Voter Attitudes Toward Poll Workers in the 2008 Election

At a conference on election reform held by the National Academies of Science in 2004, Indiana’s Secretary of State, Todd Rokita, referred to poll workers as “the street level lawyers” of elections. The reason for his statement was obvious: poll workers, in polling places, are the people who determine how well an election is run and have the power over its implementation (Alvarez and Hall 2006; Claassen, Magleby, Monson, and Patterson 2008; Hall, Monson, and Patterson, forthcoming). Because elections are held on a single day in a single window of time, poll workers often are the final arbiters of the electoral process because only with difficulty can voters appeal the decision of a poll worker on election day. Given the critical role of elections in allowing voters to express their preferences for candidates and government policy, poll workers play a critical role in politics and are key front-line, albeit largely volunteer, public administrators

UOCAVA: A State of the Research

The problems faced by overseas civilians, military personnel, and their dependents—individuals covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA)—have existed since the nation’s founding. From the Civil War to today, there have been efforts to improve voting for military voters, often to little avail. Since the 1960s, there have also been efforts to address the voting needs of civilians living overseas and the dependents of military personnel to cast ballots. UOCAVA and its amendments are the latest in this history that attempted to improve the voting experience for these individuals. Unfortunately, there is little high quality research today on UOCAVA voters generally, or military voters in particular. There are fewer than five academic articles that directly address the problems with these voters. These studies are all limited by the lack of quality data that would allow scholars and policy makers to systematically understand the types of problems faced by UOCAVA voters and the scope of these problems. Although there are data on the general issues faced by these voters, such as the issue of ballot transit for by-mail voting, there are not good data that carefully define these policy problems and attempt to identify policy solutions for these issues. The current data collection regimes need to be improved so that they are more useful to policy makers and policy analysts

Electronic Elections in a Politicized Polity

Since the 2000 presidential elections, the evolution of electronic technologies in American elections—from voting machines to computerized voter registries—has occurred within the context of a highly partisan, polarized, and politicized environment. The decision about the type of voting systems to use within a given state has become especially political and these debates have affected the confidence and attitudes of voters toward various voting technologies. In this paper, we consider the evolution of voter confidence over this period and the evolution of the political debate that relates to electronic voting. We note that confidence in voting systems is affected by several factors, including race, partisanship, voting for a winning candidate, and the mode of voting (i.e., voting in person of voting via absentee ballot). During this time, certain factors, such as partisanship, have changed in importance based on previous election outcomes

Voting Technology and Innovation

The 2008 election was different from the last two presidential elections in that there was a clear winner on Election Day and the winner was a Democrat, Barack Obama. Controversies over voting technology that raged in 2000 and 2004 were relatively dormant. Instead, the election controversies that did come up were mostly discussions of lines to vote.1 This lack of discussion does not mean that there were not important issues related to voting technology that took place in 2008, just that they were not things deemed important by the media. In fact, the 2008 election has proven to be a watershed election in voting technology considered more broadly because in this election, more than one-third of voters nationally voted before election day. As the 2008 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (Alvarez, Ansolabehere, Berinsky, Lenz, Stewart III, & Hall, 2009) noted, “37% of voters cast their ballots before Election Day, either in-person at early voting centers (18%) or by mail, mainly via absentee ballots (19%). The elderly, individuals with disabilities, and bettereducated voters were more likely to use these “convenience voting” methods.” This slow revolution in voting is requiring election officials, policy makers, and voters alike to rethink what elections mean, how voting technologies function in this new environment, and how laws, processes, and procedures need to be updated to reflect this new reality. The old mindset of election day as a singular event is no longer a reality. In that vein, voting technology is not some “thing” that is used by a voter to vote but rather is part of a larger process that runs from pre-election voting machine testing through post-election audits

Whose absentee votes are returned and counted: The variety and use of absentee ballots in California

Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. Although there has been some research focused on who votes by absentee ballot, little research has considered another important question about absentee voting: which absentee ballots are counted and which are not? Research in the wake of the 2000 presidential election has studied the problem of uncounted ballots for precinct voters but not for absentee voters. Using data from Los Angeles County – nation's largest and most diverse voting jurisdiction – for the November 2002 general election, we test a series of hypotheses that certain types of voters have a higher likelihood that their ballots will be counted. We find that uniform service personnel, overseas civilians, voters who request non-English ballots and permanent absentee voters have a much lower likelihood of returning their ballot, and once returned, a lower likelihood that their ballots will be counted compared with the general absentee voting population. We also find that there is little partisan effect as to which voters are more likely to return their ballots or have their ballots counted. We conclude our paper with a discussion of the implications of our research for the current debates about absentee voting

Are Americans confident their ballots are counted?

Building on the literature that investigates citizen and voter trust in government, we analyze the topic of voter confidence in the American electoral process. Our data comes from two national telephone surveys where voters were asked the confidence they have that their vote for president in the 2004 election was recorded as intended. We present preliminary evidence that suggests confidence in the electoral process affects voter turnout. We then examine voter responses to determine the overall level of voter confidence and analyze the characteristics that influence the likelihood a voter is confident that their ballot was recorded accurately. Our analyses indicate significant differences in the level of voter confidence along both racial and partisan lines. Finally, we find voter familiarity with the electoral process, opinions about the electoral process in other voting precincts, and both general opinions about voting technology and the specific technology the voter uses significantly affect the level of voter confidence

The American Internet Voter

Since the creation of the Internet, there have been a seemingly never-ending number of books and analyses about the role of the Internet in Politics. Many of these books fail to keep in mind that the behavior of elites--well-educated and politically active individuals who often represent the peer group of these authors--is not generally representative of the behavior of the public at large. Pundits and political campaign, but few have systemically examined the role of the Internet in participatory politics for the average voter. Instead of relying on case studies, this paper uses nationally representative survey data from 2004-2008 to determine how the general public uses--or does not use--the Internet in their political lives. We then consider whether the patterns of use for this technology appear different in the November 2008 General Election cycle. We focus our concerns in the context of increasing polarization of both some fraction of the American electorate and the policy platforms of elected officials

Poll Workers and Polling Places

In the year after the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, there was a sharp focus by many organizations, commissions, and interest groups to determine how to address the problems associated with ensuring that the events of November 2000 did not occur again (e.g., Carter and Ford 2001; VTP 2001). Not surprisingly, the discussion of these entities focused strongly around two important issues. First, there was a sharp focus on the issues related to voting technologies. Given that the difficulty, if not impossibility, of determining how to count certain ballots and the intent of the voter in marking such ballots, determining how to design a voting system that addressed this problem so that it would not occur again seemed paramount. Second, it was also clear, based on the events in Florida and in other states, that many voters had never been able to get to the point of being able to mark – or mismark! – a ballot because problems with the voter registration system had not allowed them to be authenticated as valid voters. By focusing on addressing problems related to voting technology and voter registration, election reform in 2001 and 2002 attempted to address to technologies used in voting – the way people vote – and the processes that were used to address voting issues, such as allowing provisional voting when voter registration errors occurred. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) focused most of its funding and reforms on modernizing voter registration systems by creating statewide voter registration systems and procedures for addressing problems with voter registration through provisional voting requirement and on modernizing voting systems by banning punch card voting in federal elections and requiring the adoption of new voting systems that were auditable and provided users with feedback regarding any errors they might have made in voting

Rational and Pluralistic Approaches to HAVA Implementation

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) has created a new dynamic for the oversight and implementation of federal elections, requiring states to assume greater control of election processes vis-a-vis their local governments than was previously the case in most states. We consider how HAVA has changed the relationship between states and localities, especially through the HAVA planning process. We examine two approaches that states have used in HAVA planning—a rational approach and a pluralistic approach—and how each can shape the power relationship between states and localities. We then present case studies from Georgia and California to illustrate how these two approaches have functioned in practice

Lessons and Trends in E-Voting: Initiatives in the U.S. and Abroad

Since the 2000 election, there has been a debate over the role of voting technology in the election process. In 2000 and 2001, this debate focused on the deficiencies associated with paper ballots—especially the punch card—and the ballot errors associated with these ballots. However, this debate has shifted since 2002 to a conflict between concerns about the accessibility of voting technologies versus their security, especially electronic voting technologies. This shift in the debate over voting technologies can be seen in the quantity and tone of media coverage of this issue, with coverage swinging markedly against electronic voting in 2003 and 2004. The accessibility versus security debate is familiar ground for interest groups, scholars, and players in the election policy domain. Similar debates previously occurred over modification of voter registration and related voter access issues