Election Science Working Group

This month’s speaker was Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Persily is one of the nation’s leading experts on redistricting, having served as a consultant to numerous redistricting cases over the past decades, including some currently under way. He spoke about the round of redistricting currently taking places among the states, and on topics such as gerrymandering, the role of commissions, and redistricting dynamics following the demise of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

The Boston-Cambridge Election Science Working Group reconvened for the 2021-22 academic year; this month’s speaker was Larry Moore, who is the retired founder of Clear Ballot. Larry spoke about the Arizona “audits,”  as one of a small group of experts who have led the way in countering what has been going on there. 

The working group returned this month with guests Steven Davenport and James Syme, from the Center for New Data. As a part of the center’s Observing Democracy project, they have developed applications that use pseudonymized geolocated data to measure voting activities, such as voting times, travel times, and communities of interest for redistricting.

This month's speaker was Professor Justin Grimmer  of the Stanford Political Science Department. He spoke on a draft paper about the erroneous election fraud claims made after the election entitled No Evidence for Voter Fraud: A Guide to Statistical Claims about the 2020 Election.

This month’s meeting was focused on  mis- and disinformation during the 2020 presidential election. Our guests were:

• Alex Stamos, Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former head of Security for Facebook.
• Matt Masterson, former senior advisor to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and former commissioner of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission

This month, the group heard from Miles Rapoport, Tova Wang, and E.J. Dion about “Universal Civic Duty Voting,” which some people call mandatory voting.

See below several materials relevant to this topic:

• An Op-Ed from the LA Times written by Miles Rapoport and Janai Nelson
• A recent Buzzfeed article on the issue
•  An excerpt from a recent Washington Post Editorial  which suggests President Biden’s Commission should consider universal civic duty voting.

 “The commission should look at encouraging more voter participation. That could mean universal voter registration, which would make the process less arduous but potentially more secure, or making Election Day a holiday. Or perhaps mail-in balloting should be expanded, along with ditching signature-matching for more sophisticated methods of verifying voters’ identities. The commission could even review how mandatory voting has worked in places such as Australia.”

The speaker at our December meeting was Kabir Khanna, from the CBS News Decision Desk. Kabir received his PhD in political science from Princeton University and has been helping to manage the CBS decision desk and election coverage.  He spoke about the process by which the decision desks do their work. It should be an interesting session.

This month’s meeting was a 2020 election retrospective. Our guests were:

• Julia Azari, Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and contributor to FiveThirtyEight.
• Ned Foley, Professor of Law and Director of the Election Law Program at Ohio State University.
• Jennifer Morrell, former elections director in Colorado and Utah, and principal with The Elections Group.

The October 2020 meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group focused on Ranked Choice Voting, with a panel of speakers on the subject, including:

• Rob Richie, Executive Director of FairVote
• Moon Duchin, Associate Professor of Mathematics and leader of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts University
• Jesse Clark, PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, MIT
• Ismar Volic, Professor of Mathematics, Wellesley

The Boston/Cambridge Workshop in Election Science reconvened with a virtual kick-off meeting. As is traditional, we spent time introducing ourselves and brainstorming about people to invite to speak to us during the year. 

In addition, we welcomed Nate Persily, co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project  with join Charles Stewart III, who joined Charles for a discussion about their work with the project and what they were seeing as they interact with social media platforms, election officials, academics, the campaigns, and others in the quest to make elections safe and healthy this November.

The fourth meeting of the year of the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group featured Michelle Tassinari (Massachusetts Elections Director), who spoke about cybersecurity preparations for the 2020 election and recent election reform. 

The third meeting of the year of the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group featured Devra Mohler and Monica Lee (both researchers from Facebook), who spoke on "Social Science and Preventing Election Interference on Facebook." 

The October 2019 meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group featured Sunshine Hillygus, professor of Political Science at Duke University, who spoke about the 2020 Census, particularly the issue of adding a citizenship question.

The Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group at MIT is a monthly gathering of faculty, graduate students, and other researchers who are interested in the scientific study of elections. This was the first meeting of the academic year, and was informal, allowing attendees to share research interests and to plan the year. 

In May 2019, the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group was joined by Tom Hicks of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission .

The April meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Working Group featured a talk by Amber McReynolds, Executive Director of the National Vote at Home Institute .

The March meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Working Group in Election Science featured two lightning presentations of emerging research in election science:

1.    Shiro Kuriwaki (Harvard): "Party Allegiance on the Long Ballot"
2.    Bryce Dietrich (Harvard): “Are Some Votes Counted More than Others?”

The December meeting featured a roundtable on Voter Files: Research and Social Implications. Steve Koczela (President, MassINC Polling Group) and Jonathan Robinson (Lead Research Scientist, Catalist) joined us for a discussion on the use of voter files in research and political campaigns. 

The November meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Working Group in Election Science featured a panel of three local professors who shared information and analysis based on their Election Day work: Stephen Pettigrew, of the University of Pennsylvania and the NBC News Data Analytics Lab and Decision Desk; Brian Schaffner, of the Tufts Political Science Department and National Voter Survey; and Charles Stewart III of MIT, who participated in ProPublica's ElectionLand coverage and response team during the election.

The Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group at MIT is a monthly gathering of faculty, graduate students, and other researchers who are interested in the scientific study of elections. The October meeting features a discussion on the start-up VOATZ, led by Nimit Sawhney, co-founder of VOATZ, and Larry Moore, founder of Clear Ballot.

The Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group at MIT 
is a monthly gathering of faculty, graduate students, and other researchers who are interested in the scientific study of elections. This was the first meeting of the 2018-2019 academic year; it featured introductory information and provided an opportunity for attendees to reconnect after the summer.

Moon Duchin, of Tufts University and the Metric Geometry & Gerrymandering Group, presented "Outlier analysis for redistricting: What does it measure and why?" Click here to learn more about this project.

Caitlin Conley, of the Belfer Center's Defending Digital Democracy program, presented "Efforts to bolster the cyberdefenses of state and local election administration."

The January meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group was held on January 11, 2018.

Ron Rivest, of MIT EECS, and Jennifer Morrell, of the Arapahoe County Elections Division (CO), presented on "Risk-limiting audits in elections."

Dana Chisnell, of the Center for Civic Design, presented on "The Epic Journey of American Voters."

Pippa Norris, of Harvard University, the University of Sidney, and the Electoral Integrity Project, presented on "Roswell, Grassy Knolls, and Voter Fraud: Explaining erroneous perceptions of electoral malpractices."

The September meeting of the Boston/Cambridge Election Science Working Group was held on September 14, 2017, allowing current and former members to discuss the group's agenda for the year.