Campaigns & Elections

During the 2012 election, there was a 100-year low in terms of the number of counties that voted for a different party than they did four years earlier. This flipping of counties usually has an average of 24% each election, but the November election saw only 6.8% of counties flip. Bill Bishop compared county-level voting from 2008 to 2012 and found that "[o]nly 207 counties changed allegiance in 2012 out of more than 3,100 counties that cast votes.

With the holidays over, November’s election is growing increasing distant in the rearview mirror but that hasn’t stopped analysis of voter trends. A new study from the American Political Science Review entitled “Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters’ Limitation in Controlling Incumbents” sort of sounds like a fancy way of calling voters stupid. It may not explicitly do so, but it certainly calls into question the competence of voters when it comes to assessing the performance of incumbent politicians.

We relayed recently that after a long vote-tallying process, Alameda County’s transportation measure fell just short of enough votes for passage. But supporters of Measure B1 aren’t quite ready to throw in the towel just yet. So while it’s almost December, the election still isn’t over yet because supporters have formally reserved the right to request a recount. In order for the measure to pass, it needs two-thirds of the vote and the final outcome was indeed very close, as it gained 66.53 percent of the vote when 66.67 percent was needed for passage.

In a society that expects rapid results, Election Day can be a test of one’s patience and while reporting outcomes is not a race to the finish-line, Riverside County is once again the center of criticism for being the slowest county in the state when it came to reporting results. Scrutiny over a delay in results has a history in the county, as back in 2010 Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore was fired after supervisors lost their patience with continuing to come in last, particularly after the purchase of $650,000 in new equipment.

It’s being called the Yelp of democracy and counties may want to pay attention to a new crowd-sourced, election-monitoring tool created by a Harvard professor. MyFairElection.com allows Americans to rate their polling experience and report any complaints or problems. Archon Fung, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center, is the creator of the platform that will aggregate voter-provided data into heat maps and other data-rich displays.