Every few days the Ann Arbor City Clerk sends out a list called the "Daily AV List," with a spreadsheet of all voters who have requested an absentee ballot and a note as to which of them have been returned. It's available upon request from the clerk's office, and is used by election watchers and political operatives to help plan and target mailings and campaign efforts towards those who vote by mail.

A simplistic analysis

A map of absentee voter ballots issued based on data provided by the Ann Arbor City Clerk shows which precincts have the most absentee voters. Precincts in downtown Ann Arbor and in the student dominated areas near campus and on the north and northeast side of town have very low absentee ballot rates to date; by contrast, in the precincts which include large populations of eligible older adults, turnout is much higher.

Digging deeper

In every hotly contested election, there is some question whether absentee voting leads to voter fraud. It's relatively difficult to walk into a polling place and vote under someone else's name, but by comparison it's much easier to get a ballot by mail and send it in. Part of the analysis of this data is a look to see if there are any obvious signs that things are amiss.

If you had lots of data and lots of time to look, you might ask these questions:

How does the absentee turnout in this election compare to the turnout in previous elections? If there are many more people voting absentee this year in one precinct, can you explain the change?

Are there any particular addresses which have received a large cluster of ballots sent to them? It's plausible that an individual household might get some modest number of ballots if there are multiple adults residing there, but if dozens or hundreds of absentee ballots were all mailed off to the same place, you'd start to wonder.

If you compared census data to absentee data, looking for an estimate of the number of qualified voters who are automatically eligible for absentee ballots, would you find any anomalies?

If you looked at the voting results just for absentee ballots, would you find that one candidate received unusually many votes for one candidate in one location? The best example of this I could readily find was from Cahokia, Ill., where an elected official was convicted of ballot box stuffing after 328 of 355 absentee ballots cast were voted in his favor.

Accounts of or allegations of absentee fraud in past elections

This is just a small sampling, to illustrate what can go wrong.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2004, from the New York Times:

"And in Michigan, Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land said she had to put out a statement in mid-October about where to send absentee ballots after voters in the Ann Arbor area received calls telling them to mail the ballots to the wrong address."

Detroit, 2005, from WDIV Channel 4:

"DETROIT -- A judge ruled Friday afternoon that City Clerk Jackie Currie would be replaced as head of Detroit's absentee voter program. The ruling followed testimony from Secretary of State election monitor Susan McRill, who said she discovered evidence of voter fraud. Judge Mary Beth Kelly, of Wayne County Circuit Court, ordered Thursday that McRill and another monitor oversee Currie and her election workers, or ambassadors, specifically for the handling of absentee ballots. McRill testified Friday that she witnessed ambassadors helping senior citizens at the Fairlane Nursing Centre on Joy Road in Detroit to sign their absentee ballots, and apparently coaching them to vote for Jackie Currie, Local 4 reported."

Who can vote absentee?

The Secretary of State's What You Need to Know About Absentee Voting gives a complete guide to voting absentee, including forms that you can download and print and send in to request an absentee ballot no matter where you live.

Registered voters may request an absentee ballot if they are age 60 years or older,
unable to vote without assistance at the polls, expecting to be out of town on election day, in jail awaiting arraignment or trial, unable to attend the polls due to religious reasons, or appointed to work as an election inspector in a precinct outside of your precinct of record. The precise language of the statute is at MCL 168.758.

Expanding absentee voting

The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a list of absentee voting laws on a state-by-state basis.

Thirty states and the District of Columbia allow no-excuse absentee voting, where any voter can get a ballot by mail and send it in. The state of Oregon conducts all elections by mail.

The Michigan legislature proposes a bill to expand absentee access annually, and none of them have been passed. The most recent, Senate Bill 97 of 2009, was sponsored by Liz Brater (D-Ann Arbor); it was referred to the Senate Committee on Campaign and Election Oversight, where the bill died.

Edward Vielmetti goes to the polls for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.