[EL] The Root Cause of Election Unrest is Non-Transparency

[John McCarthy]

One small correction to Mr. Kogan's note...
One of my colleagues at Verified Voting pointed out that "BMDs were not 
used in US elections until 2006 after the AutoMARK was cerified in 2005. 
Punch cards had a notoriously high residual vote rate in all 
demographics and pre-HAVA scanners did not provide undervote notification."

Although the abstract names four voting technologies (punch-cards, 
optically scanned ballots, lever, and "electronic" machines), the full 
paper itself makes clear that the fourth category of "electronic 
machines" was in fact DRE's.

And as Steven John Mulroy subsequently noted
"The fact that the research is older may indeed be significant.  The new 
generation of HMPB scanners have become quite good at flagging overvotes 
so that voters can correct their mistakes.  They also are more forgiving 
in terms of counting imperfectly filled in ovals, stray marks near the 
oval, etc., where the intent of the voter is clear. And, this study is 
not the only one to document  that African-Americans intentionally 
undervote in down-ballot races at a greater rate."

It would be interesting to learn whether the hypothesis about racial 
differences in rates of voided ballots still holds up in recent years 
for precincts that primarily use hand-marked paper ballots and more 
modern scanners.

On 1/18/2021 12:32 PM, Kogan, Vladimir wrote:
>
> Someone may have mentioned this already, but there is some compelling 
> (although older) evidence of larger racial disparities with HMPB vs. 
> BMDs: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-5907.00004 
> <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-5907.00004>
>
> *Abstract:/An accumulating body of research suggests that African 
> Americans cast invalid ballots at a higher rate than whites. Our 
> analysis of a unique precinct‐level dataset from South Carolina and 
> Louisiana shows that the black‐white gap in voided ballots depends 
> crucially on the voting equipment people use. In areas with punch 
> cards or optically scanned ballots, the black‐white gap ranged from 
> four to six percentage points. Lever and electronic machines, which 
> prohibit overvoting and make undervoting more transparent and 
> correctible, cut the discrepancy by a factor of ten. Judging from exit 
> polls and opinion surveys, much of the remaining difference could be 
> due to intentional undervoting, which African Americans profess to 
> practice at a slightly higher rate than whites. In any case, the use 
> of appropriate voting technologies can virtually eliminate the 
> black‐white disparity in invalid ballots./*
>
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