US ELECTION SCIENTIST WORRIES ABOUT VOTERS ‘SCREWING UP’

Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the nation’s leading experts in the science surrounding election administration, fears that voters “will screw up” in the November 3 election and he is working feverishly to help prevent that grievous error.

In an interview with Martin Cornwall of Science Insider of the Association for the Advancement of American Sciences (AAAS), Stewart, currently co-director of the recently-launched Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which is working with researchers and election administrators to “ensure that the 2020 election can proceed with integrity, safety, and equal access.” It has, for example, helped connect modelers with election officials trying to figure out how to best place ballot drop boxes and polling places. The effort, Stewart says, “is really research in the interest of action.”

“I’m the co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. We were put together in the heat of the recount in Florida in 2000, with the idea that we would design a perfect voting machine. But it was obvious that the problems of lost votes were broader than just voting machines and largely grew out of human systems, not the technology,” Stewart said. I’ve had a long-term interest in trying to create an academic niche that some of us call election science, which applies social science and other scientific approaches to understanding how voters interact with the election administration system… We were very concerned that most of the energy around COVID was actually being channeled into litigation, into partisan politics. We do research to try to understand what is going on in this election because of COVID and to explain that to the world, but also to encourage the meeting up of scientifically, engineering-oriented university people, civic tech people, and election administrators. “

“I’m worried about voters screwing up and I’m worried about not enough poll workers to work in-person polling places to meet demand for in-person voting. With respect to voters screwing up, what I mean is voters screwing up voting by mail and voters, you know, requesting mail ballots or mailing them in too late, not having opportunities to return them in person. [Common errors on mail-in ballots include failing to sign the ballot and marking votes incorrectly so they don’t register.] On the in-person side, I think we’re going to have a very high demand for in-person voting. In the primary season the real struggle with keeping polling places open has been with counties losing their poll workers. In 2016, 60% of poll workers were over the age of 60 and 25% are over the age of 70. So the prime poll working population is also the prime population that’s most at risk of COVID. That’s a big thing,” Stewart concluded.

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