New report from Barry Burden. From the Executive Summary:

Despite the many challenges that election officials and voters faced as a result of the pandemic and the spread of misinformation, surveys of both groups show that the 2020 general election in Wisconsin was a tremendous success.

The share of people voting by mail jumped to a record high, particularly among individuals concerned about the spread of the virus at polling places. The vast majority of municipal clerks procured adequate resources and sufficient numbers of poll workers to conduct the election, and they found ways to manage, albeit imperfectly, much higher volumes of absentee ballots.

New resources such as grants to fund operations and National Guard members who served as poll workers helped to compensate for the greater demands on election officials managing massive increases in mail ballots and restrictions on polling place locations due to the pandemic. The vast majority of voters were served extremely well, although pockets of difficulty were experienced by some populations such as young people and voters with disabilities.

Perhaps reflecting their different experiences in 2020 and even before the pandemic, clerks disagree on some important policy proposals being considered in the wake of the election. They report sharply divergent views on whether it should be permissible to process absentee ballots before election day and whether drop boxes for collecting absentee ballots should be allowed.

These opinions are strongly correlated with the sizes of the municipal populations that clerks serve. Among other differences, clerks from larger cities were much more likely to believe that misinformation about absentee voting was a serious problem and to favor some processing of absentee ballots before election day.

Despite the disruptions it caused, the 2020 experience did not alter the opinions of clerks about some election practices. Although most clerks support the right of people to vote by mail for any reason, a significant share believe, even after the pandemic experience, that absentee voting should be limited to a small group of voters who provide evidence that they cannot appear at their assigned polling places on election day.

Despite some pointed differences between clerks from the largest and smallest municipalities, clerks are largely in agreement on other policy proposals. Examples of consensus include not making the deadline for requesting absentee ballots to be any later than it is already, requiring photo IDs for most voters, and retaining traditional neighborhood polling places even if absentee voting continues to be common.

The 2020 election took its toll on election officials. After a long and trying election season, clerks report high levels of occupational burnout on several measures. In addition, a significant number of clerks report receiving more threatening or hostile messages than in previous presidential election cycles, especially in larger cities.

The survey shows more evidence of “status quo bias,” the tendency of officials is to keep practices as they are. Even after the tumult of the 2020 election cycles, a sizable share of clerks continue to oppose the opportunity to process absentee ballots before election day, resist handing over responsibilities to county clerks, and do not wish to do more public education.

Earlier today, I lamented that SB 1 in Texas omitted the paper audit or paper ballot requirement that was in its original SB 7. Since that post, I was informed that the Texas legislature did enact, with near unanimity, SB 598, which includes the paper ballot requirement, as a standalone bill. As another component, it included a requirement of risk-limiting audits beginning in 2026, with a pilot program beginning in 2022.

I’m glad to see the developments and that they were not simply chopped out of SB 7, and I’m sorry I didn’t see them before my post, which misled readers. I’ll update that post as well.

IMPORTANT UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Texas did enact a version of this requirement in a separate bill, SB 598. See my update here.

Texas’s SB 1, in my judgment, is a hodgepodge of sensible and strange rules that will add a bit more complexity and uniformity, sow a bit more confusion (especially among elderly absentee voters), and likely increase no one’s confidence in elections. Many of the critiques are right (including concerns of overcriminalizing innocuous behavior). Others are oddly misplaced. (For instance, it’s strange, to me, at least, to see critiques that the bill “without justification” creates a “two-tiered and arbitrary system.” The present law has tiers of rules, without much consternation–and, I think, it makes sense to require bigger counties provide more early in-person voting opportunities, and allow smaller counties to hold it only upon sufficient request, among other distinctions.)

With that mealy-mouthed wind-up, here’s my lament. The most disappointing thing in SB 1 is what it omits. It’s a change made after the original conference committee bill, SB 7, the one that prompted a legislative walk-out.

The old SB 7 (“tempered” by Democrats by the time it got to the conference committee report) included a phase out of direct recording electronic voting machines by 2026 and required use of paper ballots or a paper audit trail. (It’s Section 4.14 of the conference committee report, introduced in the Senate but not the House, but included in the conference report. There are details, too, about the potential fiscal impact on counties.)

That provision is gone from SB 1.

It’s disappointing, as there has been, in theory, bipartisan consensus over paper trails. “Kraken” lawsuits baselessly discussed “flipping” votes in electronic voting systems, which is impossible in essentially every jurisdiction under scrutiny as there was always a paper trail. Georgia’s excellent statewide audit in 2020 found a few mistakes–but few, and nothing so digitally-pernicious.

Eliminating direct response electronic voting systems costs money, and there are fights over who pays and when and how. There was some agreement in SB 7 to do it. And that vanished in SB 1 as enacted.

It’s a strange, sad tale of what might have been. If Democrats had stuck around for the first bill (given that it inevitably passed), would that provision from the conference report (in theory, what each chamber agreed to) make it into law? Did Republicans pull it out of some vindictive reaction, or becomes some balked at the cost on a subsequent go-around?

I’ve asked around but haven’t received a good response. So I end with the words attributable to another Muller: it might have been.

Thread.

Mike Parsons has posted this draft on SSRN (Vanderblit L. Rev En Banc). Here is the abstract:

How much does an election cost? For a democracy as old as ours, the answer is surprisingly unclear.

As election officials prepared to hold the 2020 election in the midst of a pandemic, many tried to ballpark the change in resources necessary to run a safe and effective process. The Brennan Center recommended $2 billion based on rough estimates, only to revise that estimate a month later to $4 billion to cover the range of elections that states and localities would hold over the year. Congress eventually provided $400 million 3—a figure so inadequate that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s charitable contributions alone matched it. Additional sums came from private philanthropy, corporate in-kind donations, and (of course) state and local funding—not to mention a wide range of unreimbursed expenses likely incurred by election workers themselves.

Thanks to the heroic work of administrators, poll workers, and civic groups, the 2020 elections were largely a success. But how much was ultimately spent, how much should have been spent, and how much is typically spent remains a mystery. For example, what would it have cost to ensure that no one waited longer than 30 minutes to cast a vote in 2020? What would be the price tag for 2024? There is no central source of authoritative information to help answer these questions. “States know how much they spend on roads, health care, education and other big-ticket items, but no one knows how much they spend on elections.”

With Democracy on a Shoestring, Professors Joshua Sellers and Roger Michalski step into this opening and make vital contributions. To start, the authors give us something new: hard data. Through immense and detailed research, the authors have compiled a dataset that provides real-world insights into spending patterns in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Using predictive machine learning, the authors then build on this dataset to offer detailed average spending estimates across multiple governmental units.

From these estimates, Sellers and Michalski glean important insights. First, while there is great variation both across and within states, the average spend is small. Second, and more surprisingly, the variation in spending “is seemingly unconnected to poverty, race, and other traditional explanations of electoral disadvantage.” Finally, the authors leverage these insights to sketch out potential policy options, doctrinal implications, and future research paths.

Their intervention could not be more urgent. Scholarly debates, legislative policy discussions, and judicial remedies often unfold in the abstract, with insufficient attention paid to hard costs and administrative concerns. This would be enough of a problem if all the major players in the electoral system were operating in good faith. But they increasingly are not. When every small hiccup provides fodder for conspiracy theories designed to draw the outcome into doubt, the stakes of adequate funding become higher than ever. And when across-the-board cutbacks risk potentially increasing the costs of electoral access for some voters more than others, equitable funding becomes more important than ever.

Among the many contributions of Democracy on a Shoestring, then, is to spur more concrete thinking about the costs and consequences of our country’s devolved and varied spending patterns and decisions—a topic that generated substantial interest after the 2000 election but has since waned. Sellers and Michalski have given us a wealth of empirical, doctrinal, conceptual, and practical information to kickstart these conversations.

In this response I offer two areas that warrant further emphasis and examination. In Part I, I highlight how many of the potential policy solutions identified by Sellers and Michalski could be far more powerful if implemented at the federal level rather than the state level. This includes the benefits of increased funding, uniform data collection, and soft consolidation of purchasing and expertise to leverage economies of scale. While the authors understandably focus on state-level action given the historically “hyper-decentralized” nature of election administration, recent elections reveal new reasons to believe the politics underlying this traditional arrangement may (and should) be shifting.

In Part II, I examine the authors’ surprising finding that variations in election spending are unconnected to poverty, race, and other traditional explanations of electoral disadvantage. This finding suggests that disparate electoral opportunities are not simply a matter of unequal funding. Instead, we must look elsewhere to identify the source of these disadvantages. While Sellers and Michalski seem skeptical that electoral disadvantage may thus be attributable to variations in the relative needs of communities, I believe that this kind of “structural suppression” could be more substantial than the authors credit, and that future research should focus on rigorously examining and quantifying this phenomenon.