[EL] making a Democracy Index at the ballot box

[Lillie Coney]

Hello Doug, 

You may want to take a look at ballot attrition--voters
do not vote at the same rate as they work down a ballot.

some voters may want to skip a race or purpose, but often
it is ballot fatigue or poor ballot design.  Ballot fatigue problems
would create resistance from state and local governments to 
make the ballot longer, when voters may have very long ballots 
to vote.  There are also very strict state laws on elections, which
should be considered.  It may work better with small municipal
government elections where you can work with the local elections
person. They would be interested in surveys that would help
administrators conduct better elections e.g. poll worker recruitment,
such as questions like: would you consider being a poll worker or 
did you know you could be a poll worker, etc. 

In any case major elections would be out--many states include 
constitutional amendments, referendums, etc along with candidates 
for office (top federal to the lowest local positions.)

As for auditing elections or best practices for election administration
transparency there are a few groups working on this Verified Voting
is one of them and the Brennan Center.  It is something I have worked
on from the perspective of learning financial auditing techniques and
seeing where those methods might improve election transparency,
accountability and oversight without jeopardizing the secret ballot
or voter privacy. 

My thoughts are that ballots have to be treated like currency, each 
one unique, but no feature that would communicate which voter 
received which ballot.  Ballot casting would have to create a unique 
feature that could not be refuted or rejected, but if removed or another 
inserted in its place would be caught during auditing or ballot tabulation.
In the instance of all electronic voting machines--Prof. Ron Rivest 
proposed software independence, which means that election accuracy
is not dependent on the the correctness of the voting machine software.
This can be accomplished with a another device that is not made by
the manufacturer of the voting machine or it may be a physical ballot.

Lillie

On May 7, 2012, at 5:27 PM, Doug Hess wrote:

> An idea I have thought about before, but not kicked around:
> 
> Administrative data resulting from elections and survey data on or around election day provide information that can be used to inform a "Democracy Index" (metrics on the quality of the election process), but what about adding a few questions to the ballot to make it into a mini survey? For instance, after you vote for the candidates, there could be a question that says: How long did you wait in line today? Or whatever. It could then be tabulated and reported with that precinct. 
> 
> You would not have to ask everybody the same question, or even ask everybody any question. Thus, it wouldn't intrude too much on the voters' time...and it would not make the process at the precinct much longer overall. Randomly distributing ballots within a precinct might be tricky since it is not the usual, but there could be ways to ease this by the printers. Or, it could be a stand-alone survey that people are given at random and submit with their ballot. 
> 
> Do any states or counties (or have any in the past) have an "election day experience" survey and incorporate it into the election process itself? 
> 
> On a related note: do precinct directors report data at the end of the day on events at the precinct? E.g., number of people standing in line at certain hours, etc.?  
> 
> Doug 
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