Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT
MIT teacher’s research study measures the number of mail-in tallies ended up being “lost votes” in the 2016 U.S. federal election.
In elections, every vote counts. Or ought to count. But a brand-new research study by an MIT teacher shows that in the 2016 U.S. basic election, 4 percent of all mail-in tallies were not counted — about 1.4 million votes, or 1 percent of all votes cast, signifying a substantial issue that might grow in 2020.
The research study measures the variety of factors for this, consisting of late-arriving tallies, issues with tally signatures and envelopes, and poorly significant tallies, to name a few things.
“Mail ballots tend to have more mistakes on them,” states Charles Stewart, a teacher in MIT’s Department of Political Science and author of a paper detailing the research study, which takes a look at information from all 50 U.S. states.
Voting by mail — the exact same thing as absentee ballot — will most likely be more common than ever in 2020, as citizens look for to prevent crowds at ballot locations throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
As the research study recommends, specifies that have more experience with mail-in ballot tend to have a somewhat lower portion of lost votes. Thus the 2020 election might include an uncommonly high portion of lost mail-in ballot efforts, and the chances of your mail-in tally counting might differ a bit, depending upon where you live.
“The likelihood of a vote being lost by mail is, in part, determined by how the state feels about that,” states Stewart, who is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science and head of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. “States can put more or less effort into ensuring that voters don’t make mistakes. … There are different mail-ballot regimes, they handle the ballots differently, they operate under different philosophies of what mail balloting is supposed to achieve, and who bears the risk of mail balloting.”
The paper, “Reconsidering Lost Votes by Mail,” looks like a working paper on the Social Science Research Network, and will be released by the Harvard Data Science Review.
Check your work
The principle of “lost votes” was very first studied thoroughly by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP) following the objected to 2000 U.S. governmental election. The VTP concluded that of 107 million votes cast in 2000 — of all kinds, not simply mail-in ballot — in between 4 million and 6 million went unrecorded. The federal Help America Vote Act of 2003 (HAVA) consequently lowered that number to in between 2 million and 3 million.
The present paper extends that line of analysis to absentee votes, and updates a 2010 Stewart research study. Overall, there are 3 primary kinds of issues with mail-in votes: postal problems, procedural issues including things like signatures and tally envelopes, and vote-scanning issues.
In the very first case, about 1.1 percent of all mail-in votes are lost since of issues throughout the mailing procedure — from unfilled absentee tally demands to the return of those tallies. Some of those lost votes represent election-administration mistakes, not postal problems. Stewart does not believe current decreases in U.S. Postal Service capability will always alter that, although numerous professionals are prompting citizens to mail in their tallies immediately.
“Postal service problems, literally the ballot not arriving, the ballot arriving late, getting lost in the office, that’s one source,” Stewart states. “But it’s probably the least important source of loss, despite all the controversy about the postal service.”
Secondly, votes can likewise be lost when citizens deal with the procedure improperly: They stop working to sign tallies, are evaluated to have actually sent mismatched signatures, or do not utilize the tally’s security envelope, to name a few things. About 1.5 percent of mail-in votes experience these issues, Stewart price quotes.
“The voter can make a mistake in the certification process,” Stewarts states. “They don’t sign the envelope where they’re supposed to, they don’t seal it properly … there are all sorts of things that lead to rejected ballots.” Still, Stewart observes, “Election offices could be less persnickety about technical issues.”
The 3rd kind of issue, making up 1.5 percent of all efforts at absentee ballot, happens when scanning makers in ballot locations turn down tallies.
“The scanning problems, nobody really talks about because it’s the most abstract, but I think it may be the most important,” Stewart states.
This classification consists of citizen errors that might be remedied personally, however cause rejection on absentee tallies. When individuals “overvote,” picking a lot of prospects, scanning makers capture the mistakes — and HAVA mandates that in-person citizens can re-do the tally.
“If you overvote, there’s a requirement in federal law that the ballot be kicked back to you,” Stewart states about in-person ballot. “If you undervote, there’s not a requirement, however numerous states will settle back the tally [to voters]. But if you do that and drop your tally in the mail box, there’s no one to kick the tally back to you.”
One regular kind of overvote takes place when citizens redundantly include their picked prospect’s name to the write-in line, Stewart states: “The most common reason for overvotes is people will fill in the bubble for their candidate, and then they’ll go down to the bottom and write in the name of their candidate.”
There are other methods a citizen can nasty up a tally also.
“It could be, if you’re making choices and put your pencil down next to every name, that could be picked up as a vote by the scanners,” Stewart states. “There are things you just don’t think about that could go wrong.”
The location of lost votes
To perform the research study, Stewart utilized a range of information sources, consisting of U.S. Postal Service on-time rates, the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau.
One finding of the research study is that the portion of lost mail-in votes is lower in states that lean more greatly on absentee balloting in general. It is 3.5 percent in states that perform their elections nearly totally by mail (Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) and in those that keep an irreversible absentee tally list (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Montana, and Utah, plus Washington, D.C.). But the lost votes portion for mail-in tallies is greater, at 4.4 percent, in states that honor absentee tally demands without any reason required, and it’s 4.9 percent in states that need a reason for absentee balloting.
That recommends both that citizens end up being more skilled when they have more experience at mail-in ballot, which states might process mail tallies better when it ends up being regular for them. Stewart, for one, thinks that election authorities do a remarkable task in general.
“I’m very sanguine about the integrity of the process, from what I know about election officials,” Stewart states. Still, he acknowledges, absentee ballot can be a challenging procedure, and a substantial variety of votes might be lost in 2020.
“That’s why we have a lot of voter education going on right now,” Stewart states.
Reference: “Reconsidering Lost Votes by Mail” by Charles Stewart III, 18 September 2020, Harvard Data Science Review.
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3660625
