Local Election Administrators Research Articles

Local Government Election Management in Lagos State and the Influence Of A Zero-Sum Game

By intent and definition, the Local Government in a democracy is supposed to be the closest government to the people and its administrator should be decided by its residents through a free and fair election. But in Nigeria, the works of the election management bodies that conduct Local Government elections in the States are cumbersome because the Governors have substantial control over them. For instance, the Chairman of the Lagos States Independent Electoral Commission is nominated by the Governor, who also has a major stake in the outcome of Local Government elections. The Local Government election in Nigeria is a zero-sum game for the ruling party in the State, as election into all the Local Government administrative centers is seen as a 'must-win' for the party of the Governor. One of the reasons for this is that Local Governments in Nigeria receive a monthly statutory allocation from the National Revenue. Also, local government official positions that include: the Chairman, Vice Chairman, Supervisory Councilors and other Councilors are used by the Governors and other ruling elites in the States to ‘settle’ loyal party members in their localities. This paper uses Lagos State to highlight the reality of the management of local government elections in Nigeria. It submits that the mode of configuration and procedure of local government election administration must be changed to a more transparent and unbiased one before the election can be taken seriously by the residents of the State.

How Partisan Is Local Election Administration?

In the United States, elections are often administered by directly elected local officials who run as members of a political party. Do these officials use their office to give their party an edge in elections? Using a newly collected dataset of nearly 5,900 clerk elections and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we compare counties that narrowly elect a Democratic election administrator to those that narrowly elect a Republican. We find that Democrats and Republicans serving similar counties oversee similar election results, turnout, and policies. We also find that reelection is not the primary moderating force on clerks. Instead, clerks may be more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and selecting different election policies may only modestly affect outcomes. While we cannot rule out small effects that nevertheless tip close elections, our results imply that clerks are not typically and noticeably advantaging their preferred party.

The forgotten election administrator of internet voting: lessons from Estonia

ABSTRACT The introduction of new voting channels, voting technologies and other voting innovations are often thought to improve voter participation in elections and democracy. However, it frequently happens at the expense of administrators, who needs to deliver even more complex elections. This article traces how the introduction of a new voting channel, Internet voting, affects frontline administrators through a qualitative in-depth case study of the 2017 local elections in Estonia. Findings show that the local election administration plays a substantial role in delivering Internet voting, despite the centralized election hierarchy. The case shows little evidence to support the expectation that Internet voting decreases the administrative burden of local election officials. The article outlines the vulnerabilities in Internet voting administration, resulting from the complexity of delivering multi-channel elections, particularly the ones integrating Internet- and paper-based voting channels. The article makes important recommendations for improving the implementation of electronic voting and improving the quality of elections.

Election Administration and Public Records Responsiveness

Is there an optimum method to elicit public records from election officials? Using a field experiment that randomly assigned the wording and email domains used to solicit public records, we test how county election offices respond to requests under given conditions. We find that the response rates of Florida’s 67 Supervisors of Elections (SOE) to a request for election administration data and election protocols after the 2018 General Election varies considerably, but that the formality of the language and the email domain randomly assigned only marginally affects the compliance of election officials to abide by the state’s public records statutes. The variance in responses and lack of compliance seems to not be related to who asks for data nor how it is solicited, but rather is idiosyncratic. Despite the largely null findings, our study raises concerns about local election administration and transparency.

The Politics of Locating Polling Places: Race and Partisanship in North Carolina Election Administration, 2008–2016

Do local election administrators change precincts and Election Day polling place locations to target voters based on their partisanship or race? We systematically evaluate whether decisions consistent with targeting occur using the near universe of eligible voters, polling place locations, and precinct boundaries across three presidential elections in the closely contested state of North Carolina. We find no evidence that local administrators allocate precincts and polling places in a manner consistent with partisan manipulation for electoral gain. Some counties appear to differentially target opposition party voters with these changes, but the county-level variation we document is likely due to random variation rather than deliberate manipulation. There is also little evidence that the removal of minority voter protections in Shelby County v. Holder impacted polling place placement. If partisan-motivated precinct or polling place decisions occur in North Carolina, they are seemingly more idiosyncratic than pervasive.

The Gatekeepers of US Elections: Exploring Street Level Bureaucrats in Montana

ABSTRACT Following the 2016 presidential election, the Trump administration pressed for the creation of a nationwide voter fraud investigatory commission, which is now inactive. However, some Americans deactivated their voter registration due to privacy concerns. Therefore, additional research is needed to explore the role of street-level bureaucrats or front-line actors in the administration of elections. The purpose of this research is to examine the public’s perceptions of the gatekeepers of U.S. elections – civic entrepreneurs (e.g. election administrators). The researchers in this study conducted a telephone survey of 405 randomly selected registered voters in Montana to uncover the level of confidence citizens in a large and rural state have broadly about the administration of electoral processes. The results made it clear that local election administrators are inherently civic entrepreneurs because their interactions with citizens directly influence the publics’ trust in electoral processes, and in turn, their participation.

What Happens at the Polling Place: Using Administrative Data to Look Inside Elections

AbstractTremendous attention has been paid to local election administration since the 2000 presidential election meltdown, yet policy makers still lack basic information about what happens at the polling place. One strategy to understand the interactions between citizens and street‐level election bureaucrats is to turn to administrative data. Using logs collected by polling place workers, the authors analyze more than 66,000 individual incidents recorded from four different statewide elections. Such data provide novel insights and guidance for the administration of elections. Findings indicate that task scale (in terms of the number of ballots) and complexity (in terms of absentee ballots) increase the incident rate. Managerial choices about how polling places are run also matter: the use of electronic voting machines and central count processing of ballots reduce the incident rate, while splitting poll worker shifts increases it. Operator capacity, measured in terms of experience, also reduces the number of incidents.

Reprecincting and Voting Behavior

Despite the expansion of convenience voting across the American states, millions of voters continue to cast ballots at their local precincts on Election Day. We argue that those registered voters who are reassigned to a different Election Day polling place prior to an election are less likely to turn out to vote than those assigned to vote at the same precinct location, as a new precinct location incurs both search and transportation costs on reassigned voters. Utilizing voter file data and precinct shape files from Manatee County, Florida, from before and after the 2014 General Election, we demonstrate that the redrawing of precinct boundaries and the designation of Election Day polling places is not a purely technical matter for local election administrators, but may affect voter turnout of some registered voters more than others. Controlling for a host of demographic, partisan, vote history, and geospatial factors, we find significantly lower turnout among registered voters who were reassigned to a new Election Day precinct compared to those who were not, an effect not equally offset by those voters turning to other available modes of voting (either early in-person or absentee). All else equal, we find that registered Hispanic voters were significantly more likely to abstain from voting as a result of being reassigned than any other racial group.

Casting and Verifying Provisional Ballots in Florida*

ObjectiveSome scholars report that the partisanship of local election administrators affects which voters will cast provisional ballots and which ballots will be rejected, raising serious questions about voting rights and the application of uniform election laws within the American states. Our goal is to demonstrate that casting a provisional ballot and rejecting a provisional ballot are separate processes, the discrete dynamics of which have not been adequately assessed empirically.MethodsDrawing on a county‐level data set spanning three general elections in the battleground state of Florida, we look beyond the partisanship of local elections administrators, focusing instead on how voter registration issues in local election jurisdictions may condition both the casting and rejection of provisional ballots.ResultsOur findings suggest that voter registration maintenance issues in a county affect the number of provisional ballots cast and rejected. Most importantly, we find that counties with greater numbers of voters who register after the registration cutoff date prior to a general election (and who are thus ineligible to vote) tend to have greater numbers of provisional ballots cast and rejected.ConclusionsProvisional ballots are the stepchildren of local election administration. Voters deemed by poll workers to be ineligible to vote a regular ballot are permitted to cast provisional ballots; these ballots are verified by local canvassing boards after the election results are tabulated and the unofficial winners declared. We find that the partisan leanings of local elections officials play a minimal role in the number of provisional ballots cast and rejected, which we hope will encourage scholars to scrutinize other local factors that might cause disparities in these votes of last resort.

Improving Election Poll Worker Training: Reflections on Implementing New Ideas for Measurable Success

Poll workers have been called the “street-level bureaucrats” of democracy. Voters’ evaluation of their performance shapes nothing less than citizens’ perception of the legitimacy of the democratic process (Burden and Milyo, 2013). There are a number of reasons that training poll workers can present quite a challenge. Local election administrators may face considerable difficulty translating recommendations from national organizations such as the Elections Administration Commission (EAC) into practice because of the varying requirements of state, local, and federal law. Therefore, each jurisdiction must develop a unique approach when implementing changes to the training of poll workers. How, then, do elections administrators best prepare this group of workers to competently run our polling locations? In this “Tales from the Trenches” piece, we offer the story of how one local administrator did just that in Williamson County, Texas. Along the way, we discuss how she identified the shortcomings of the existing poll worker training program, implemented improvements, and the lessons she learned in the process.

What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials

Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.

Of Money, Machines, and Management: Election Administration from an Administrator's Perspective

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the almost $4 billion it authorized for election improvements changed the way America votes. State and local jurisdictions upgraded voting technology to solve the residual vote problem, highlighted by the 2000 presidential election in Florida. They also adopted statewide voter registration lists and made other election administration improvements. This essay explores the impact of modernized voting technology from the perspective of a local and state election administrator. It considers both the short- and long-term impacts of these changes, particularly in terms of ongoing expenses, sustaining improvements, and the shift in power relationships between federal, state, and local policy-makers and election administrators. The essay concludes with thoughts on where the U.S. could go next to continue the modernization of its election systems.

Essential Research Needed to Support UOCAVA-MOVE Act Implementation at the State and Local Levels

Congress’s most recent effort to enable overseas and military voters to cast valid, timely ballots imposed a large number of complex tasks on State and local election administration. By federal mandates, preemptive provisions, and severely constrained implementation timetables, the MOVE Act requires State and local election administration officials to offer Internet transmission of specified services including voter registration and blank ballots. However, Internet-connected election equipment presents many dangers to overseas voters’ ballots and to accurate election totals. Authenticating overseas voters, assuring that they receive only a correct and authentic electronic ballot, guaranteeing vote privacy, maintaining the integrity of the ballots during marking, transmission, storage and canvass, and other essential objectives of election security, are much more difficult -- not less -- when vote transaction data must traverse the Internet. With appropriate infrastructure, however, election offices can reliably serve overseas voters with at least some Internet-transmitted election materials. Achieving reliability, however, requires substantial expert technical services, ongoing staffing and training, and appropriate computer equipment, software, network services, and testing protocols. To avoid repeating the electoral disruptions and injury to public confidence that followed the last federally-induced embrace of problematic computer technologies (paperless electronic precinct voting machines), this paper recommends that Federal assumptions about State and local technical readiness be temporarily set aside. Sound empirical data (that can be anonymized) are needed to document the currently available technical and security infrastructure and changes to that infrastructure which are still needed for MOVE Act full implementation. If Federal election policies and “best practices” continue to be formulated for overseas absentee voting without sound baseline knowledge of existing technical conditions, expertise, and resources, serious election difficulties and inequities are likely to arise. These include (1) federal phase–in planning and support errors arising from erroneous readiness assumptions; (2) insufficient budgetary allocations for initial and ongoing technical and security management; (3) inability to achieve voter privacy, security, and reliability objectives, and thereafter, (4) the likelihood of unfair accusations against election officials for not achieving the mandated objectives. To ensure full implementation of the Act and achievement of its objectives, federal agencies, other funding entities, and State and local election administrators should collaboratively support independent research to document both the status quo and needed technical infrastructure.

Federalism and Election Law: Implementation Issues in Rural America

With the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, federal guidelines established the need for more coordination between states and local election administrators. We examine the implementation of HAVA in rural election districts, where a lack of resources increases the district’s cost of becoming compliant with the federal law. Using case studies of Maryland, Virginia, and New York, we analyze how centralization of state election authority can affect the inequality of implementation costs between rural and urban districts. We find that the centralization of election administration is important, but it alone cannot account for the experience of rural districts implementing HAVA. These findings have implications for policymaking in the area of election reform; particularly that federal data collection should measure the cost of HAVA implementation, rather than just compliance, in the localities so that states could use the data to develop funding formulas that would reduce strain on rural election districts.

Building Capacity in Election Administration: Local Responses to Complexity and Interdependence

Public administration research has identified networks, professionalization, and collaboration with community interests as potential principles by which public organizations can enhance their capacity and effectiveness. This article explores the implementation of these principles by election administrators at the local level, where their ability to conduct elections is the subject of current scrutiny. Findings indicate that election administrators established networks, professional organizations, professionalization requirements and community collaborations prior to the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Findings also suggest that local election efforts may become more effective as a result of certain provisions of the act that promote centralization and information dissemination. Local election administrators may also continue to build capacity by applying these public administration principles.

The Street‐Level Bureaucrats of Elections: Selection Methods for Local Election Officials

AbstractThe 2000 presidential election and the recount battle in Florida focused attention on local election administration in the United States. The Help America Vote Act, passed by the federal government in 2002, requires wholesale changes in voting equipment and other election procedures. However, the law did not address the selection of individuals who manage elections: both state and local election officials play a great role implementing federal and state election laws. Recently, several election reform advocates have argued for shifting to nonpartisan election administrators in the United States. Others, particularly associations representing election officials, have not endorsed that position. To inform this debate, we provide data on the selection methods and party affiliations for all local election officials in the United States (more than 4,500 individuals or commissions). We find considerable variation in the methods used to select state and local election officials in the United States.

Local Election Administration in California

Local Election Administration in California

Book Reviews : Local Election Administration in California. By JUDITH NORVELL JAMISON. (Los Angeles: Bureau of Governmental Research, University of California. 1952. Pp. xii, 60.)

Book Reviews : Local Election Administration in California. By JUDITH NORVELL JAMISON. (Los Angeles: Bureau of Governmental Research, University of California. 1952. Pp. xii, 60.)