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The Early Voting Information Center
We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked with on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, and a number of state and local elections offices.
Professor Gronke's academic credentials including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers can be found at his personal Reed web page.
EVIC researchers for Summer 2013 are Jacob Canter and Chelsea Brossard.
Pew’s Election Performance Index released
Congratulations to Zach Markovits, Charles Stewart, and the Pew team that has been working on the Election Performance Index for a number of years. It’s been a long road, and there will inevitably be complaints from states who think they are ranked unfairly, and from advocates who think the rankings are insufficiently detailed or use the wrong measures.
From my perch inside this machine, it has been educational–and frustrating–to discover how difficult it still remains to collect comparable, consistent, and relatively complete measures of election performance for 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many of the rankings are driven upwards and downwards not by performance but by simple reporting. That will remain the case until states feel some pressure to collect and report a relatively complete set of indicators after each election. (This kind of pressure is one of the rationales behind the index first proposed by Heather Gerken.)
If anyone wants a sense of how much forward progress has been made in a few short years, compare this report to the first exploratory effort, the Data for Democracy report that I assembled along with Dan Seligson in late 2008. It is encouraging to see how much progress has been made between the two presidential election cycles.