2018 OC Election Integrity Pilot Project Final Report is Available!

We recently summarized and reviewed our work on the 2018 election integrity pilot project in Orange County. This report is now on the project’s website, and here’s the report’s Executive Summary:

In 2018, we launched an ambitious pilot study to develop and implement a wide variety of tools to study the integrity of elections in Orange County (CA). In this report, we review our project, and provide a summary of the results from our analyses. The election integrity methodologies that we developed, tested, and deployed in 2018 using data from Orange County included the following analytical applications:

• A methodology for scanning the County’s voter registration database for anomalous changes;

• Tools for analyzing post-election precinct-by-precinct datasets for unusual patterns in voter turnout and votes cast;

• Monitoring of social media data for mention of the election and any issues that arose;

• In-person election observation in early and Election Day voting locations;

• Surveys of registered voters about their experiences with the registration and voting processes and technologies.

Across our major analytical studies, we produce evidence that the administration and conduct of the 2018 primary and general elections in Orange County had a high degree of integrity. Orange County is a very large election jurisdiction, with complex and evolving procedures. That our analytical tools found so few areas of concern lends strong confidence in the conclusion that the county’s election administration was without compromise.