[EL] MOVE Act and partisan reg. early vote 2008 comparison

[Michael McDonald]

On Saturday, we passed the deadline for states and localities to transmit
ballots per the 2009 MOVE Act. Some states began or previously began sending
mail ballots to military and overseas voters, sending mail ballots to
domestic civilians, or even begun early voting.

I've seen chatter about how the 2012 ballot requests, and in some cases the
returned ballots, have more registered Democrats than at the start of mail
balloting in 2008. This appears primarily to be a consequence of overseas
civilian requests, who were delivered ballots per the MOVE Act. I have
already seen a pattern in North Carolina -- which has been processing mail
ballots since Sept. 7 -- where the earliest ballot requests and returned
ballots had a larger share of registered Democrats than in 2008, but as the
mail balloting period continued, more registered Republicans now constitute
the North Carolina ballot requests and returned ballots. I would thus
caution not to make too much of these earliest of early vote statistics.

I am posting early vote statistics here, where I can obtain them:

http://elections.gmu.edu/early_vote_2012.html

And I am posting updates on twitter: @ElectProject

I would make a request of the list serve: a couple of election officials are
generously sending me reports of aggregate early vote statistics. I would
appreciate similar statistics from states and localities, either pointers to
where the data can be found in a public location or private reports where
this information is not posted publicly on the web. I am particularly
interested in a source for the aggregate Florida mail ballot statistics,
available only to campaigns. The state only publicly releases the early
in-person voting statistics. Since registered Republicans typically
constitute a greater share of Florida's mail ballots, it would be misleading
to report only the in-person votes. I want to have the best picture as
possible of the early electorate in Florida.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor
George Mason University
4400 University Drive - 3F4
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

703-993-4191 (office)
e-mail:  mmcdon at gmu.edu               
web:     http://elections.gmu.edu
twitter: @ElectProject