Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots

Photocopies of the ballots challenged in the 2008 Minnesota elections, which constitute a public record, were scanned on a high-speed scanner and made available on a public radio website. The PDF files were downloaded, converted to TIF images, and posted on the PERFECT website. Based on a review of relevant image-processing aspects of paper-based election machinery and on additional statistics and observations on the posted sample data, robust tools were developed for determining the underlying grid of the targets on these ballots regardless of skew, clipping, and other degradations caused by high-speed copying and digitization. The accuracy and robustness of a method based on both index-marks and oval targets are demonstrated on 13,435 challenged ballot page images

Towards Improved Paper-Based Election Technology

Resources are presented for fostering paper-based election technology. They comprise a diverse collection of real and simulated ballot and survey images, and software tools for ballot synthesis, registration, segmentation, and ground-truthing. The grids underlying the designated location of voter marks are extracted from 13,315 degraded ballot images. The actual skew angles of sample ballots, recorded as part of complete ballot descriptions compiled with the interactive ground-truthing tool, are compared with their automatically extracted parameters. The average error is 0.1 degrees. These results provide a baseline for the application of digital image analysis to the scrutiny of electoral ballots

Letting the Candidates Own the Recount: The 1962 Minnesota Gubernatorial Recount and its Use of Alternative Dispute Resolution

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Evaluation of Voting with Form Dropout Techniques for Ballot Vote Counting

Vote counting accuracy has become a well-known issue in the vote collection process. Digital image processing techniques can be incorporated in the analysis of printed election ballots. Current image processing techniques in the vote collection process are heavily dependent on the anticipated, geometric positioning of the vote. These techniques don’t account for markings made outside of the requested field of input. Using various form dropout techniques, however, every mark on the form can be extracted and used by the machine to make an intelligent decision. Most methods will still miss a few marks and result in a few false alarms. This paper explores methods of voting between the results of the different mark extraction methods to improve recognition. To provide diversity a simple image subtraction technique is paired with a distance transform and a morphology based algorithm. The result has a higher detection rate and a lower false alarm rate

Rethinking Transparency in U.S. Elections

Bush v. Gore catapulted this country into a crisis of confidence in the management of our elections. Despite reforms since 2000, public confidence in election administration continues to wane. Are dead people on the rolls? Are noncitizens voting? Are provisional ballots wrongly rejected? State election transparency statutes meant to reassure the public that elections are producing legitimate results are often conflicting, vague, and even nonexistent. Exacerbating the problem, the last two decades have witnessed huge changes that offset the transparency balance. Dramatic changes in how Americans vote, how elections are administered, and who scrutinizes the election process call for a recalibration of election transparency norms. It is not immediately clear, as some are beginning to sense, that unqualified openness serves the fundamental goals of election transparency, that reactive access policies boost public confidence, or that current state transparency architectures tap the full potential technology offers. Circumstances demand not just statutory revision, but revisiting traditional assumptions about election transparency to accommodate radically changed circumstances. This paper contains a proposal pairing an increase in public access to election materials with penalties for harmful uses of election data. We have an opportunity to craft a modern transparency regime trained on the core goal of ensuring public confidence in election outcomes. Developing state transparency regimes that address—and take advantage of—modern realities is critical in an era when election controversy is the new normal

Whose Electors? Our Electors! : Due Process as a Safeguard Against Legislative Direct Appointment of Presidential Electors After an Election

Prior to the 2020 general election, some commentators suggested that President Donald Trump and his allies would attempt to undermine the election’s result by inducing Republican-controlled state legislatures to directly appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. As predicted, after losing his re-election bid to President Joe Biden, President Trump pressured some leaders in Republican-dominated state legislatures to ignore the election’s result and to appoint electors who would vote for him in the Electoral College. Although these efforts were unsuccessful, the volatility of the current political landscape suggests that this issue might emerge again in a future election. In discussing possible safeguards against such an attempt, many commentators have focused on the Electoral Count Act and other legal measures. Most, however, have not addressed the possibility of a constitutional safeguard. This Note uses the 2020 presidential election as a case study and argues that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides a constitutional safeguard that can restrain states from overturning election results through direct appointment of presidential electors

Why Judicial Elections Stink

Those who are concerned about judicial independence and accountability in the United States quite rightly focus their attention on state judicial election campaigns. It is there that the most sustained and successful efforts to threaten judicial tenure in response to isolated, unpopular judicial decisions have occurred; and it is there that escalating campaign spending has created a public perception that judges are influenced by the contributions they receive. Attempts to address these problems have been undermined by four political realities that the author refers to as the Axiom of 80 : Eighty percent of the public favors electing their judges; eighty percent of the electorate does not vote in judicial races; eighty percent is unable to identify the candidates for judicial office, and eighty percent believes that when judges are elected, they are subject to influence from the campaign contributors who made the judges\u27 election possible. Conceding the inevitability of judicial elections in light of entrenched public support, court reformers have relegated themselves to proposing incremental reforms aimed at lessening the detrimental effects of judicial elections. As valuable as these efforts are in the short term, the author argues that they will ultimately fail because judicial elections are inherently unable to preserve judicial independence or promote judicial accountability. The author thus proposes a six point long-term strategy aimed at overcoming popular support for judicial elections, gradually phasing elections out of existence, and replacing them with an appointive model of judicial selection akin to that employed in the federal system

The Future of Election Reform: From Rules to Institutions

The United States has reached a crossroads in election reform. Before 2000, few people-aside from the state and local officials charged with running elections-paid much attention to such arcane matters as voting technology, provisional ballots, voter identification, and voter registration. Since then, we have seen unprecedented efforts at reform, most notably the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)

Every(day) Identities in Forensics: Performing Identities Within the Constraints of Intercollegiate Forensics

Goffman\u27s (1959) dramaturgical theory of identity provides a framework for making sense of complicated, mundane identity performances. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with intercollegiate forensic co-culture members, the current research builds on Goffman\u27s dramaturgical theory of identity. Crystallization-based analysis showed identity performances are situated within one another like Russian matroyshka (nesting) dolls. Co-cultural expectations produce multi-level professionalism expectations, and overlapping co-cultures mean individuals manage conflicting conventions. Implications are offered for the forensics community, other co-cultures, and identity scholars