Model City: Denver Cleaned Up Its Voter Rolls and Boosted Turnout, Too

[Judi Lynn]

by JANE C. TIMM
AUG 6 2017, 6:15 AM ET

Denver, Colorado has spent the last eight years modernizing its elections, offering a model for how a city and county successfully maintains voter rolls.

The city began taking steps in 2009 to make it easier for voters to cast ballots, officials to count them, and administrators to maintain accurate, clean voter rolls. In the process, they’ve increased voter turnout and saved taxpayers money.

In the 2016 general election, turnout was at 72 percent — up six points from the city’s 2008’s turnout, and ten points higher than the national average in 2016, according to the city's data. The effort has driven election costs down, from $6.51 per voter to $4.15 per voter.

“In Denver, we’ve said, ‘What do we want our voter experience to be?’ and worked backwards from there," Denver Board of Elections Amber McReynolds told NBC News. The city employee been running the Mile High City's elections for the last six years.

More:
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/model-city-denver-cleaned-its-voter-rolls-boosted-turnout-too-n789286

[bullimiami]

1. If your goal is to suppress certain voters and muddle any results

While making a profit for a well connected few.
You end up with a quite different solution.

[Igel]

2. Wait.

Some pundit who actually did a literature search and had evidence to back up his claim (her claim?) pointed out that pretty much every single change made to education increased student achievement.

In fact, if you could add them all up at some schools every student should be getting an A+. But the school that was failing in 1970 could still be failing, in spite of the huge change.

But it was classic observer's paradox material. Sometimes the change provoked a lot of new teachers. It provoked parent engagement. It provoked careful monitoring of students and a huge increase in effort and attention. It blew away old budgets and allowed for reallocation of resources. It excited students. Having researchers come in, advise, monitor and report to the principals and the top district staff. Not just the one teaching style or practice. All kinds of things changed. Even if there was a control, the control was "untouched," not "let's do everything the same except introduce this new teaching practice." The control was fake, in other words, because the education PhDs claimed to change one thing as they changed 10. (But they believed and constructed their own new, better reality.)

Sometimes the innovation was tried in 10 schools, just one showed great results, and that was the one school whose data was used in the analysis.

And a follow up showed that in almost all cases the big increase one year had vanished within 3 years. Even if the innovative teaching practice was still a standard part of the teachers' toolkit. In other words, the practice was there but the results caused by the practice weren't. The attributed causal connection wasn't all that causal. Far more casual, it appears. This effect has been given a name, but I'm really bad with names.

The phrase "regression to the mean" comes to mind. But education research is about the ever important work of saving people, and we don't have time to wait in publishing earth-shaking, messiah-level results. Or reporting that, really, most of them had really, really small effects at best.

In other words, Denver did all these great things and got a one-time bump.

We heard the same thing about a number of other innovations. All those wonderful tricks and practices that so boost voting--early voting, same-day registration, etc.? Over time the percentage of voters has pretty consistently declined. Those innovations sometimes produced a bump that was swallowed in the trend. Sometimes those innovations occurred the same year as something else that also increased turnout--Obama's election, perhaps--and that Obama bump was attributed to that innovation. Again, people want to believe, and the more important the social goal the less critically people think about things like, "Gee, do I have a valid control?" or "Am I using the right statistical tool?"

Yeah. Bummer. But the easiest person for a research to deceive is himself. The next easiest are those who want to believe him. That means those are the ones with the greatest need for well-honed critical thinking skills applied first and foremost to the things that the researcher (and acolytes) want to believe are true. Any idjit has the attitude and desire to apply those skills to things they think are wrong, even if they've only ever heard of critical thinking in an ad at the back of their comic book. Self-defense is pretty inherent; self-criticism and attacking the self? Not so much.