d expert we also gave the students through an online survey something that we called a proposed ballot title and summary which we told the students may or may not have been the actual title and summary that appeared on the ballot and may or may not have been prepared by a neutral or disinterested person so also in our instructions we explained something about how you know ballot labels works they knew this was something that could appear on the ballot but they didn't know whether this was written by the attorney general they don't know whether it's written by a proponent they don't know whether it's written by an opponent they don't know whether it's written by us all they know is that they're supposed to read the label and evaluate it for four kinds of bias relative to the long description prepared by the neutral expert the four kinds of bias that we asked them to evaluate correspond roughly to types of bias recognized by the courts first does the label use prejudicial language second does it make an argument for or against adoption of the measure third does it selectively exclude or include information in a way that may cause some people who don't know much about the measure to vote differently than they would have voted had they read the long description prepared by the neutral expert and finally there was a catch-all other category subjects who reported proceeding bias were then asked about the direction of the bias that they perceived did it favor a yes vote or did it favor a no vote we also asked a bunch of questions about the subject's individual characteristics specifically did they support or oppose the measure that they've been asked to evaluate based on the description in the pamphlet we asked them about their reading ability measured by SAT scores we asked them about party affiliation and then various measures of trust in government and social trust and we asked what do we expect to find here well again as I said before we expect perceptions of bias to co-vary with both the observer's characteristics and the actual political circumstances that may have influenced the Attorney General in terms of the AG's incentives we expect the closeness of the election and the ideological divisiveness of the measure to be positively associated with bias we also expect Republicans to write labels that are biased towards a yes vote on conservative measures biased towards a no vote on liberal measures and vice versa for Democrats in terms of the observer characteristics we expect voters or students in this case who support a measure to see less bias than people who oppose it we expect good readers to see more bias at least of the selective inclusion or exclusion of information form than for readers simply because they will have assimilated more information about the measure from having read the pamphlet and finally if our veil is imperfect partisan minorities are people who are distrustful of government may be more likely to see bias what do we find what I'm reporting here are results that are based not on the full set of surveys we intend to complete by the end of this fall but by half the surveys we've done so far we have about 900 observations in total from 300 observers covering half of the measures that have been on the ballot in California between 1974 and the present by the time this paper appears in press or is ready to be submitted for publication at the end of December we'll have double that number of observations and all of the post-74 measures in our data set so first we find competitiveness is completely unrelated to perceived bias second ideological or partisan divisiveness is positively correlated with bias but the effect is small and not significant and in our directional model where we're again trying to explain perceptions of bias in favor of a yes or a no vote we find that there is the expected coefficient on the interaction term between attorney general party and the ideological or spatial location of the measure but the effect again is not significant so there's really no evidence that we can point to in this paper either based on our subjective observer measures of bias or on the objective readability scores that the attorney general is behaving in a strategic fashion and in terms of the observer characteristics we do find a significant effect in the supporters are less likely to perceive bias than opponents of the measure and this effect interestingly is largely due to perceptions of bias in terms of selective inclusion or exclusion of information or other bias there's not any kind of winner effect or agenda center effect on perceptions of bias with respect to whether the label is argumentative or whether it's prejudicial and interestingly enough the California courts when reviewing ballot labels for compliance with state law tend to focus on whether the label is argumentative whether it's prejudicial so perhaps through some in-co-op process the judges themselves sense that these forms of bias are more susceptible to objective evaluation or at least evaluation that's not clouded by the observer's own policy preferences with respect to the measure than other forms of bias um reading ability turns out to be significantly related to perceived bias but not in the way we predicted good readers are significantly more likely to see labels as argumentative but less likely than others to see labels as bias by virtue of selectively including or excluding information and finally none of the trust and minority party variables are significantly related to perceived bias as you can say is evidence that our veil worked so where do we go from here we as I said are gathering more data we're going to try testing some alternative hypotheses about attorney general incentives maybe it's not on the divisive ideological measures that the AG really behaves as a strategic actor but instead on measures that benefit or are opposed by a special interest and there's a few other things that I won't talk about but you can raise questions about if you wish later on thanks so much perfect thanks Chris I can testify there's a lot information in this paper so take a look at it I know you didn't get a chance to talk about all the stuff that's in it but by any means my colleague Bernie Groppin says never have more than one idea in a paper and you've got way more than one which is great reading okay so let's move on to the second paper it's the policy views of partisan elected officials and David Kimball, Martha Croft, and other authors three maybe others are joining us for a video no just us no I mean watching maybe okay so Martha Croft is going to talk first that's what David said so we do have to acknowledge our co-authors what we have David Moynihan from Wisconsin who's a public administration scholar and Cara Silva as well and of course Brady Bayback another public administration scholar that worked with do you think it's going to be best to clip it on okay I'm only talking for half of it so we want to acknowledge our co-authors and I also want to thank you for working out the technical issues with turning it on before I got up here so my question from the last panel was really along the lines of do we really know a lot about what the election administrators look like in terms of some of their policy views because this is something that I have thought for a long time that we haven't spent a lot of time doing but fortunately for us we actually are learning more we're doing surveys and we've done surveys over the last decade because of the whole election 2000 we start to care about what local election administrators think so what we know that from David and my previous work is that partisanship often is a factor in the selection of local election officials either they're elected with under partisan label on the ballot or they are selected or appointed by a partisan official like for example the governor of North Carolina appoints an election board right now she is a democrat who knows what's going to happen in November if the republicans is going to win but when that's all said and done the majority of all the election boards in North Carolina are going to be two probably of one party and one of another now so we know that partisanship is a factor now and looking in Rick's book by the way a nice actual airplane read a Stephen King book as I read on the back he says in his that there is no question that democrats and republicans acting from their own views of the public interests tend to administer elections differently which is sort of at the very minimum the least the probably the statement that we can definitely say is perfectly logical not necessarily bad not necessarily the fox is getting the hens out of the hen house but something that you could see from people who are well human beings who act with certain motivations and there certainly is some evidence to support this hypothesis which I'm going to talk just a little bit about but that really was the motivation for our research question in the democratic local election officials those people who are running the nuts and bolts of the day to day operations of elections in the United States are they or do they hold differing policy views now keep in mind that what we're asking right now in this paper isn't are they behaving differently isn't are they doing things differently isn't are they hurting someone and helping someone else rather it's do they have differing policy views we think that that question is only the first question you have to ask in thinking about this analysis are their policy views really that different or and later on can they leave those policy views at the courtroom steps or the office steps or whatever but not only that we are also interested in something that I think we haven't yet explored enough in this paper but apparently we have a little while to finish the paper and that's the idea of the inter-governmental relationship between the locals and state officials there is a certain amount of partisanship that can interact with that relationship between the people who are running the elections the day to day nuts and bolts of the elections and the people with the Help America Vote Act in many states were given far more power over locals than they really had in the past so the relationship that is there is pretty important and so David and I and Don and Carol and Brady all ask in this paper this question of what happens when they come from different parties so I think this is a pretty key question in terms of inter-governmental relations and instead of too many ideas in one paper I would say there are many ideas in this paper but it's rich and not all over the place so previous studies there is evidence that partisanship is there in thinking about measurement of where do we see something going wrong what we're thinking about is well we can't say more or fewer provisional votes is either good or bad but what we could do and what we have done is look at this idea not that more or fewer provisional votes are counted by one ministry over another but rather are people who are state of democrats and people who are state of republicans do they have differences in the number of provisional votes that are cast and counted and it turns out they do and it turns out that they are affected those counts those numbers cast and counted are affected by the partisanship of the district the jurisdiction that the local is administering and also on the partisanship of the official themselves that's past research and so we have some of that and it's looking at provisional votes we go further with using another survey in looking at the attitudes of locals toward provisional voting whether that affects or is related to statistically the numbers that were cast and counted and you can read we at least have some evidence on provisional voting that the attitudes of the officials have are related to partisanship and not only are they related to partisanship it's related to the outcomes but that's on one type of program I think we need more study one thing that we've done one more minute hold on a minute thank you I'm like oh no David we'll be mad later the race we have this great data from the congressional research service Carol and Don had collected and we have information about the race of the local election officials and it turns out just the vast majority of local election officials are majority they're white even in the VRA section 5 counties they are white officials now this isn't necessarily good or bad but it does say something about representation and a lot of the very rich issues that we've been talking about today in terms of local election officials and election administration more generally but so our bigger question is now though let's take another look at this data is are there differences in some of these controversial issues bipartisanship and so I'm going to pass the mic over to David now perfect hear me now so we're focusing mainly on the opinions of local election officials in the United States they can support for a number of reasons centralization, we've got a lot of discretion the concern that their policy preferences be influenced the way they carry out their job so number one they may be purveyors of bipartisanship in election administration number one but number two they're also useful observers of what election administration is like where they work and the comment on that is a highly political as a partisan and are they happy with the state officials with whom they have to interact so data in the paper we have three different national surveys of local election officials to be examined most of the evidence I'm going to show you today is from the 2007 survey but I'll talk about some of the others a bit these are national representative surveys of local election officials and then what we did is we also compiled some of the official their party affiliation and the manner in which they were selected or appointed where's that with our survey data as well the so as I mentioned before I think there's sort of two perspectives here on where the partisanship comes from I think this has been touched on in some of the previous papers may come from within the official local official may try and tilt things and help his or her party but it also comes from outside sources if the heroes in Ned's paper for example Speaker Randall or John Jay or John Quincy Adams or Secretary of State of Florida or Secretary of State of Ohio right now or the GIV in Wisconsin no matter how virtuous they are they still have to deal with the storm partisan conflict raining down on their head and they have to take sides in those conflicts and in taking sides they have to deal with the anger from the losing side so a couple different ways we try and look at this and what we hypothesize there's going to be more partisan conflict in the largest local jurisdictions with the most voters that parties act strategically if they want to manipulate the election procedures they're going to hunt for the places where there's the most voters so they're going to focus on the most populated local jurisdictions to try and do so whereas in small rural county they really don't care about the administrators because there's not a lot of those influence out there swing states some already mentioned that that's a big source of partisan conflict and we haven't talked about Hava that much but local officials report quite varying views about whether they like Hava and particularly whether they have difficulties implementing the Hava requirements so we think that's another source of their may color their views whether they think the election administration is highly political or not so to get to some of our results the figure here shows just starting with basic political views the surveys ask them place yourself on a scale from one to seven one is extremely liberal seven extremely conservative and this is simply the mean ideological self-identification that they gave us so the bars on the left are in small jurisdictions we define that as this local jurisdictions serve less than 40,000 voters in a national election a large one serving 4,000 more and in the small jurisdictions all the local officials are being slightly conservative like the American public the Republican officials are maybe half a point more conservative on average than the Democrats in the non-partisan ones but in large jurisdictions you see that gap widens the difference between Democrats and Republicans on average is more than a point and a half in large jurisdictions and basically that's a pattern that repeats itself when we look at specific election law policies one of the surveys asked a question about their support for a photo ID requirement from zero to 10 zero supported at all 10 extremely supportive jurisdictions on average is virtually no difference between the positions of the Republican or Democrats or non-partisan local officials in large jurisdictions that's where the differences open up the Republican becomes more supportive the Democrats and the non-partisans become less supportive of photo ID and we see the same basic pattern in other policies other anti-fraud policies like the non-national vote in liberal policies like election day registration automatic registration no difference in the small jurisdictions between Democrats and Republicans but significant differences between the two parties in the large jurisdictions the the surveys had a separate set of questions that asked the local officials to comment on what election administration like in your state or in your area so one asked how contentious is the environment in which you administer elections so this just shows the histogram of the responses there's quite a bit of variation some describe it as extremely contentious some describe it as not all contentious in the response in the middle another question asked how satisfied are you with the state election administration in the state where you work here the responses tended to be more positive on the whole although again 15 to 20% of them give answers toward the bottom half of the scale so there's some unhappiness there as well so the next thing we did was we examined the predictors of their responses on the election administration environment in which they serve sort of cut to the quick here we saw outside forces were much more influential on their responses on these questions so we hypothesized for example if the local official shares the same party as the state official then the local official is going to report less political conflict and more satisfaction with the state administration whereas if the local official is the opposite party and the state official report less more conflict and less satisfaction but we generally didn't find that instead the size of the jurisdiction and difficulties implementing HAVA were stronger predictors of their reports of political conflict and happiness there's a brief question about whether they support moving the election administration into civil service not a lot of support for that and less support among those who are elected local officials whose pork chops would get cut under such a proposal so to wrap things up real quick I would say one sort of caution here these surveys were conducted a few years ago it's safe to say that since then certain attitudes toward election laws have probably hardened even further particularly in the photo ID issue so if we did a national survey after the fall elections we might see more events of partisanship but generally on the policy preference side we only observe differences between Democrats and Republicans in large jurisdictions in their own reports of the environment in which they work about conflict and partisanship those reports are influenced more by outside forces than their own party affiliations so we'd recommend being cautious about what to expect if we switch to the non-partisan administration Yohane, hear me I'm going to bring up your picture, Dan Right Let me start by first of all thanking everyone else there at Irvine for making it possible for me to be with you virtually and not physically I was very but hoping to come there and disappointed that I'm not able to be there in person I disappointed largely because I was really looking forward to the opportunity to get feedback from all of you on what is very much a work in progress so I was especially happy to be invited because its theme addresses what I think to be the biggest piece of unfinished business on election reform in terms of what's happened in the last 12 years since the 2000 election Rick Hasen as well as Ned in his keynote I've been able to hear all of the presentation so far through the webcast they both alluded to this and in particular to the fact that my own state where I am now Ohio is in some ways an example or both sides of what's wrong with the way that we administer elections now so I've got my right so in the past several years in Ohio we've seen first in 2004 major controversies by our men for public and sanitary state to handle all that for example with refusal to accept registrations on 80 pound paperweight decisions about increasing provisional balance controversial decisions by our democratic secretary of state having to do with the window for simultaneous registration and early voting as well as rejection of certain absentee ballot applications that were sent out by the Nantane campaign and most recently as again Ned alluded to controversies with our current Republican secretary of state John Fustin acted in the way that many people including myself applauded by opposing a Republican ballot ideal but more recently has seen to follow the party line on issues such as provisional voting early voting as well as a redistricting commission initiative of which I am for you on that as a color by that the balance it seems to be really hard to deny that in the area of state level election administration we've got a serious problem and going back to something Dean Lohanstein said earlier in his previous work from which I've learned I think conflicts of interest are the best way of understanding what's wrong here conflicts of interest between on the one hand state election official obligation to administer and enforce state election laws impartially with regard to partisan consequences and on the other hand their personal interests in doing well by their party so even if there certainly are we've got really deep and serious conflicts overvalued in the area of election administration between access and integrity for example in case of things like voter ID and voter registration hopefully we can overcome our consensus on that issue to reach consensus on the need for impartial election administration and if we want to look at a model that might work Wisconsin seems to be to be a unique example and I think it's a different way of course characterizing and categorizing the institutions that run our elections but as I've explained in my paper I think it's really the only true example of a non-partisan election administration institution at the state level in the United States so in the remainder of my remarks let me first talk about the context of Wisconsin Government Accountability Board second some of the major controversies it's faced in the area of election administration and here are some kind of conclusions as well as I just mentioned the context of Wisconsin Government Accountability Board is really unique my warmest colleagues and I at the police department talked about Wisconsin will have other state-level institutions in other western states and this book which we wrote back in 2007 for registration to recount that's when we followed it up with its reports for registration to recount we visited in 2011 it's unique not only among the spot states but we studied books as others have pointed out I think among all state-level electoral institutions briefly we're kind of going through all the details that I mentioned in the paper the six-member Government Accountability Board is composed of retired judges who are in turn selected by many of the Board of Appeal judges those four judges were literally picked out of a hat and achieved justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in front of the rest of the board the nominees to the government's kind of voting order I should say the recommendations of this committee to the Governor must be made unanimously the Governor actually appoints the members of the Government Accountability Board for the initial commission when it was first established in 2007 the way the confirmation process worked is that three of them had to be confirmed by the State Senate which was then controlled by the Democrats three by the State Assembly which was then controlled by the Republicans or subsequent appointments members of Accountability Board must be confirmed by two-thirds of the State Senate which is a procedure designed to ensure the same degree of bipartisan consensus and to ensure that people who will impartially administer elections there are two separate divisions to the Government Accountability Board the Ethics and Accountability Division which administers and enforces campaign finance ethics and lobbying laws and the elections division which is the one whose actually I will be focusing on which administers election laws and the Government Accountability Board as a staff which is headed by an appointed director of legal counsel Kevin Kennedy previously served under the institution that was previously responsible for running elections in Wisconsin the elections work I won't go through the comparison with the Government Accountability Board structure and those of other states to say that the dominant mode of administering elections at the state level in the U.S. remains a partisan elected chief election official that is and a chief election official who is actually elected as a nominee of his or her party in a lot of the other states all of the other states we have some sort of either official appointed by a partisan body or a bipartisan board in most states that have bipartisan boards one party or the other actually has a controlling vote on that board the Wisconsin model is however more like independent electoral institutions in other countries there's some that have through independent agencies running their elections like Australia, Canada, India others that have some that I think were alluded to earlier even if they're not formally independent of the board government a considerable functional independent by virtue of that they are both a professional civil service with some practical degree of autonomy and partisan politics moving on to the controversies that the EAC chief has encountered in its first several years I talked about five in the paper countries that were voting for registration absentee and group voting voter identification reporting of results in a contested state supreme court race and finally the recall elections I'm going to focus on two of those in the interest of time and that are those are group voting identification probably election administration issue in the states since temporary focus on election administration really began in 2000 Wisconsin's public state legislature and active into law a relatively restrictive voter identification law in 2011 requiring government voter ID the government accountability or made rulings that were controversial especially among republicans on two issues 2011 law allowed student IDs identification but required that they have an exploration they didn't also require those institutions that might have learned to be accredited the 200s had to deal with whether colleges and universities could put stickers on the IDs with an exploration they wouldn't have to qualify the board said that they could the 70s shoe had to deal with technical colleges whether those were colleges universities accredited colleges universities under the meaning of the law and the board said they were I think both of those decisions were justified textualist interpretation of the law what's really interesting about this controversy however is the attempt by the state legislature and government to who was potentially interfere the government having knowledge decision and this is the result of the law that was also enacted which it allows a legislative committee to require that agencies including independent agencies like the GAP in Wisconsin promulgated a rule and if the rule is promulgated gets approval by the development authority and the reporting can take effect and so that is what the joint legislative committee actually did in case of his policy decision that had been made by the Wisconsin and on ability to work on a party line 6 to 4 pro with all the Republicans supporting opposing it. That was at least when moments mooted by a sense of important projections that were issued against Wisconsin's voter ID the law. I highlight this however as a potential threat to the autonomy and the commitment to the agreement. The final issue I want to mention is the controversy over the recall elections which we have discussed in the paper. There were a couple of decisions of the GAP that were controversial with respect to these recalls 9 state senators subject to recall in 2011 for more state senators along with the government for 2012. What had to do with the timing of the recall elections there were 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats subject to recall and the government sent those elections on different dates because there were some factual issues that had to be resolved with respect to the Democratic office holders challenges to recall petitions. I analyze that controversy to some extent in the paper. I think the court was justified in this decision in 2012 earlier this year we're facing controversy having to do with whether it was actually reviewing the petitions almost a million or with a tutorial recall to make a long story short the walker assumed in Waukesha County Kyrgyp Court and one internship which was later reversed on grounds requiring a more intensive and time consuming review by the GAP one that I think is my reading of the law more intensive than the law actually allows analysis that I go through in my favor coming to the end of my time on the question whether the government accountability board has been a success my tentative answer to this question is yes I think that it has done what it was created to do which is to impartially in faith and for selection law I think it's true we've seen more complaints from Republicans and from Democrats about the government accountability board's performance and I think it's safe to say that a lot of Republicans who voted for it probably now were correct to vote there weren't any Republicans who opposed it at the time that this was enacted until long 2007 on the other hand it is not the case that the government accountability board has decided all important election administration cases on the cross-clatch Democratic side I mentioned decisions on voter registration, early voting as well as the rejection of Democratic challenges from there to the recall politicians of Democrat office holders in which the board is undecided for the purpose of Republicans on important issues at the end of the day however I don't think the balance of the number of Republican favorite decisions versus the number of Democrat favorite decisions is really the best way of evaluating its board and evaluating it is what has been faithfully, carefully and impartially administered the law on that sport my view is that they've done quite well second point by way of conclusion there are some real threats to the independence of this body most notably this administrative rulemaking process that was altered in 25 in as well as a provision of the rules regarding challenges to state agency decisions which effectively allow jurisdiction shopping point and I guess question by way of conclusion what are the prospects for exploring this model I guess I have to say let's sit outside my area of expertise to matter of political reality rather than law or policy but my view is not terribly optimistic much as I think this is a model that we are really exploring and I think this is largely because the increased hyperpolarization of our politics in general of which incidentally has been the leading example I mean in the seven years or so the five years or so that we've been studying in the state my more it's been a tangible increase in the level of polarization in the state that once had a really strong good government culture which largely counts for why this awarded to it gets inattentive to law and implemented in the first place so I think it's going to be difficult in the future to get this kind of body and attitude through other state legislative bodies as the champion was democracy might be an alternative we had an issue of that between us I hope they try to implement a similar kind of non-partisan institution but I'm not terribly optimistic about that without your reform either I wanted to integrate I'm almost done in work because I don't really think there's a big political constituency for this kind of reform one that's likely to be willing to put up a substantial sum of money and in the real world it takes to get an initiative on the ballot to develop a successful team so with your minds there are three conclusions I have to deal with how the work to its independence and prospects we're informing it I can just pose with a couple questions which I'd really love to get some of the other things that I should be looking at I was originally intended to look at the performance of the ethics and accountability division as well as the collections division with respect to election administration I would love that to happen this is a question especially if you're a political scientist there are there other ways of measuring the performance of these special students who have these ideas on them so thanks again for allowing me to participate and look forward to your comments and questions it was a surprise to me in the previous paper that these partisan officials weren't that much more different than they were I mean I would expect more and it was a surprise to me to find out that Wisconsin has a nonpartisan election board that's amazing now we have two discussions Samuel Lysikar showing on first and he says 16 minutes for him I'll give him that let me start by joining in with everyone else and thanking Rick for this opportunity we've had the privilege in this field of a number of significant conferences over the years and it has the effect of when they work well and this one has worked well of sharpening the issues and setting the agenda for the future and in particular is the day where Zahn and the conditions in the room become more and more oppressive you have to do a lot of hard thinking otherwise you're overwhelmed with the question why my fear I will try to resist that because it just started speaking the air conditioning went on so it's just great so I wanted to distinguish questions that have been presented recurrently today and that somewhat confused the issue because they run into each other and the three questions are what is the optimal form of institutional design if we were starting from ground zero how would we design certain kinds of election institutions to achieve certain purposes and there are disputes about that there are disagreements there are different values there are different objectives but that's one set of questions what's the optimal arrangement to achieve whatever aims we want to in this area the second is how do we assess the current institutions that we have are they suboptimal in their suboptimality because real life is always suboptimal in their suboptimality is it serious or is it not is it a good or we should be really worried here a little worried much of a difference and the third question which also runs into this is what about the political economy of reform are we forever doomed to the world of the second best so whatever we do it's just going to end up well there will be problems there too and the forces that would permit political reform at any given point might give us something more so the way I think about this is for the papers and I want to start with the papers and then I want to move on to where they fall into the kinds of questions I think are underlying this entire gathering is the first question is what is the right institutional design for various election related functions and all of the papers back up into that they're all empirical papers and they all want to to greater and lesser extent hint at a message about the form of institutional design but they don't take that question on directly what they do instead is they ask a question which is how much is at stake depending on the choice of institutional design or another way of framing it would be what has been the performance in office of various institutional actors and as I said before that helps us inform us is should we do something should we worry and then that leads us into the question of well maybe we have the right institutional design if we're getting it pretty much right now the three approaches are all basically directed toward the second question and apply prescriptive answers toward the first question and what's interesting is that they have three different methodologies for addressing this question three very different social science tools that are each valid to its own extent and within its own framework so Elmendorf Spencer we get an experimental setting through lab projects and controlled simulations Kimball Croft would get the survey of beliefs and values of the real world participants of the lab participants and Takaji would get a qualitative observation of a single institutional actor in conditions of extreme stress as five examples of how the GAP responded in Wisconsin okay now let me raise a few methodological issues just quickly and I think Justin will have more of this the Kimball Croft paper you have the first problem it's surveys people answer surveys in self-serving ways 40% of the subject responded to the surveys that means 60% didn't if I'm not empiricist but I think that follows and so we have to have some assumption about whether the people who responded or liked the people who didn't respond about the generalizability about whether there's you know correlation between between the two sets but what worried me when I started reading the paper because I wanted to know what these people like this is like a black hole for me I just don't have any idea how the system operates on the ground I worried when I got to page two and I said if there's little difference between Democrats and Republicans little reason to change partisan selection of election officials I said wow that's a lot of work to be done by a survey instrument I'm not you're going to have to do a lot to convince me of that and the survey asks basically how do you feel about certain issues where we think there might be a propensity for divisions among partisan lines divisions in administration what I worry about is not most cases I worry about the cases that matter and I worry about the propensity to cheat only when they're high stakes and I'm not sure that the survey of general beliefs can pick that up and that's certainly been my experience with election officials who I encounter only in the circumstance when I sue them so I'm guarantee it's not a cozy relationship but we get to know each other a little bit there and what's interesting is that they still pick up substantial differences the way they report the differences covers it a little bit because they have this big divide between large and small jurisdictions that's the central metric I'm not persuaded that the Mayberry effect is going to cure the problems in Cuyahoga County and Ohio Mayberry effect is I like all others in this room should have mourned when Andy Griffith just died and so it's the small town better values of America that's not enough for me I want to know about where the action is in the big cities where there's a lot of votes where a lot is at stake where we're fighting the battles over voter ID where we're fighting the battles over early election days I don't want the small towns where everybody knows each other and leaves the front door open and then a problem that runs through these papers is when you slice your observation you may miss a bigger part of the picture a lot of democracy is the public faith and you do not pick up the public faith on the integrity of the system necessarily by asking the internal participants how well they think it's going there's an external validation that is much more complicated and may in fact be doomed not because of the actual performance of these people because of a perception and that's important in election administration what happened to oh I skipped Elmendorf Spencer altogether that's what I did okay so Elmendorf Spencer I have an issue here as you would expect why else am I here it's miserable in this one this type of work they do is experimental settings I've run experiments I know the difficulties of getting a situation where you can test an effect and get numbers big enough to have a strong effect that you can report and it's a legitimate method we tend to feel more comfortable when we trust the lab subjects that's why we like rap experiments once you get to humans and to college students in particular you get all sorts of methodological questions raised but I accept that they will be a good group to test the problem is I'm not convinced by the hypothesis or I have questions about the hypothesis my hypothesis would not be that the AG cheats in every case that the AG cheats in every referendum that has a redistributive effect my hypothesis would be the AG cheats when it's prop 8 the AG cheats when it's a big front burner issue that's going to get him or her a lot of plaudits and is going to make him or her the next governor right so that you can't test with the data set big enough and so you've expanded the data set here in order to get to generalize the effect and to get the numbers up high enough they acknowledge that page 37 they say they may cheat only on important ones and so forth the flip side of this paper is the public perception they try to take this on probably the public perception is that there's a long line of behavioral research going back to a very famous paper called they saw a game which is a paper where college students from two schools do the exact same football game and we're asked what calls did the officials blow and not only did they pick did they have high numbers but they also had no correlation between which calls the officials we all integrate information in ways that are good for us this runs through both of the first papers and the work that I did some years ago on self-serving biases it's a way we have to understand ourselves that we are objective and so the participants are likely to perceive bias in ways that further their political views regardless of the intentionality of the actor so again as with the paper by Martha and David you have the problem that there's another world out there of external validation that may be affected by what you're doing I move quickly I had to say about Dan's paper except that it's only one observation and he can't overcome the cheese effect which is this is Wisconsin you know they're nice people in Wisconsin my wife is from Wisconsin they're still nice people I think you know my wife is from Walkishaw walkishaw by the way and the city of Walkishaw so nice they named it twice New York or something like that Walkishaw these are good people they have bad choices as spouses perhaps but they are good people and Wisconsin will function under any system in the last election I was monitoring problems on election day in Wisconsin what the problems was there was a line a little bit of a line the parking outside said 15 minutes only so people were circling the block because they were afraid to park for 15 minutes only in case they couldn't get come to New York we'll teach you how to park any goddamn place you want ridiculous so there may be dysfunctionalities in other domains in places that don't have this civic tradition that are hard to pick up from within the study of Wisconsin whenever you have one observation you don't know you have to make some assumptions about generalizability okay let me finish take my last 5 minutes roughly 4 excellent on questions of institutional design is really what we're getting at I was very jealous of Nick those who know me know that my object in life is that everything should be reduced to a 2x2 matrix I couldn't quite get there so I got 3x3 and obviously there's more points you could run down the y-axis but we're talking about nonpartisan bipartisan and partisan institutions as ways of administering elections but it turns out that there are different functions where different mixes may be better or worse or more problematic not so problematic so take the counting of votes I don't want partisans counting votes right you don't want people one side counting all the votes because that's just a recipe for disaster we saw Tom Beach County I hold it up I think this is a vote for my guy you know that's not good but it's not clear to me that we need to invest in nonpartisan which is most expensive for telling it's a pure zero sum game put three republicans three democrats in there make them count it together they'll neutralize each other they have every incentive to observe it's transparent that's the kind of institutional setting where it may very well be let the parties administer it because they have no common interest and the bottom one on redistricting I again don't like partisans doing it and as Bernie pointed out this morning if you have bipartisan doing it they may actually be able to externalize costs on the unrepresented party the sweetheart bipartisan gerrymander is a way of exporting costs on to us who have nobody to vote for in a meaningful way without them internalizing that cost so redistricting is different than tallying and I think in the redistricting context is a reason that every country that has put the question before itself of how should we design the institution either ab initio or now that we've had a political crisis of some kind like world war two in britain what are we going to do now that we're really confronting the issue of institutional design and they go over to non-partisan administration is actually interesting and it's the focus of this conference and what's interesting about the three papers is that they pick up individual places within administration where you have a non-partisan body as Dan's GAB which is also a little bit of a bipartisan body because the appointment process as he describes it is actually rich and complex so it has elements of both but it fundamentally operates toward a non-partisan type institutional arrangement and on the other hand the other papers deal with partisans who have moved in the direction of who have taken over some kind of election function and the question is if we were starting from scratch would we have non-partisan administration for the elections would we have professionals for these kinds of functions the answer is probably yes is this an area where we could trust bipartisan competition because of a zero sum game maybe if we could get a really really good three three group in there we could trust that there would be no partisan distortions but election administration requires the capacity to administer so there would be tremendous cost to this in terms of the basic inefficiency of the institution that would result we would have an FEC and my view of the FEC is it was designed to fail and better than any other institution in Washington it achieved its purposes but it's designed so that it cannot act and we wouldn't want to build that in so even though we could conceive of a bipartisan stalemate on misuse we would sacrifice administrative efficiency and now we're in the domain of partisan and to the extent that the papers are read and I don't think I read them this way and I don't think the authors want them to be read this way but to the extent that the papers are read as this is a good arrangement I don't think that's the conclusion that follows what may follow from the papers if they can establish the empirical question that they set out to address if they prove it what would follow from the two papers that address either the AG's performance in California or election administration around the country is it's probably not optimal it probably doesn't kick in all that often and maybe we'd be willing to live with it because it works okay so it doesn't address the optimality point it addresses is this worth wasting our time over our limited reform initiative our limited resources to go after this and I think what the papers do is they say if you really try to tease out the way this works in practice and you leave aside the big question of the public perception of misbehavior which is always critical but if you leave that aside it may be that these people are honorable and they mostly do their job in the way they should and I think that the points that Ned and Heather were making at lunch kick in here people want to have a good view of themselves they don't want to think of themselves I resist Machiavelli I'm a huge fan of Machiavelli so that was just a bad comment but they don't want to be evil they don't want to be thought oh I'm just here to be instrumental for somebody else they want to have a self-perception that they basically do their job honorably and I think the papers indicate that maybe they are doing their jobs pretty well under a circumstance where we have a decidedly sub-optimal institutional arrangement I don't know how we're gonna top the Wisconsin versus New York parking example but Justin Leavitt is in charge of trying by not even attempting so I too want to start as everybody has started is everybody should be starting by thanking Rick and thanking UC Irvine not only for assembling us here today I love these things because I get to hang out with all the people I like to see all the time but also for leaving the institution I'm currently at in such fine hands and also for furthering my fitness program with the sauna you've instituted here I think that I'm sweating more because of who came before me if who I have to follow and the fact that I know that I stand between you and the end of the day that I am because of the temperature but I'm gonna try not to parse out which is which I'm gonna go through the papers as Sam did fairly quickly and then try and draw back to a broader point at the end for Elmendorf and Spencer I thank you because you can't ever get too much good empirical analysis and it is heroic I know to report research with a null finding but I thank you for it because it's extremely interesting problem it's a valuable investigation and it's a useful discussion methodology and it lets both you and others replicate the work and see if there can't be a finding of some sort in the future this is a great step there are a few specific comments that I have on the methodology that you chose and including the big one that you note whether the initiatives are polarizing as a post-treatment effect and the better that the AGs are at doing their job the more it's going to doing the job that you suppose that you hypothesize the partisan job the more it's gonna squelch the effect that you're testing for so if they're really good at rigging the game that means that you're gonna be focused on the wrong ballot initiatives and wrong measures which means you won't be able to pick it up or something that it's a difficulty I'm not sure you can compensate or you recognize it for well but maybe something that's inherently based into the measuring whether an initiative is going to be controversial based on the outcome of the initiative after they've gotten their hands on it I have questions about the the R squared values for some of the models they're not very high which means there's a lot of other stuff going on that we're not measuring and that brings me to about readability it may be that that is a way to influence the elections but if that's the second or third or fourth most effective or at least the second or third or fourth least cost and there's an easier, better, bigger way then readability is not going to be a step that chief election officials or AGs take all that off and they're going to go to whatever's easiest and least cost so it may well be that you identified a potential tactic but at least in California there are easier ways to rig the game and so you're not picking up it may be a tactic but you're not picking up what's really going on I am curious about you list variation in a bunch of states and you've got California at about a 1.8 variation in reading level from top to bottom and you said that you found elsewhere or you have seen research elsewhere indicating some of the states run from 1.1 variation in reading level all the way up to 26.4 variation I want to know about the 26.4 state and I want to know if there is some strategic manipulation of that going on or whether that's completely random you happen to pick one and I understand what you did that's sort of lower on the scale but when you've got that large a swing I suspect you may find a much bigger effect in terms of the the real people which we'll call college students for this I thought there was going to be a difference they saw a game point which is that I think they actually saw a game I think that you've keyed them to find bias you've said here are four types of bias can you find it yes or no and everybody wants to say yes I found it look there it is and so that drives up your results on whether you're going to find bias or not I don't know whether it's possible to reduce with a question like if you were a court would you strike this down a little bit of the stakes of can I find it out of the mix but I think part of what you're observing is the eagerness of college students to support you in your surveys and to do well in your surveys not least because you have done something I told you about earlier that I love and I'm going to use in every empirical project I do now I encourage you to read this paper if for no other reason it has an appendix with the actual survey instrument in it and I want to read to you of this letter to the college students to get them to participate thank you for choosing to participate in this exciting study of ballot missions and I don't know who wouldn't be jazzed up after that you would ever know if you asked them about it I'm going to have every paper I look at this is an exciting paper about this is an exciting study about that's going to be everywhere now and I thank you for that I have learned something very important in this paper I thank you because we can't ever get too much research on local election officials and I really think we have a tendency particularly in our profession to focus on being in shiny the president, the supreme court when really the front lines matter so so so very much and there's not enough attention and I love the fact that there's more attention being paid to the people who are really administering and delivering us all the perhaps bigger and shinier the most of the surveys that you found on polarization are from 2007 boy I'd be curious whether that shows three years of relaxing in the aftermath of a hyperpolarized election and I wonder whether you would find the same results from 2009 that is, you know, is there even more ideological polarizations, there even more straight for election officials the year after an extremely tenacious election rather than three years after a year before I wonder whether the fade effect is as prominent as it might otherwise be you measure differences in attitudes on a bunch of policies and the photo ID one caught my eye I wonder whether you're capturing actual differences in how photo ID requirements work so ID is not uniform, there are lots of different things that people can show, some of them are strict ID rules some of them are not, some have different types of ID you're allowed to show and whether people's support or objectives might very well depend on what the nitty-gritty is and what they're used to, now I don't know how you ask the question, the question might have been generic but even if the question's generic it might not necessarily represent their experience so you might not be asking a uniform question on a uniform policy you might be asking a question on a policy that people in different states are viewing very, very differently I had two speculative hypotheses about what's driving the difference and I just don't know whether this is causing some of the differences that you did find you find a difference in attitudes toward reforms more, I think more synchronicity more common ground on tightening up the election process and less common ground on, for a better word, of using access and loosing it up and I wonder whether that's a version to critique more than anything else, it seems to me that it's easy to critique at a local level and to suggest expansive reforms at a state level or at least that's what I note simply from watching that is not empirical it's very easy to go in and target very localized decisions and when seeking to expand things like registration, election day registration or NBRA enforcement at agencies that tends to be focused on a statewide level and so maybe they're responding to a brief about the stuff that looks like fraud because the attention is directed globally but they haven't gotten pull or praise locally, the pull or the praise for broader access to voting is more statewide, I don't know if that's a potential cause for the difference that you found you also found obviously the partisan differences are higher in more populated jurisdictions Sam touched on this a little bit I wonder whether that's a campaign effect, whether they feel the need to differentiate the partisan elected campaign or not or whether it's party selection maybe parties are recruiting more ideologically driven individuals in higher population areas you may be able to test this at least a bit by looking for ideological differences in statewide positions and bigger states may have a broader ideological spread than smaller states it may be that for example the Delaware party it's just as important to have an ideologically driven person but not quite as much of a campaign effect as it would be in California for example that you might find more, you might be able to tease out this difference of whether it's their need to campaign on different platforms rather than party recruitment driving ideological differences from the ground up if you are able to conduct a study statewide to see if bigger states have show one difference and smaller states show another that's a thought for Dan for Danza, a huge figure and given his projection on the video today I mean that quite literally you can't ever get too much Wisconsin for me, my wife's also from Wisconsin and obviously has the same difficulty in spouse selection I hear great I hear a lot about how great Wisconsin is and I thank Dan for giving me more of the same this is not the main point of his paper but he points out a decentralization problem, he's right but the comparison with other countries is particularly hard maybe this just comes from living in LA but Denmark and Sweden, two countries he holds up as prime examples, this happens a little bit in mixed paper as well they both have fewer people than LA County and so perhaps some of these institutions are much easier to put in place in places that just aren't that big and maybe size actually does matter I'm also not sure about the link between decentralization and partisanship that doesn't exactly claim one but he's making a point and so I wonder whether it's related whether he thinks it's related and if so what ways and I'm not sure that's an easy question to answer Wisconsin certainly takes decentralization to extremes as he points out it's all municipalities rather than counties and that drives everything down to a local local local level whatever you believe whether it's beneficial or not that makes a strong government accountability all the more important go to Orbad Dan chooses five topics and says that the government accountability came out pretty well there's a methodological issue which he knows about which is he thinks they're good decisions most of the time so do I other people might disagree and we're not sure and so it's very tough to measure whether these are fair and not just balanced by the way the Waukesha County election results as being a major contested issue I understand it was contested but just to put this in a little bit of perspective the election results that were severely delayed came in six hours after the polls closed and so maybe that speaks to all of our need to ratchet down from the outside the expectations that we have in addition to demanding performance of the election officials six hours to wait if caused by a troublesome reason may well be troublesome but if it's just six hours because they were actually lining stuff up that doesn't seem like a crazy abuse of power to me and I love the fact that Dan pointed out something that I did not know the legislature is I think quite stark change of control over the government accountability board I wonder whether as the system within which the GAB works changes whether the GAB can remain the same it will be really interesting to see whether or not the legislature chooses to use this sort of override prerogative of forcing a vote on contested issues whether the government accountability board maintains the same level of service whether good or bad whatever you think of it that it is provided so far because I think the system is going to be very important there's a common feature to all of these papers and this leads back to the questions that Rick posed at the very beginning of the conference and I have here a different set of conflated questions than the ones that Sam identified the papers here all talk about partisanship but they're all talking about different kinds of partisanship in very different ways and that's true throughout the papers throughout the day it's a common feature of work on partisanship and both scholarship and lay audience it's something I'm writing about man and this is I think to Bruce's point earlier partisanship isn't uniform it can mean the method of selection you're chosen in a partisan election or you're chosen by an official who has been chosen in a partisan election you're appointed it's why both elected legislators and Supreme Court justices can be described as Republican or Democrat even though that means very different things and how we expect them to operate it can mean partisan effect and results that favor Republicans or Democrats it can mean a whole range a whole spectrum of partisan intent a lot of people today talked about ideological partisanship taking positions that are consistent with being a Republican or Democrat but simply because you believe those positions out of the spectrum of possible options are correct and either your party has informed that ideological position or you are tailoring your ideological position that happens to end up something that the party supports the party is absorbing it but either way around that ideological partisanship is different from a responsive partisanship taking action because of the way particular voters will vote which is itself different from what I call tribal partisanship which I think is what most of the reforms are aimed at taking action not because of what you believe ideologically not because what you believe what you respond to what the voters want but because it will tangibly benefit my party tomorrow Republicans or Democrats I am acting primarily because I want a Republican or a Democrat to win and that sort of partisanship is very different that also means by the way that when we talk about non-partisan institutions we mean different things we mean and here I take a note from Pam that there's a sort of negative liberty idea of non-partisanship it's targeting a form of partisanship that we don't want or that we want to remove or squelch I completely believe as Pam said that no one is actually non-partisan but as lots of people much smarter than me and far more eloquent have said throughout the day there are people who all the time every day and most of what they do act in some different non-partisan ways that is they don't engage in tribal partisanship when they take an act even though they could even though there are no legal sanctions in place and I think that has to do with three different factors which we've also mentioned a lot today some of them are substantive rules that constrain partisanship don't eliminate it but substantive rules if you have to follow a certain substantive doctrine there's only going to be so far you're able to go with a partisan instinct some of them are structure I'm a huge fan of all of the structure conversation and we've heard a lot of it today it does play a huge role partisan elections mean that you would expect partisan attitudes at least different ideological partisanship otherwise there's no reason to elect someone as a republican or a democrat that is every time we have a partisan election you should expect they will believe different things or else the partisan elections not doing what we set it up to do there are also structures that seek to combat this partisanship and I will wrap up some of the structures do it well some of it do it less well the missing aspect in here I agree entirely with both Ned and Heather is norms situational norms that are powerful that don't bind everyone all the time but bind people surprisingly often in most of what they do we don't actually see electoral thunder most of the time and that is something to reflect on because there aren't often structural sanctions or rules based sanctions that stop it if something is stopping it despite individuals incentives to favor a particular republican or a particular democrat when they can it's got to be a more salient strong structural situational norm there's an interesting paper recently and this is where I'll close an election law journal by a guy named Michael Franz who points out the enforcement model what you got Michael actually the enforcement at the FEC and this was juxtaposed with his paper today on the advisory opinions where you might most expect tribal partisanship enforcement actions at the FEC there's a particular individual largely associated with a particular party who's going to be sanctioned in some very tangible way and there's a very easy mechanism to block that enforcement action you just need three votes and you need it along party lines and Michael's work points out that out of 1342 enforcement actions that he studied 19 had a deadlock along partisan lines and that to me that 1% if you even believe that to be tribal partisanship rather than something ideological that 1% maximum seems like something that we can actually take create solace that's the system working most of the time pretty well and with that thank you so do we have any responses from the panelists and then we can ask Dan alright, so I'll make a response really quickly by raising an issue that's often raised at election law conferences that has not been today and that is the idea of ecological inference so I'm not talking about racially polarized voting so much but I recognize attention between general trends and between specific acts and it's something that seems to have come up over and over in the different panels we have the heads remarks we have this paragon of virtue and Samuel Randall and then Heather is attempting to say wow, can we draw general can we make a system where that becomes the general norm that's certainly the case in our paper and I think that's a great issue that Sam has raised what we may be the most worried about are very outlier cases or a very specific subset of the cases and what our first stab at this what's great about presenting a working paper to conferences oh, we're still we're still working on this but we are very aware that some of the most important action may be happening in a particular way and I think that you're right in terms of general trends maybe this isn't something that might be as bad as we would have expected but some of the ways that we've thought about going about this or identifying kind of reverse engineering ways of thinking, oh, well what do we see that is the most biased and how can we evaluate what's happening there as opposed to predicting bias and things like that but anyway, just in terms of response to both of you I think that's a very fair concern to have and I think that it's something that as kind of election law community we need to grapple with because I see people talking about specific instances general trends and trying to wrap them all up together is difficult and I think that's something that we need to take more attention to yeah I guess the only thing that I would say additionally I don't disagree with Sam's observations taken individually I very much agree that the basic point of the project is not to say what's an optimal institution but where should our reform energies be directed I was actually surprised by our findings I thought we were going to find like through both measures of bias or strategic behavior we missed the evidence of it and the fact that we don't see the evidence of it suggests to me that well you know it's time to look in some other ways in some other places but this is you know one piece of a larger body of work that might ultimately help us to say something about where we should be putting our energies I don't know if Dan's with us I am you have any responses we can't see you just quickly so on Sam's comments I think you know because identification of these three distinct questions that are floating around in my papers is quite right I do want to say I'm a little bit disappointed when I you know Sam yesterday didn't tell him that it wasn't going to be able to come he said these examples where you could run but you cannot hide so Sam you went too easy on him my response to him was my doctor's got me all royed up so you can actually decline on him but you know it's certainly true that Wisconsin is a constant it does have a really strong progressive dimension a strong government culture I guess the same could be said of Wisconsin that is sometimes said about Iowa the contest of district in Wisconsin Wisconsin on the other hand I do think that we've seen a rapid deterioration in sort of the play nice culture in Wisconsin in recent few years and I talk about this in conflicts on the Supreme Court um but um um so as I acknowledge in the paper it's important to be cautious in that of exporting what happens in any other state or one state's experience to others but um there's a lot of thinking plates outside the big city all nice and western here um second on Justin's comments I um as Justin suggests I think there are two distinct problems partisanship and decentralization um in the U.S. election system um there's actually a third one that's really deep in mind and this is especially true as with decentralization partisanship when we contrast the U.S. with other countries but a relative lack of professionalization and sometimes not always but sometimes in competence like I think that we saw in the way that our elections were run on the decentralization points um it's true that some of the countries that are favorably to the U.S. here in another world much smaller but on the other hand there's like India that are several times larger than the United States which I think certainly have a much more centralized system have a much better system that said I'm not typically optimistic about the project of um federalizing election administration at least establishing a strong federalist army like that which exists in other states and looking to the failed experiences cleared out in other countries in the U.S. as well as even worse the EAC um it's hard to be optimistic about the project or um moving more forward to the federal level so I think we're pretty much stuck with state level and local level election administration in the United States whether we like it or not and the opposite question is optimistic and done better okay from the audience I want to pass the microphone around so Dan can hear okay um moving beyond just the critiques of the strengths and weaknesses of your research um sort of extrapolate from a bit of personal experience to a suggestion and see what you think about it um I gave up my membership in the party when I became president of the local chapter of the league of women voters in the city of Los Angeles and it's kind of liberating um so I'm wondering what you would think about having the government take less role in promoting parties in general should government officials still be actually registering people in parties um should election administrators when they become election administrators be required to give up their membership in parties because once you start not being at a party I found you start no longer walking that walk and feeling it as much as before and perhaps picking up on Ned's comments at at lunch um maybe judges as well especially when they're going to be involved in election decisions but maybe all judges should be required to give up their party affiliation when they become judges just like lawyers can't be members of judges can't be members of the bar anymore once they become judges so what do you think about actually nonpartisanizing election administrators personally perhaps nonpartisanizing electors, the voters by no longer registering them as party members I have a couple of responses to that and that is that there is some research um sort of in the urban politics tradition examining um where do I turn on one here okay good so my response would be that there is some research some of the urban politics research looking at city governments that are nonpartisan where people run they run under a nonpartisan label and and it's not entire so from one study that I can recall the evidence was that the members still had very distinct partisan attitudes and I think that if we were to sort of look at our experiences um you know and sort of look at one by one anecdotal situations we would think that that kind of still exists that you know that in none when you look at a school board or something you know that they're making decisions that are based on their values that are based on attitudes that well they quack like partisanship they walk like partisanship and they even swim like partisanship so let's call it it's not all about I mean then my response might be something like well it depends on the person too I mean I am I know a lot of journalists and myself too as a political science professor I put unaffiliated when I registered but I still have very strong attitudes about how things should be or else I wouldn't be a professor and make really rotten money I think that and I'm not a hero a couple quick things I think creating a new institution for election administration very difficult getting a political coalition to support that but I think it's more realistic get a political coalition to support sort of conflict of interest I can suggest I'm not a lawyer so I don't know about the first amendment you know she's just saying if you're if you come in officially you can no longer affiliate that sort of thing most states in the US don't require you to declare a party identification when you register to vote so most states are unlike California in that respect so they're already doing what you want on that score quick point Wisconsin actually does proclaim to both his government accounting accountability board members as well as staff engaging in political activities I think that's a good thing but I should be realistic that in itself it's not going to accomplish a whole lot making short decisions made in the archival this is Josh Douglas so I think this is all interesting and good and we're talking about ways to get sort of partisanship out of election administration but I feel like there's an elephant in the room which is that when for the most contentious issues we'll tip elections the courts are going to become involved and until we figure out a way to remove some sort of partisanship from court decision making in the election area it's going to be hard to achieve some of the things that we're talking about today so I guess I was curious for a reaction as to whether this is even permissible if we don't also reform the ways in which we're invoking courts particularly state courts like the judiciary in resolving election disputes but we have evidence that partisan judges rule in partisan ways that's a problem and I wonder if having reforms for impartial election administration helps for the run of the mill things that we're talking about but when a close election gets within that phrase of the marginal litigation what do we do at that point isn't it really the courts that we have to worry about as well so I guess I can respond briefly to that and saying that maybe the prospect of judicial review is part of why the California Attorney General is not behaving more like a strategic partisan actor than we expected or it may be that their civil service norms are practices internal to the organization of the Attorney General's office that constrain from below what the Attorney General can practically do or get away with we haven't looked into either of these institutions in relation to this paper but it's a question that I think is sort of served up by our preliminary conclusions at least and even if there is some prospect of partisanship in judicial review if you don't know who you're going to draw as your judge or it may be that ex-ante it still operates as a constraint I think my observation might be in some tension Josh with what seems to be the premise of your question if I'm getting it right I mean I actually think the more aggressive judicial review of election and administration laws as well as administrative decisions made by partisan certain terms of state I think this is a really good thing and it's something we have seen a lot more of it since Bush versus Gordon especially in the last year or so it's seen the courts applying a very constructive role by looking over the shoulders both of partisan legislators and partisan election administrators so I even if we have every state to go to a Wisconsin GABA you know it's not just about legislators from enacting laws that are designed and that their own party often with slim military support but they don't really serve any destructive purpose and so it seems to me that the courts have played a really constructive role in the last several years on the fall but I sort of know decision to agree with every decision I think everybody can hear me I'm Joe Dunn I am former state senator and CEO of the State Bar so I'm monitoring that I have a question to the I have a follow up question on the nonpartisan judicial races idea because I think at least most in the legal community would agree I should say getting back to that concept would be good or then if not to go to an all appointed state judiciary and I know it's a mixed bank but I'm curious if any of the panelists could comment on how could we get to nonpartisan judicial elections given the white versus Republican party decision out of Minnesota U.S. Supreme Court decision by four decision the only one that Sandra Day O'Connor has publicly said she regrets her vote in that decision I just don't think it's an issue White versus Republican party establishes the ground rules for expressive liberties in the context where you have an election there's nothing in white versus Republican party that requires you to have an election in fact one reading of the case was Justice Scalia showing his disdain for the system by saying if you want to put it to an elective process you're going to have elective processes you're going to make voters aware of what the positions of the judges of the putative judges the judges to be are and the only way to do that is through a full and open campaign and it had the paradoxical effect of you know being on one reading and in your face decision you want to go this route this is what you get this is what elections mean in the American system you don't read anything in it that requires elections at all okay then I misunderstood there's several parts to this then one thing is could you have nonpartisan elections as opposed to partisan elections and there's some ambiguity in the law right now and on one reading of California Republican California Democratic Party case you could argue that a pure nonpartisan election might run into trouble but I don't think so because the way the court has scaled that back in subsequent cases and on a strict reading of again it was Justice Scalia there it's the act of forcing a party to have somebody who is not its choice as its standard bearer that is constitutionally offensive so if you have nonpartisan elections you don't have that so as a legal matter you could have nonpartisan judicial elections you could have appointed elections what you cannot have is partisan elections where the party doesn't get to choose and partisan elections where the candidates can't speak fully on the issues of the day the here to their problem is as Heather calls this problem often is the political reform problem and that's I live for many years in Texas and in Texas there's a big demand for merit selection and the proponents of it the most active proponents of it where the Republican Party where from the Republican Party until the day that the state flipped and the Republicans won every statewide election then Democrats discovered their meritocratic roots and Republicans believed in the people so that's tough that the political reform agenda is going to be state by state it's going to depend on the political climate and the generalizability I don't think there's very many legal restraints constraints in this area all right let's begin our ending here by thanking the panelists I wanted to my own horn but this was the hottest conference everyone's been thanking me but I want to thank all of you for sitting through a very long day thanks to again to bring our agreement the IT staff the PR staff the UCI political sciences and law professors under the banner of the center for studying democracy I just appreciate everyone being here today the good news is that there is ice outside along with light refreshments there will for the participants who spoke today there will be a shuttle going back at 445 to the hotel so make sure you're on that if you want to get a ride back and you can look for the papers in nine or ten short months in the UCI law review thank you all for attending and hope to see you again soon


Okay, this is a software overview. This is where I look at programs that you may not be familiar with something that might be useful to you And today we're going to look at Clipman. Now, there's a couple of programs in Linux that do this But I'm going to look at Clipman today Actually, I think it's called XFC 4-Clipman and your repositories because it is designed for the XFC desktop environment But it will work on other desktop environments as well so once that's installed you can run it you can look for it in your Software list, so I'm going to say Clipman There it is and once I click that you'll see that the icon down here by my clock appears It says Clipman and it looks like a clipboard when I click on it Let me clear out because it has some previous stuff in it You can see by default it will say clipboard is empty and it'll be a clear button. You can't click So at this point I can start highlighting stuff and I can press ctrl-c to copy highlight ctrl-c to copy Highlight ctrl-c to copy so I just copied three different things and of course I can go into a text editor here and I can ctrl-v and paste the last thing I I copied well Clipman keeps a History of things you've copied so I can go back here I go. Oh, and now I want to go back and paste this and now I want to paste this So it's nice to be able to go back Maybe you copied something working on a project, but then you copied some other stuff And you don't want to go and find that thing three things ago that you copied. It will all be here in your history And you can obviously clear this out at any point which is important to think about if you ever Copy something important like a social security number or a credit card number You don't want that laying around in your history if we right-click this we can go up to properties You can also disable it if you want for a time you can change the history size by default It's going to remember the last ten things you copied you can have it save on quit Store the last copied images enabled by default and ignore selections As I have shown you in a previous video if you're in Linux you can highlight something and right away. It's copied and you can Center-click to paste that anywhere. So by default Clip man's ignoring those which is good because again you might be Highlighting a lot of stuff that might be private information and you don't want sitting around in a history so ignores that but if you want that you can uncheck that and that will be on and I would also recommend turning off save on quit that way when you restart your computer So you know that things aren't sitting there for people to find later on It's nice to have there when you sit in there working, but you may not want that stuff stored for a long time But that's up to you what you decide to do We also have stored last Image copied so let's go ahead and close that real quick I am going to go to my website here and I can Highlight copy this highlight and copy this and I can right-click the image and say copy image Now I can open up something like gimp image editor Create a new image And I can let me Copy the text there, and then I'll go in and I'll create Text here control V to paste the text Okay, now let's say I want to paste that image now I can go back to the page and copy it, but let's say I've closed that window I can come here and the image is listed here in my history as well I can click that and then come back to gimp and say control V to paste it and make it a new layer And then I can also again add some more text here, and I can go here and go Oh, I believe in freedom paste that so it's nice having that history there So I just thought I'd share this application with you if you were unaware of it again And there's at least one or two other programs. They're fairly similar in Linux this one I just like I like the design is some ex ex FC stuff Also, let's look a little more at these properties Let's see tweaks So there's there's other options in here that you may want to look at That I haven't really messed with myself so Again, and when you're done you can always quit out of it if you don't want to use it anymore So I thank you for watching this maybe this program will be useful to you and as always I Please visit my website films by chris.com. That's Chris the K Check out the link in the description, and I hope that you have a great day