"Justice Department Reviewing Aschroft; FEC Data Pointed to Possible Violations"

The Washington Post offers this report.

"McCain-Feingold's Internet Loophole"

Chris Sullentrop offers this report on Slate.

Columbia Journalism Review Website Asks for More Press Coverage of the 527 Issue

The Campaign Desk website of the Columbia Journalism Review offers this posting, which begins: "A largely behind-the-scenes lobbying effort is underway that could affect the manner in which campaigns are financed during this election, and many to come. That effort may also have the unintended effect of rocking the non-profit world to its very foundations."

Punch Card Errors and the Schwartzman Effect

Readers who remember this post about errors in the California recall election may wish to look at this working paper, Do Punch Cards Promote Voter Error? Evidence from the California Recall Election by Thomas S. Dee of Swarthmore College. Here is the abstract:

Conventional evaluations of voting systems have focused on the prevalence of ballots for which no vote can be recorded (i.e., “residual” votes). However, recorded votes that were mistakenly cast are another potentially important - but less easily measured - source of error. In this study, I present evidence that a relatively small but non-trivial number of voters in the recent California recall election mistakenly voted for the four candidates positioned next to the two major candidates on the ballot. I then examine whether the prevalence of these errors was influenced by the type of voting technology used (i.e., punch card, optical scan, touch screen). The results of this analysis are consistent with conventional studies of residual votes and indicate that punch card systems significantly increased the prevalence of these voter errors (i.e., by at least a third).

"Old New Voting Machine, Same Old Fraud"

I usually don't link to international election law issues (for example, I've been ignoring election controversies currently brewing in Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Iran and Iraq). But this story out of India in today's New York Times is worth reading to put into perspective some of the voting problems in the United States.

Bauer on Party Independent Spending

Responding to this post, Bob Bauer writes here on independent party spending post-BCRA.

-- 
Rick Hasen
Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow
Loyola Law School
919 South Albany Street
Los Angeles, CA  90015-1211
(213)736-1466
(213)380-3769 - fax
rick.hasen@lls.edu
http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html
http://electionlawblog.org