Category Archives: Elections
Slovenia rejects new family law
Last week in Slovenia, voters rejected, via a national referendum, a new family law that would allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The new family code was passed by the then-governing center-left coalition in 2011 but a conservative religious group collected the signatures necessary to challenge the law in a referendum.With a low turnout of approximately 26 percent, around 55 percent of voters rejected the law, while about 45 percent supported it.
I’ve discussed several times my opposition to direct democracy without turnout thresholds. They allow a small, driven group of individuals to pass laws so long as the rest of the population isn’t as equally mobilized to stop them. This is a great example of that. Should Slovenia really be overturning such an important law based on the preferences of just over 14 percent of voters?
Cameras in Russian polling stations
From the WSJ comes this story about Russia’s plan to install web cameras in polling stations for the March presidential election.
Russia Friday launched the presidential election website, www.webvybory2012.ru, that will allow web users to access video recorded at any of the approximately 92,000 polling stations across the country. One camera will give a full panorama view of each polling station and a second camera will be directed at the ballot box.
[...]
The website allows users to select as many polling stations for monitoring as they wish, although only until Election Day. Users will be able to monitor the election from 12 a.m. to 8 p.m. Moscow time. For an hour, recording will continue but nothing will be shown to observe the secrecy of the ballot. Starting at 9 p.m., when voting closes in Kaliningrad, Russia’s westernmost province, the service will show ballot counting and viewers will be able to see video from 8 p.m. local time.
Webcams in polling stations aren’t a bad idea by themselves, but I have a lot of problems with the way this is being implemented. My first concern is that it may contribute to the common development practitioner practice of assuming impact from an output. As with all transparency initiatives (making public records available, etc..) it’s not enough to simply produce the information and assume civil society will use it. Often times they won’t. There are many similar “citizen monitoring” projects being done through the Ushahidi platform, which produce neat maps. Often the assumption is that people will actually do something with that map. I don’t want to bash Ushahidi too hard as I think it can do interesting things, but producing data should not be viewed as a behavior-changing impact of an intervention. It’s just an output that we hope will lead to the behavior change.
The webcams do, however, remind me of an innovative experiment done in Afghanistan: In 2010, local election monitors took photographs of the final tally sheets in local Afghan polling stations, which was shown to reduce fraud by 60%. The Afghanistan experiment was done through a Randomized Control Trial (RCT), which brings me to my next problem with this experiment.
It’s always difficult to determine if election monitoring actually reduces fraud (although Susan Hyde has done great work showing that it can). This is for the simple reason that we don’t know the counterfactual level of fraud if the observation wasn’t there. Because of this, I think it would be much smarter if - instead of trying to put webcams in nearly every polling station – they randomly assigned the web cameras to certain stations. This would allow us to measure if the intevention was actually effective or not. Aside from the fact that so many webcams will make monitoring of any of them less effective, not randomizing the cameras will make it impossible to actually determine impact. Of course this assumes the actual goal of the project is to reduce fraud and not just give the appearance of transparency.
Bad election administration has consequences
Croatians voted in favor of European Union membership in a referendum on Sunday, although turnout was officially placed at 43 percent. Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic stated that this was a result of an inaccurate and out-of-date voter registry. If the voter roll was accurate, Pusic claimed, then actual turnout may have been closer to 60 percent of voters.
I’ve previously discussed how I believe that most plebiscites should require some turnout threshold in order for a measure to pass. Thresholds can prevent a small, driven group of individuals from easily passing beneficial laws assuming the rest of the population isn’t as equally mobilized to stop them. EU membership is an important issue, so a turnout requirement would make sense here. When nobody even knows how many voters exist, however, such a rule is impossible.
Like this:
Institutions are still important, even in America
I try not to venture into American politics much on this blog but there is one thing that’s really bothered me that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. I know this is somewhat outdated, as Rick Perry is yesterday’s news, but why did no one challenge him on the idea that he would cut Congress’ pay in half?
“The idea that [a congressman or woman] makes three times what the average family makes is really obscene,” he said. “[They] need to have their salaries cut in half, they need to spend half as much on their budget, and they need to be in Washington half the time.”
It is somewhat depressing that in no debate, no member of the media, or no other candidate, bothered to ask Perry where in the Constitution the president has the authority to determine congressional pay. If someone did, Perry’s famous three branches of government mishap would have have become his second most embarrassing debate moment. That’s because the president does not determine congressional pay. Congress does. The president is not the boss of congress, even though people only seem to hold the former accountable. It’s this same lack of knowledge of how American institutions work that leads otherwise smart people to speculate how a third party president could really change things.
Electoral Choice and Ballot Complexity: Effects on Turnout
Work has been a little hectic lately, so the blogging has been light of late. I do plan on resuming a more consistent schedule soon, however. Before diving back in the Egypt numbers, however, I wanted to highlight two very good papers I saw presented at APSA several months ago.
When advising on electoral system design, election assistance practitioners often recommend that developing countries implement simple systems that their voters will be able to understand. While the theory behind this is sound, I’ve always wondered if we were overestimating the impact of ballot complexity. After all, I’m sure many Americans aren’t aware that many of their city council races are MNTV, while their congressional race is FPTP, yet our system still functions. In two papers that actually attempt to answer this question, Aina Gallego of Stanford University and Saul Cunow of UCSD both looked at what impact various electoral variables have on voter turnout. Aina argued that increases in ballot complexity, while not impacting educated voters, has a negative effect on turnout rates of less educated citizens. Aina used two strategies to test her hypothesis. For the first, she conducted a field experiment where she sent several fake ballot questions to a random group of Spanish citizens. The control group was given a straightforward ballot containing descriptions of candidates and which party they belonged to, and then asked to vote for one. The second group was given the same list, but was asked to vote for up to five. The second group had a 12 percent drop in responses from low-educated citizens. For her second strategy, she ran a cross-national regression of electoral system design by turnout among various demographics and found that controlling for other factors, increased preference votes were associated with a decrease in turnout.
I had two problems with Aina’s methodology. The first is her field experiment failed to simulate a realistic ballot structure that any voter would encounter. The second is her classification of voting system type was binary (ability to cast preference votes or not) and did not account for the many rules that would significantly impact the level of ballot complexity within preference voting systems. This could include the option of voting across multiple parties, the ability to rank candidates, and the ability to punish candidates on a given party list. Also, her theory is based on the cognitive perceptions of voters before they decide to vote, not on what they actually experience in the voting booth. Invalid ballots are evidence of voters who were unable to handle the ballot, but showed up anyway. Therefore, I would suggest a more realistic measure would be district magnitude, as an increase in candidate choice would, by her theory, intimidate the voter and make them less likely to turnout. Despite these shortcomings, her paper provided a new look at a concept that has been assumed, but never rigorously tested.
Related, Saul Cunow conducted a field experiment in Brazil and found that there is a curvilinear relationship between the number of candidates on a ballot and turnout. That is, at low levels of candidate choice, turnout is low as voters feel they have little options. As the number of choices increases, turnout increases, due to the more choices. After the number of potential candidates increases past a certain level, however, turnout decreases as people are confused by the number of choices and have a harder time distinguishing between them. Saul also finds that the presence of party labels does not reduce the probability of abstention among higher numbers of candidates.
Both are good papers and you should read them.
Bad election managment
From Al Masry Al Youm:
Disabled citizens faced difficulties while voting in this week’s round of parliamentary elections, a number of rights groups have said.
There were no sign language interpreters to help the deaf and the majority of polling stations were located on upper floors, making it difficult for voters in wheelchairs, the Egyptian Coalition for the Disabled in Alexandria said.
[...]Heba Hagras, an Egyptian Bloc candidate who has a disability, also said no facilities were available for those with special needs. Hagras said she found it difficult to go up to the polling stations in her wheelchair. She said one supervising judge refused to leave the voting station to help her.
Mohamed Mokhtar, who also uses a wheelchair, said his polling station was on the third floor and the scrambling of voters made it even more difficult to reach the ballot box.
There are a lot of people with disabilities in Egypt. This is embarrassing.
Compulsory voting in Egypt
Something I’ve heard surprisingly little about with all the election coverage is how Egyptians are responding to the High Election Commission’s (HEC) announcement that the government fully plans on enforcing the country’s mandatory voting requirements. I did find this from the Daily News Egypt.
“We do not have a polling station specifically for senior citizens so we have to take permission from other voters in the queue to go to the front because we cannot stand for too long,” said a voter who preferred to remain anonymous at one of Tora’s polling stations.
“Some of those senior citizens came to vote because they are afraid of the LE 500 fine if they fail to vote,” Fathy said, adding that they do not even know the candidates they will vote for and are asking others about their selected candidates.
The law requiring eligible voters to participate existed in the past, but was never enforced. The HEC, however, has publicly stated that it intends to levy a LE 500 (Approximately 83 USD) fine on any eligible voter who does not cast a ballot. (I can’t find out if this applies to both the first and second round). While LE 500 could be easily paid by richer Egyptians, it is the equivalent of many months’ salary for the large lower class. This raises serious concerns over the ethicacy of such a law that will disproportionately hurt lower economic classes. Given the unconsolidated nature of the political party system, it seems unfair to force voters to choose somebody, when it is more than possible that nobody represents their views. Turnout for the March referendum was only 41 percent of eligible voters, indicating a large number of Egyptians are not political engaged.
I could speculate on the effects of compulsorily voting in Egypt, but it wouldn’t be much more than that. I do think the greatest threat it could pose to the election process would be dramatically increasing the number of invalid ballots. From what I’ve gathered, both the ballots for the nominal and list tier of seats need to be filled out correctly for an elector’s votes to count. Given the high illiteracy rate, confusing ballot design, and the fact that mandatory voting is most likely to bring out apathetic voters, I could see how this would cause problems. Of course a well organized party could take advantage of this by providing voters with information on how to cast a ballot. Anthony Downs’ model is put to the test.
Hopefully somebody did an exit poll and asked how big of a factor this was in turning out voters. Until we have final turnout numbers, however, there isn’t much we can go on.
Egypt’s election law favors small parties, fractured parliament
Although it’s difficult to predict many aspects of Egypt’s upcoming election, most observers assume that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party will win a plurality of seats, while the smaller, divided liberal parties will perform poorly. This is most likely true. What is not true, however, is the often-stated proposition that this is partially because the country’s electoral system works to the Brotherhood’s advantage. There are some good reasons people have said this. Under previous versions of the electoral law, I’ve made the same argument. As the rules stand now, however, this is not completely true. The details of the new electoral system, specifically the seat allocation method in the proportional tier, will give actually give a boost to the fractured liberal parties, while depriving the Brotherhood of a majority they would obtain in more commonly used electoral systems. The reason for this is due to the formula used to calculate who wins the two-thirds of seats in the proportional representation tier.
No proportional representation system can perfectly award seats in one-to-one relation to vote shares. There are various systems for allocating seats proportionally but broadly speaking, they all fall into two categories: the largest remainder method (which Egypt uses), and the highest average method. For the largest remainder method, each seat in a legislature corresponds to a raw number of votes, equal to a quota, and a party’s seat share depends on the number of quotas it wins in an election. How that quota is calculated varies based on the system, but under the simplest method, the Hare quota, total votes are divided by N (total) seats to create a quota used for allocation. After this number is calculated, parties are awarded seats for every time they reach that quota. However, after the quota is reached a certain number of times, there are bound to be some seats left over, as well as remainder votes that didn’t contribute to a full quota. Parties’ remainder votes are then tallied and used to determine who will get the remaining seats.
For the upcoming elections, it appears Egypt will use a Hare quota. Despite its recent use in Tunisia, the Hare quota is a somewhat unpopular method. Figure one shows that the largest remainder method, and the Hare quota specifically, isn’t nearly as common as the highest average method of seat allocation. I bring this up because it’s notable the government chose a less common system.
Figure one
Hare quotas may be less popular because, while being easier to understand, they are slightly less proportional than other systems. In general, Hare quota’s favor smaller parties, and produce more fractured parliaments. In the case of Egypt, it will benefit smaller parties. To illustrate this, let’s look at how the Hare quota will play out. In Figure two, I made a very crude estimate of a hypothetical vote distribution in one of Cairo’s four districts (with a district magnitude of ten). For vote totals, I divided how well each party was doing in the most recent public opinion survey by the total voters. My total voters was calculated by taking how many Cairo voters participated in the March referendum and dividing by four (the number of districts in Cairo). The problem with this, of course, is that I’m using a national poll and placing it at a district level. Unless somebody is willing to provide me with crosstabs, however, this is the best I can do. First the Hare quota is calculated (576,640/N (10)), which equals 57,664. This is the number of votes a party needs to get one seat in the first distribution. After this, however, we still have five more seats to allocate. So the remainders are then ordered from highest to lowest, and the five parties with the highest remainders are given one extra seat.
Freedom and Justice gets four seats, Al-Wafd gets two, and the remaining four seats go to the next four parties. Note that in this scenario, Freedom and Justice isn’t being specifically disadvantaged; they are actually receiving the number of seats they deserve. It’s just that smaller parties, are getting more seats than we would expect if the system was perfectly proportional.
Now let’s look at how the exact same scenario would turn out if we used the much more common, highest average method. Specifically, the D’Hondt system, which is the most common method used across the world. Figure three below shows how this works. Party votes are first divided by 1, then 2, then 3, and so on until they reach N number of seats in the district. So in our Cairo district, they would keep dividing untill they reached ten. This produces the chart we see below. After this, the N (in this case, ten) highest distributions are found, and each one awards that party a seat. As we can see below, this method give Freedom and Justice six seats in total, Al-Wafd three, and Al-Nour one. In this case, Freedom and Justice overperforms, while the other parties generally get what should be expected.
Figure three (Click to enlarge)
It should also be noted that this method would favor Freedom and Justice even more in smaller Egyptian districts. Under the D’Hondt method, a decrease in districts magnitude can decrease the number of parties who win a seat. If, for example, this was a rural district in Masa Matruh Governorate, with four seats, then Freedom and Justice would get three seats and Wafd one.
There are several interpretations of why the SCAF would choose the largest remainder method. The first is that they were simply using the system closest to what was used the last time Egypt had PR elections, in the 1980s. (1) This would seem plausible. A second interpretation is that this is an attempt to weaken the Muslim Brotherhood, whom they knew would be the largest party. (Perhaps the Tunisian transitional authority made the same calculation with regards to weakening Enahda’s seat total). A third interpretation is that the SCAF wants to reduce the number of wasted votes (votes cast for a party that doesn’t enter parliament). A high number of wasted votes could jeopardize the legitimacy of the election in the eyes of many Egyptians. A fourth, very cynically theory that I don’t actually believe, is that the SCAF is intentionally trying to create a parliament that is as fractured and weak as possible. The SCAF’s reluctance to abolish the nominal tier of seats, which most people predict will be won predominately by independents; the low .5% threshold for entering parliament; and the Hare quota, are all rules that will favor a greater quantity of small parties, and MPs with no party affiliation. This could create a parliament that is weak and ineffective, either creating a strong president, or weakening the public’s trust in democratic institutions. An extreme cynic could argue that both of these would benefit the SCAF.
I’m more inclined to believe in the first explanation, and think that a large number of wasted votes is greater threat to the legitimacy of the election than a fractured parliament. Regardless of why these rules were chosen, however, it’s important to realize the implications they will have.
(1) In 1984 and 1987, Egypt used a modified Hare Quota, where seats that could not be awarded on the basis of full quotas were awarded to whichever party had at least half a quota. When no party achieved this cutoff, such seats were awarded to the nationally most popular party. This was a very unproportional way to allocate remainders, and served to boost the seat total of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.
Tunisia links
Unfortunately, coverage of Tunisia’s election seems to be sparse, so I wanted to share two links I’ve recently found that I beleive are helpful.
- A 21st Century Social Contract is a good blog covering post-revolutionary Tunisia
- Tunisia Live is an English language news site that has lots of up-to-date news about the election.
Democracy in Libya
While watching Al Jazeera today, I became annoyed that so many experts and analysts kept referring to this mythical Libyan election that will somehow take place in 8-9 months. I don’t expect an election administration expert on every TV panel but I wish somebody asked if this was a realistic timetable (spoiler: it’s not). Libya isn’t the first post-conflict country to deal with the difficult decision of an election timetable. The optimal time to hold a first election is different from country to country, and the tradeoffs are important. The earlier the election, the harder it is to run a good one. The longer you wait, the less legitimacy the interim government will have. Libya will probably have the benefit of massive amounts of foreign funding and expertise, but that still doesn’t guarantee a well run election. One only has to look at Kosovo to see that unlimited resources, although helpful, are far from sufficient for avoiding major pitfalls in an election.
Another troubling thing I’ve heard on more than one occasion is the notion that institution building in Libya will be like working on a “blank slate.” I’ve also heard this used to describe South Sudan and in both cases, they aren’t completely true. When it comes to governance, there is not such thing as a black slate. Governing has been taking place in some way. There may be a lack of formal democratic institutions, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t doing things before we got there. It’s true that in terms of elections and governing institutions, Libya is much more of a blank state than most countries, but that doesn’t mean informal methods of governance, even at the local level, won’t influence the institutions that are eventually developed.
