Mar 18 2010
Pew Center Issues Updated Cost Report
I’ve written much about the battle by some to radicalize the voter registration process. Part of the battle has been to decry the high cost of maintaining the current voter registration system.
To that end, the Pew Center issued a report in December detailing the costs of voter registration. I’ve linked to it below. I had serious doubts about some of the figures in the report and started to do some research. I’m in the middle of it now, but in at least one instance Pew has now modified their report and revealed that their “real” cost estimate was inflated by 10%. Here is the note sent to Oregon election officials.
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:11:40 -0400
Subject: Pew updates Oregon voter registration cost study numbersGood morning everyone:
Originally released by the Pew Center on the States in December 2009, “The Real Cost of Voter Registration: An Oregon Case Study,” noted the difficulty in determining voter registration costs and created a model—based on Oregon’s experience—for states to estimate their registration expenses. We recently received updated information from the Oregon Secretary of State’s office regarding the allocation of voter registration costs between the counties and the state. As a result of this new information and to address a miscalculation of the state’s costs, we are reducing the total amount spent on voter registration in 2008 from $9.7 million to $8.8 million in the report. These updates will result in additional adjustments including the average cost per registered voter moving to $4.11 from $4.51, and the average cost per voter registration transaction moving to $7.67 from $8.43.
Sincerely,
John Lindback
The problem that Pew is correcting is laid out in this email exchange I had with Dave Franks from the Oregon Secretary of States’ office. It appeared, and now Pew is admitting, that some of the costs of the Oregon voter registration system were being double counted. I caught it relatively quickly after I saw the first cost submission from an Oregon County. The suggestion in the Lindback email is that the SOS was inaccurate, but my emails with Franks suggest a different story.
Perhaps Pew would have caught this mistake on their own, although it’s hard to believe that any organization would release a report if they still had more fact checking that they wanted to do. That a County Clerk from Illinois could find this flaw tells me that attention to accuracy wasn’t as high on the Pew priority list as continuing to beat the drums for radical changes to our voting system.
Unfortunately, even with this correction, the information from Pew is sporadic. I have requested, and been repeatedly denied, access to the raw data that Pew received from the Oregon counties and from the State of Oregon. It is very simple. Pew is in possession of 36 different submissions from the 36 Oregon counties. Posting them to their website should be very simple. Putting them in an e-mail to me would also seem to be simple.
I’ll address more about this report in the coming days and weeks. Even if the data was accurate, which we now know to be untrue, the report was highly flawed.
The Pew Center on the States Make Voting Work project has a bad reputation that this story reinforces. Thanks for posting it. Such secrecy and refusal to post the raw data puts all their claims in their report into question. Why could their findings not be replicated from their own data?