Archive for November 2012

Every election official hopes to have a perfect Election Day. One county official in New Mexico found out the hard way that expecting perfection isn’t the same as planning for it.

Commentary by NYU’s Richard Pildes on judges’ treatment of early voting in Ohio and Florida suggests that rising expectations on early voting are beginning to find their way into legal decisions in cases about limiting early voting.

Galveston, TX’s Election Day problems are the subject of Pew’s latest Dispatch. It shows that sometimes problems aren’t the result of what ISN’T supposed to happen, but rather what law and procedure says IS supposed to happen.

Brian Newby’s latest ElectionDiary includes an extended meditation on capacity issues – and a cautionary note about looking for solutions before the problem is properly defined.

Two new Congressional election reform bills take very different approaches to addressing the issues and problems that arose on Election Day 2012.

No blogging this week – I’ll return Monday, November 26.

Pew’s latest Election Data Dispatch looks at all the different reasons why jurisdictions faced long lines on Election Day. The discussion is reminiscent of a famous observation from a classic of Russian literature.

Charles Stewart of MIT has a new blog post that features a “back of the envelope calculation” about long lines in Florida, using recent federal data and a new proposed formula. The outcome is surprising.

A recent exchange on the New York Times “Room for Debate” page suggests that we are about to have a fierce national debate about the virtues of a nationalized election administration system. I don’t see it.

This just in (OK, just in last week): we have received a National Science Foundation grant to study pollworkers’ effect on election security.