On reporting election results

Yesterday I complained that neither I nor the vast majority of voters in Denver's Tuesday election had any idea how to pick a good candidate for municipal clerk and recorder. I want to revise that statement slightly. I now have a pretty good idea of what poor behavior by a clerk and recorder's office looks like. That would be that office's decision to update election results every 90 minutes on election night.

I understand that most of what that office does really doesn't require real-time updating, and the only people checking election returns on election night are journalists, candidates, and nerds like me. And it's good to be careful. But I'm pretty confident that election night is when the office's website gets the bulk of its hits. I can't imagine it's that time-consuming to just throw the most recent results up on the web.

At any rate, the clerk and recorder's race is going to a runoff between Sarah McCarthy and Debra Johnson. Whichever candidate can most credibly promise to provide frequent, accurate vote updates on election nights has my vote.


Update: I am told by some people in the know that I should ease up. After all, the director of the elections division recently left, there were write-in candidates, and there was a surge in ballots on election day, not to mention that they have a small staff and time spent updating a website is time not spent counting ballots. This all may be true, but it's still possible to plan for the inevitable Tuesday crunch. I wonder if the elections division would take in volunteers on election day. Not to count ballots, mind you, but to help report numbers. It wouldn't be that hard to create a user-friendly computer template that allows volunteers to update the results as ballots are counted. I'd volunteer for this sort of thing.

Too many elections

It's Election Day in Denver! I just voted for mayor and two city council offices.* But what's really important is that I had a chance to vote for the city clerk and recorder's office. Whoever wins that race better, um, record... stuff... just the way I like, or there'll be hell to pay. Oh, and I also voted in the city auditor's race. Now, obviously, as a voter, I have strong opinions about auditing, so if the next incumbent doesn't audit in a fashion consistent with my auditing vision, I'll go out and find someone else who will.

Um, yes, I was being snarky. The point is, I don't see why these positions can't be appointed by the mayor and/or confirmed by the city council. I relied heavily on endorsements when casting votes because I really have no idea what makes someone a good municipal clerk/recorder or auditor. Frankly, I doubt the endorsers know much about that, either, but I'm counting on them to at least not endorse lunatics.

*I don't want to offer too many predictions about the mayoral election, except to say that it will go to a runoff featuring Romer and either Hancock or Mejia, and that Linkhart will under-perform his most recent polls. If you've followed this election at all, you know these aren't particularly brave forecasts.

Obama Untethered

Conservatives will no doubt rejoice that Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are calling on Obama to step down after one turn.  But a few important caveats.  First, Pat Caddell is a Democrat in the same sense that UB40 is a reggae band.  Second, the logic behind this article makes no sense whatsoever.

Caddell and Schoen reveal an utter distaste for elections, saying, "Governing and campaigning have become incompatible."  But let's set aside the moral repugnance of presidential advisers opposing democracy for a moment and deal with their argument on its own terms.  Only if Obama renounces his reelection, they argue, can he do the truly necessary work to improve the country.  This work apparently involves cutting spending.  Why is he more likely to do this work if he renounces a second term?  Because he'd be less beholden to the left and better able to work with Republicans:

If the president were to demonstrate a clear degree of bipartisanship, it would force the Republicans to meet him halfway. If they didn't, they would look intransigent, as the GOP did in 1995 and 1996, when Bill Clinton first advocated a balanced budget. Obama could then go to the Democrats for tough cuts to entitlements and look to the Republicans for difficult cuts on defense.

Right, concerns about looking intransigent should compel Republicans to work with Obama.  Never mind.  Why on Earth would an Obama who is not running for reelection be more likely to compromise with Republicans?  Of the 18 presidents who served during the 20th century*, five lost their reelection bids to candidates of the other party; zero went down to primary challenges.  In other words, if there's any pressure on Obama right now, it's more likely that he's feeling pulled toward the center than toward the extremes.  Obama knows that the chances of him losing to a Republican are greater than those of his being deposed by another Democrat.  Take away the reelection pressure, and what do you have?  An Obama who's more likely to move left than right.

Now, back to the moral repugnance.  I really don't understand pundits and pollsters who have such a hostile view toward democracy.  What evidence do we have that leaders who are either uninterested or incapable of seeking reelection are actually better at their jobs?  We have plenty of evidence pointing the other way.


*I'm counting McKinley and Ford, not counting W.

Ballot TRACE

As part of Denver's current mail-in voting system, the city is maintaining a website called Ballot TRACE (Tracking, Reporting, And Communication Engine).  You enter your name and birth date, and it tells you the status of your ballot.  As the readout at left notes, my ballot for Tuesday's primary has been received and recorded.  As an added bonus, you can have the site e-mail you or text you with ballot updates.

This strikes me as a pretty modest, inexpensive step an elections division can take to increase voters' confidence.  Kudos.

Primaries and Partisanship

John Sides has a few posts recently (here and here) in which he cites research by Eric McGhee at the Public Policy Institute of California on the effect of primary systems on the partisanship of elected officials. (Disclosure: Eric and I are working on a conference paper together on this topic.)  His findings suggest that the effect of moving from a closed to an open primary is surprisingly modest.  He further notes that during California's brief experiment with the blanket primary, politicians were no less polarized and the budget was still passed late.

Here's another way to look at this issue.  In the graph below, I've plotted Jerry Wright's data on legislative partisanship in each of the state legislatures during the 1999-2000 session along the vertical axis.  The horizontal axis is the type of primary the state was using at the time, going from most to least restrictive.

Now, notably, the states at the far right (Louisiana with its jungle or top-two primary and Nebraska with its nonpartisan elections) are among the least polarized legislatures.  However, the regression line is nonetheless flat.  We'd expect polarization to decrease as primaries become more open to independents -- they don't.  Indeed, many of the states employing the blanket primary at the time prove relatively partisan.  And Wisconsin and Ohio, which then employed open primaries, have among the most polarized legislatures in the country.  Of course, this is a pretty simple bivariate look at this problem, but one would expect to see more of an effect than this.

So what will happen if California adopts Proposition 14, the top-two primary, this spring?  Well, I suppose that depends on just how representative we think Louisiana is.  Does the Cajun State have a relatively moderate legislature because of its primary system, because of its unusual political culture, or because of other odd institutional rules in place there?  Given that it's hard to separate those out, and given that other evidence about primaries and partisanship suggests little relationship between the two, I doubt the initiative would have anything close to the impact its backers suggest.

I'm wondering if anyone has recent data on Washington's state legislature, the members of whom have been elected through a top-two primary since 2006.  Since Washington has been among the more polarized legislatures in recent years, it will be interesting to see if the chamber has been de-polarizing.