Challenged Ballots in Minnesota

Minnesota Public Radio has published many of the challenged ballots in the recount there. Rounds 1 2 3 and 4. I understand that some people (given the overall volume) are bound to change their minds and want to scratch out a choice. However, if a voter fails to follow clear and explicit directions to fill in the oval and only the oval for all contests on the ballot (witness below), that voter's ballot should not be counted.

I suppose for me the most agitating part of all of this comes to mind when I reflect on my roll-off studies. Maybe instead of actual trends resulting from political institutions, it's all just trends in lunacy and oddity. Why would someone randomly abstain from a string of elections only to continue on the ballot later? Might as well figure out why someone chose to take the time to write in "Lizard People" for every write-in slot, and not vote for "Lizard People" for Senate. Oh democracy, how much better you are than the alternatives, but how revealing you are of the people.

Lobbying and Bailout Size

This graph is floating around a bit after Lee Drutman submitted some interesting analysis to The Monkey Cage. I think Andrew Gelman makes a good point that we're looking at some serious selection bias here, and it would be nice to see more zero bailout points to get a better idea of overall lobbying expenditures. Also, as one of the commenters points out, without AIG, there is arguably not much of a relationship there. Pretty graph, but I wouldn't worry about it too much. The AIG lobbying-bailout outlier simply as a relationship between size of bailout and size of assets (Y-axis only) is particularly interesting though. 

Ballot Roll-Off

As promised in my first post, here's the deal with undervoting/roll-off. First, the definition is pretty simple for those not familiar. Roll-off is the phenomenon of voters not completing a ballot with a selection in each contest. It tends to occur more towards the bottom of the ballot in races like "Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor."

Obviously, this year I was pretty interested in this phenomenon as it affected those of us down the ballot from Barack Obama. Many people were expecting landslides down the ballot for Democrats. We wanted an empirical estimate of what it would be, and more importantly, if it would be. Would there be an Obama wave to ride for the rest of the Democratic Party? Are young/AA voters more likely to roll off of the ballot?

From my analysis of previous elections, the answer to that exact question was no. What was frightening, however, was the nuance. While young and/or AA voters do not roll off at a rate greater than average voters, newly registered young and AA voters were very much more likely to roll off in the 2008 primary in NC. Simply put, there would be a downballot Obama wave, we just needed to learn how to surf it and make sure it got all the way to shore. That's why you saw all kinds of advocacy of the straight party ticket beyond standard turnout efforts. Because we knew turnout was not enough, and we knew by how much.

This study triggered my academic interest in the roll-off phenomenon. I just finished a paper studying the phenomenon in NC judicial elections and proposing an informal model of how to think of roll-off in a functional manner as it occurs within a single ballot. It's rather informal, so don't be surprised by the tone or absence of a thorough lit-review. If anyone is interested, here it is. Let me know in the comments section if you see anything you contest or have anything to say. It is, to say the least, a working paper that I hope to develop over the course of the next semester. 

Electoral Engineering Introduction

Welcome to my new (and first) blog! This blog will be the exhaust pipe for my assorted political thoughts. I often find myself wondering who bloggers are and what they are about, so here's me.

I am a senior undergraduate studying Political Science and Statistics (or Electioneering as I call it) at Duke. I grew up in Raleigh and have been a lifelong Duke fan. I found my way into Political Science by way of the Engineering school and a professor my freshman year who taught me about the world of understanding politics numerically and taught me the power of institutions to affect outcomes - hence the blog name. My passion is using and developing statistics to make strategic decisions. Politics is my chosen applied field. Long term I hope to work as a campaign consultant, most likely in polling. I may, however, end up in the non-political realm doing similar work. I guess not knowing is part of the glory of being young.

Politically, I am a registered Democrat who has worked on Democratic campaigns most recently for Bev Perdue's NC gubernatorial bid doing statistical strategy stuff. My involvement with Governor Perdue has made me ever more interested in politics as a career. However, I don't consider myself exactly a rah-rah party guy. I initially registered unaffiliated and voted Libertarian in the 2004 Presidential contest on the basis of neither major party candidate offering any real solution to the most pressing issue our government faced/faces - budget deficits.

Much of the writings I expect to do here will be something along the lines of the applied stat-type blogs I read (Andrew Gelman, Charles Franklin, Mark Blumenthal, Sam Wang, etc.) and the political blogs I read. I'll probably also get tempted to toss in some general political commentary. I'll be doing research with Professor John Aldrich next semester into undervoting (more on this to come), so I'll probably chronicle some of my work in that realm here as well.