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Thad Hall

Thad Hall is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah and a research fellow at its Institute of Public and International Affairs. From 2000 to 2004, he worked for The Century Foundation on issues relating to election reform and the Internet. With R. Michael Alvarez, Hall wrote Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promises of Digital Democracy and runs a blog on election reform.

Sarah Laskow interviewed Hall on July 1, 2008.

If you could start out with just telling us what’s your background with these issues?

I’m a political science professor at the University of Utah. I have written three books on various aspects of elections and several articles on this topic as well. We have two new books out, one on election fraud called Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, which is an edited volume with Michael Alvarez, myself, and Susan Hyde, who is at Yale University. And Michael Alvarez at Caltech and I just wrote a book called Electronic Elections. That book is out from Princeton University Press. It discusses the issues associated with all voting equipment, but we focus on electronic voting.

I understand you’re also working with the EAC to study vote counting and recounting?

That’s correct.

For that, the counting and recounting, what can you tell us about the current state of those laws and procedures? What are the best and worst examples that you see?

That project is still ongoing. I really can’t talk about all the details of it. We did a preliminary version of the vote recount study that was completed about a year ago. We’re now updating it. In the preliminary study, one of the things you see is there’s a great deal of variation across states and how they handle ballots, how they handle vote counting issues, kind of the clarity of their laws. Obviously, those things are important because they affect what might happen if there was to be a close election.

For example, in a recent movement toward looking at election audit laws, those laws, for instance, often have things in them that say if you should conduct an audit, the audit should look at both the electronic and the paper trail. If there’s a discrepancy, you should figure out which one to use. That’s not really clear. If ‘X’ occurs, you do ‘Y.’ That’s one of the big issues that we’ve seen in these state laws. There’s often a lack of clarity about how to handle a specific problem. Some states actually do have very clear laws. We’ve seen, for instance, in Virginia there’s a very clear statute of what it takes to actually go into the system and recount ballots, and how exactly you do those recounts, what exactly constitutes a ballot that can be recounted and what doesn’t. When you have that kind of clarity, it’s really a lot easier to work through the system.

The other issue that we see is that there are states that give more time for figuring out these post-election questions than others do. For instance, some states have to certify their elections within a week, like California. That would be considering provisional ballots and stuff like that, compared to other states that give almost a month to go through the process of doing the audits. There are also little quirks in the process. For instance, not all states require polling places to keep track of how many people signed in to vote. The first step of doing an audit, to see if there were ballots issued to people who signed in, you can’t really do. There are little things like that where some states don’t require the same sort of reconciliations. That’s also problematic in this day and age.

Can you think of any examples of states that are particularly unclear in their laws? You talked about one that was particularly clear, Virginia.

As I say, we’re updating this project. We gave states some feedback on their statutes so they could say the kinds of mistakes they were missing. I’m not sure what states have updated their laws. I’m kind of reticent to say anything about that.

What other current research are you doing on election problems?

We’re doing a series of election audit projects right now to look at what constitutes an effective election audit. We’re looking at both post-election audits and also looking at how you can do audits more broadly where you actually are looking at the features of the election that feed into that post-election audit. There’s been a lot of interest recently in looking at how you actually go about recounting and election and doing an audit of the electronic system or the paper system to make sure the tabulation worked correctly.

That’s pretty interesting. I think I read in your book that you can’t really audit an election because it is a secret ballot.

It does make it more difficult. What you can do, though, is audit the process. When you think about what an audit is, a lot of what an audit is is a process. Those projects are ongoing. We’re trying to figure out how you can audit an ongoing process to make sure that it’s done correctly. There’s quite a bit of literature on how you do this in the audit world. Audits in the financial world, it’s not just focused on making sure the bottom lines add up. If you think about somebody like Enron, their bottom lines added up fine. The problem is that they weren’t following the appropriate process for adding up their bottom lines. They were making off-balance sheets and things like that.

What you have to do with elections is consider whether or not you should be doing it in some different way as well, thinking about audits more broadly. That’s an ongoing project that we’re doing that we’re not finished with. We’re also doing a series of projects on studying voter confidence. We’ve been looking at the facts that make voters confident and not confident in the election process. We’re looking at things like poll-worker interactions and voting technology and things like that, how they influence public confidence. Some of the things we’ve learned there is that the quality of the poll workers and the training that poll workers have make a big difference in confidence. We also know that people, if they vote for winning candidates, not surprisingly, tend to be more confident.

One of the things that’s kind of funny about both the fraud and the voter confidence literature is, people who vote for winning candidates tend to not think that their elections are fraudulent. People who vote for wining candidates are confident that the process is fair and all that stuff. It’s kind of interesting.

Part of it, too, is also from an expectation component of it as well. You can think back to the 2006 election. The Republicans did not do as well nationally as Democrats did, obviously. Republicans had also been told by the media that their candidates were going to get beat. There wasn’t the same level of concern as existed in 2004 where Democrats were very shocked that their candidate lost again to George [W.] Bush. You get this difference between these two groups.

It’s kind of an interesting difference; when you have this expectation that bad things may happen, you’re not so shocked. If you don’t, you tend to want to discount it. It’s a lot easier to say, “the system was fraudulent,” as opposed to, “my candidate ran a terrible campaign.” That’s one of the interesting aspects of this.

Based on all your work in these different areas, what do you think the greatest challenge or stress is that the electoral system is going to face in the upcoming election?

I think there’s a big focus right now on technology and machines and things like that and the way people vote, as opposed to there being a similar focus on the process by which elections are run. If you step back from it and you think about the way elections are run, one of the things you want to have is an election where poll workers are well trained, where there are very clear procedures for how you handle ballots, for how you handle voters in the polling places, how you handle security, how you handle chains of custody and ballots. I think if people took those issues much more seriously, both election officials and advocates — I think election officials by and large do take them seriously, although there are some places where there are problems.

That’s kind of the key to running an effective election. It’s having these processes in place that make the system work correctly. If you look at problems that have occurred in recent elections, both on paper ballots and with electronic voting, the big problems that arise are related to people failing to follow procedures, or not being trained to know how to handle things, or just not having a contingency plan. For instance, people who ran out of paper ballots during the primaries obviously just hadn’t really thought about how to handle those types of issues. You really have to have thought those through. That’s really a problem.

You can’t really necessarily predict what’s going to happen, and if you haven’t thought it through, then there might not be a plan.

Exactly. I think Norm Orenstein and some people at the AEI Brookings Election Reform Project did a really interesting study of what would happen if there was a terrorist event that occurred on an election. Or even think about the flooding that just occurred. People don’t think about those things. What would we do if those things happened on Election Day? Things happen. 9/11 was Election Day. You really have to think through: “How am I going to handle this? What am I going to do? How am I going to make sure that my election runs effectively?” A lot of people haven’t done that. That’s a big problem.

Do you think that we’ve improved since 2000 or 2004?

Things are a lot better than they were then.

What’s gotten better?

I think that people are taking procedural aspects of elections a lot more seriously. I think voters are much more sensitive to the process and making sure that things work well. I think all those things are very important. We’ve also improved voting technology since then.

It seems like there’s been some confusion with the voter technology question. I keep reading these stories that say, “We’re going to electronic, and now we’re going back to paper.”

It’s just kind of interesting. You’re right that there is this difference. If we look at the voting process from 2004, there was a dramatic decline in residual votes, things like that, compared to previously. I think that’s a good sign. We should recognize that there are shortcomings. Things are pretty good.

That’s very optimistic, compared to a lot of people who talk about elections, I think. Maybe I’ve just been reading too many books.

You have to remember that a lot of people have an interest, for various reasons, in focusing on this negative side. I think there are negatives to the process, but there are also positives that we have to be aware of as well. We should focus on both. I think that we should recognize that a lot of this is not a technology problem, but a problem of making sure that we have good procedures. If you think of it as an administrative problem, it’s a little bit different.

As an academic, how do you see your role in this area that’s often very politicized?

My role is to do good research and get that research out to the broader community. That’s what we should be doing. That’s why we have an academic peer review process where people do peer-review literature. Research is not done initially in the public square, but it’s done carefully in an academic setting where people get reviewed by your peers. We know what’s good research, and then we’re able to do things with that research.

Your job seems really hard. As I’ve been reading about these issues and trying to understand and talking to people, it just has struck me that there’s not a lot of data out there about elections.

I think it’s funny. There is and there isn’t. One of the issues is that a lot of people have data; they just don’t know that they have the data. Getting the data can be really difficult.

Like who?

It’s funny. You’ll be in a meeting with elections officials [who say,] “If we could just get this data, it’d be great.” They have the data. A lot of times, they don’t have it in the right format or things like that. There’s a lot of data out there. Part of the secret is to try to get it or to do the surveys you need to do to do it. It’s not necessarily that hard. It just takes a little bit of time and effort and thinking about how to do it.

The data, the work we did on voter confidence wasn’t that hard to do. We just did a survey. A lot of people hadn’t thought to do that survey work before. It wasn’t that we did anything that unique. It was just that we just had thought to do it. It was a very good project to do. We got really good findings out of it.

So you just have to know where to look.

Exactly. There are data limitations. You have to try to figure out how you can go about getting the data and answering the questions.

From your perspective, have you seen if money plays a role in election administration at all? Can anyone with a chunk of money come in and have an influence from the outside, or is it pretty impervious to those sorts of things?

It’s kind of like looking at the campaign finance question. What would happen if a millionaire came in? Let me answer it this way. I think that the money problem and the money issue in elections often falls around the fact that elections are run by election officials, but they’re paid for by — this is not what you’re asking but I’m going to answer it this way anyway — county commissioners or state legislators who have other funding issues that they’re interested in.

To answer your question in kind of a non-conspiratorial type way, there actually could be a lot of good that would come from investing a lot of money in elections. It wouldn’t actually have to be a lot of money, either. It would just have to be investing in elections in a way where we were spending a little bit more money on training, on procedures, on things like that that make the system run a lot more smoothly. I think if we did that, you could actually make a big difference in how elections are run and their effectiveness. It just requires making a commitment to fund elections and to make sure that you are making the procedures work well.

There is the HAVA [Help America Vote Act] money.

The money, again, addresses the technology question. It addresses the kind of process and procedure questions that are critical to all this. That’s kind of the shortcoming of it. When you look at this thing as a one-shot process or things like that, it becomes more problematic. You have to think about it much more consistently as being an issue where you’re going to address it in a comprehensive sort of way.