Archive for 2018

The State of Alaska is advertising for pollworkers in the tiny Yukon River community of Stevens Village after receiving no votes (or ballots, or anything) at all in the 2018 primary. This is an extreme version of the recruiting challenges that many localities face – but it’s rare that a community will have no one.

Reed College professor Paul Gronke has a new blog post at his Early Voting Information Center site examining public attitudes toward the process of choosing election officials and the role partisanship should play. SPOILER ALERT: voters like their election officials, but they’re not keen on partisanship.

Election Day is two weeks from tomorrow and I know there is a ton of election news, but LOOK EVERYBODY ALASKA HAS COOL “I VOTED” STICKERS FOR EARLY VOTERS AND THEY ARE INCREDIBLE. Setting aside how fantastic these stickers look, the idea of using “premium” (my word) stickers to encourage early voting is an interesting tactic – and the results could tell us a lot about the power of giveaways like this to shift voters away from Election Day voting.

Regular readers may have noticed an exciting new change at electionline.org – an updated look accompanied by some functional changes intended to keep the site informative and useful to the election community for years to come. This refresh comes at a key point in the election cycle; if experience is any guide, traffic (both news and visitors) spikes in the weeks before and after Election Day. Go take a look!

Ballots for Colorado voters have begun to make their way to voters this week – and the Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul has a fascinating inside look at the part everyone plays – especially the United States Postal Service – in making it happen. Given that Colorado’s ballot delivery system could be the wave of the future in many states, it’s a great window into how thoughtful and thorough the process is in preparing, sending and receiving ballots from voters.

A new report suggests that several state voter registration files are available for sale on the “dark web”. This data may not have been stolen via a “hack” but rather represents a misuse of voter files by an unauthorized party; still, this threat – large files with voters’ personally identifiable information being offered for sale to individuals who may not respect state and local laws regarding what can (and cannot) be done with such information – is the kind of election cyberthreat (an attack on voters rather than outcomes) that worries me the most.

The weather has once again been a major player this election season, with hurricanes swamping the Carolinas, the Florida Panhandle and large swaths of the Southeast – but severe weather is also affecting voters in Arizona, where the combination of mail ballot delivery and torrential hurricane rain have resulted in soaked, unusable ballots. Election officials are moving swiftly to alert and assist voters with getting replacements.

Election Day is three weeks from tomorrow, and while the fight for control of Congress and governorships gets most of the play, Secretary of State races are also important to the nationwide election community. With that in mind, Governing Magazine’s Louis Jacobson has released updated ratings for the 27 state races in play this fall.

There has been a lot of attention to the candidates on the November 6 ballot – but in this week’s electionline newsletter, Mindy Moretti previews a number of state and local ballot questions addressing issues with the voting process. Most of these issues aren’t likely to generate the kind of partisan heat that many ballot questions bring; however, if enacted, each of them will constitute significant change in how the affected jurisdiction administers its elections.

With Election Day less than a month away, now is the time that election offices step up their efforts to let voters know what’s going to be on their ballots. But in Iowa’s Linn County (Cedar Rapids), several hundred voters mistook sample ballots for the real thing – actually voting and returning them. It illustrates the line election officials must walk in preparing voter education materials like sample ballots: wanting to ensure that they are sufficiently realistic and usable to be helpful to voters, but not so much so that there’s confusion about what’s real and what isn’t.