMDs (voting machines in which voters cast their votes on a touchscreen, the machine spits out a ballot listing the voter’s choices and produces a bar code/QR code for a ballot reading machine … Continue reading
Category Archives: election administration
Andy Kroll for Mother Jones: Are we prepared going into the 2020 election? After seven months of reporting, interviewing more than 40 experts as well as current and former government officials and reviewing thousands of pages of records, the reality … Continue reading
Philadelphia Inquirer: People holding their breath to see how Pennsylvania votes in the 2020 presidential election might not want to wait up too late on election night.While the unofficial and more immediately available results have accounted for the vast majority … Continue reading
AP reports. … Continue reading
George Pillsbury and Miles Rapoport for TAP. … Continue reading
Very excited about this: Can American Democracy Survive the 2020 Elections? The role of media, law, political norms, and technology in assuring acceptance of election results. February 28, 20208:15 a.m.–5:00 p.m.UCI Division of Continuing Education, Yosemite Ballroom RSVP > Tentative Schedule … Continue reading
Coming tomorrow, the Bipartisan Policy Center Election Task Force report “Getting Election Reform Right” and and live webcast event scheduled to start at 9:45 am ET. Update: The report is now available here. … Continue reading
Cleveland.com: “Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state’s top elections official, said Wednesday he’d directed county boards of elections to update their computer firewalls to block a series of digital addresses tied to computers in Iran.” … Continue reading
Next Tuesday, Jan. 14th, the EAC will host an summit with officials, experts, and advocates discussing the administration of the 2020 elections – and it’ll be livestreamed for those who can’t make it in person. … Continue reading
This seems like a good roundup of many of the electoral proposals on the agenda in Virginia for the coming legislative session. … Continue reading
Alaska Public Media reports on the progress of a proposition calling for a top-four primary, ranked-choice voting, changes to appointments to local election boards, and campaign finance reform, among others. … Continue reading
Greenberg Traurig, in The National Law Review, have you covered on some of the basics. … Continue reading
Two studies newly published in the latest issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics series: Ethan Kaplan and Haishan Yuan, Early Voting Laws, Voter Turnout, and Partisan Vote Composition: Evidence from Ohio We estimate effects of early voting on … Continue reading
The Virginia Mercury looks at the legislative session ahead. … Continue reading
Dauphin County is the last over the line to purchase a new voting system with a paper trail, right at the deadline. … Continue reading
Kareem Haggag and Devin Pope, following up on their study using smartphone data, offer some suggestions in the WaPo for reducing wait times at the polls. I offered my own suggestions a few years ago. … Continue reading
Detroit News: Michigan’s Bureau of Elections failed to properly safeguard the state’s file of 7.5 million qualified voters, a discrepancy that allowed an unauthorized user to access the file and increased the risk of an ineligible elector voting in Michigan, … Continue reading
Kim Zetter for Politico: Public confidence in the integrity of the 2016 election outcome rests largely on the belief that the Russian hackers—who did, in fact, attempt to meddle in the election, according to the U.S. intelligence community—were blocked before … Continue reading
AP reports. … Continue reading
WaPo: Last month, voters in six Georgia counties cast ballots for local elections using new touch-screen voting machines that officials have said will resolve long-standing questions about the security of the state’s election system.Richard DeMillo, a professor of computing at the … Continue reading
News and Observer: Members of the State Board of Elections admonished county election board members to “get off Facebook” and “delete your Twitter account,” as they reviewed the latest complaints of improper social media posts by local election officials.The state … Continue reading
NPR’s Pam Fessler. … Continue reading
AP: One of President Donald Trump’s top re-election advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states but will be able to “start playing offense” in 2020 … Continue reading
Press release. … Continue reading
WSJ: A voting machine that is widely used across the country contains some parts made by companies with ties to China and Russia, researchers found, fueling questions about the security of using overseas suppliers, which has also sparked scrutiny in … Continue reading
AP: Thousands of Ohio voters were held up or stymied in their efforts to get absentee ballots for last year’s general election because of missing or mismatched signatures on their ballot applications, an Associated Press review has found.The signature requirement … Continue reading
AJC: Amid widespread voter distrust of government oversight of elections and questions about ballot access, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution conducted a unique statistical analysis to learn how precinct closures and distance to the polls impact voting.The AJC mapped Georgia’s 7 million … Continue reading
Carolina Public Press: A voting system certified and tested earlier this year for use in North Carolina’s March 2020 primaries won’t be available, according to manufacturer Elections Systems and Software, so the company’s lobbyists have suggested the state quickly approve … Continue reading
WSJ reports. Given earlier patterns, I would not be surprised to find that the number of noncitizen registrants and voters is far lower than this initial report. … Continue reading
Michael G. DeCrescenzo and Kenneth R. Mayer have written this article for ELJ. Here is the abstract: How much did Wisconsin’s voter identification requirement matter in 2016? We conducted a survey of registered nonvoters in the counties surrounding the cities … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
NYT: It was a few minutes after the polls closed here on Election Day when panic began to spread through the county election offices.Vote totals in a Northampton County judge’s race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out … Continue reading
Important report from NPR. … Continue reading
New post at the Civics Center. … Continue reading
The Guardian: An election’s outcome can potentially be flipped by bad ballot design – not just the misalignment of rows, but also choices as seemingly minor as the order of candidates’ names, which disproportionately favors those at the top of the ballot. … Continue reading
Detroit News: A Democratic group has filed a third voting rights lawsuit against the state of Michigan, targeting Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson about an automatic registration law.The lawsuit argues that the treatment by Michigan’s automatic registration law of people … Continue reading
Based on social science of the “primacy effect” giving candidates listed first on the ballot a benefit, a federal district court has struck down Florida’s law dictating ballot order of candidates based on the winner of the last governor’s race … Continue reading
Detroit Free Press: With absentee voting skyrocketing since voters approved a ballot proposal last year allowing for its expansion, clerks across the state are worrying about counting ballots next year, when a record turnout is expected for the presidential race.Some … Continue reading
Looks like more chicanery from Georgia election officials: Georgia election officials have opened an investigation into two prominent critics of the state’s new touchscreen voting machines, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger’s office confirmed Wednesday.Those critics called the investigation an attempt … Continue reading
AP: More than 234,000 voters in Wisconsin would be made unable to cast their ballot unless they register again before the next election under a lawsuit filed Wednesday that liberals fear could dampen turnout among Democrats in the 2020 presidential … Continue reading
WaPo: The federal government should start vetting companies that sell election systems as seriously as it does defense contractors and energy firms, a top election security group argues in a proposal out this morning.Under the proposal from New York University’s Brennan Center … Continue reading
Reid Wilson in The Hill. … Continue reading
Bloomberg: Digital voting machines were promoted in the wake of a similarly chaotic scene 19 years ago: the infamous punch-card ballots and hanging chads of south Florida that tossed the presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore into … Continue reading
WaPo: County election websites in two battleground states are highly vulnerable to hacking by Russia or another adversary that might seek to disrupt the 2020 vote by misleading voters about polling locations or spreading other false information. About 55 percent of county … Continue reading
Miles Parks for NPR. … Continue reading
AJC: A glitch with Georgia’s new voter check-in computers caused delays in most of the six counties testing it, causing some precincts to stay open late to accommodate voters who left without casting their ballots.The problem occurred in at least … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
Release: Using data from the 2018 midterm elections, the Bipartisan Policy Center today released the largest-ever observational study on wait times in polling places. The research, conducted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the overall average wait time to vote … Continue reading
AP: Legislation headed toward the governor’s desk in Pennsylvania on Tuesday would deliver the biggest changes to state election laws in decades and provide aid to counties for much of the cost of new voting machines as a bulwark against … Continue reading
ProPublica: In the glare of the hotly contested 2018 elections, things did not go ideally for ES&S, the nation’s largest manufacturer of voting technology.In Georgia, where the race for governor had drawn national interest amid concerns about election integrity, ES&S-owned technology … Continue reading