Roll Call article on EAC Burying Study

["Margit Johansson" <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>]

EAC Blasted Again For Burying Study

Matthew Murray, ROLL CALL STAFF, 9 April 2007

The beleaguered Election Assistance Commission is weathering new
criticism amid charges it mishandled a controversial and expensive
voting study, again drawing scrutiny from Congress and outside groups
just as the agency battles back from recent allegations that it
stumbled in overseeing voting machine testing labs.

The current controversy is over the politically sensitive issue of
voter identification laws.

At best, critics say the agency unnecessarily delayed publicizing
findings of a voter identification project that was released only 10
days ago and shows that some state laws significantly disenfranchise
black and Hispanic voters. At worst, experts suggest the commission
yielded to political pressure, attempting to bury the uncomfortable
conclusions of a poorly managed study that sapped the tiny agency's
resources - and still didn't yield the data the EAC must by law
provide.

In 2005, Rutgers University signed a two-project deal with the
commission worth $560,002, according to a copy of the signed contract
obtained by Roll Call. The EAC, which was created by 2002's Help
America Vote Act, contracted the university's Eagleton Institute of
Politics to produce research supporting the "development of guidelines
on topics of provisional voting and voter identification procedures."

In short, EAC officials, who set aside roughly 5 percent of the
agency's fiscal 2005 budget for the study, thought they were
commissioning a survey of voter identification procedures across the
country.

But with the check cashed, on June 28, 2006, EAC officials got more -
and less - than they bargained for. Rutgers' Eagleton Institute and
Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law submitted research
titled "Best Practices to Improve Voter Identification Requirements,"
which commission officials claim is a slight detour from Rutgers'
original marching orders.

The study was released 10 days ago at the insistence of Rep. Maurice
Hinchey (D-N.Y.), who oversees the EAC's budget on the House
Appropriations Committee.

"We asked them to analyze problems and challenges, and to come up with
different answers to problems and challenges of having voter
identification law," said Caroline Hunter, a Republican-nominated EAC
commissioner who took her seat on the EAC in March. "What we ended up
getting was a little bit different from what we originally asked for."

Hunter continued: "It's fair to say the original request did not ask
them to study the effect of identification on [voter] turnout. Now,
whether it evolved into that is another story. Originally that wasn't
part of the contract."

Commission officials declined to elaborate specifically on subsequent
discussions with Rutgers on the project, other than to confirm that
university researchers approached the agency about shifting the
study's focus and that the EAC agreed.

"I don't think anyone here is saying we weren't a part of the
conversation," Hunter said.

But once the study was complete, Hunter said, the agency did take
issue with the allegedly faulty math used to conduct the research, and
that may have doomed the study right out of the gate regardless of its
conclusion.

"It was a methodology that we had concerns with," Hunter said. "The
way that it was done, there were some concerns."

Tim Vercellotti, a Rutgers political science professor who co-directs
the Eagleton Institute, disputes Hunter's charge that the study
cherry-picked statistics to show a relationship between voter
identification laws and voter participation, a correlation that may or
may not exist.

While the agency is well within its rights to decide what research it
issues as guidelines, Vercellotti said, there is no doubt the study's
methodology is sound. What also appears certain, he suggested, is the
issue's ability to strike controversy along constitutional and racial
grounds.

"I speak for the research team that worked on the project,"
Vercellotti said. "It's a solid piece of social science research, but
it's being released into a very political environment."

Vercellotti added: "People are very sensitive about the implications
of [voter identification requirements] having any relationship to
lower voter turnout among any group, but particularly among people of
color."

Another individual familiar with the study, who requested not to be
named, said the commission's unanimous decision not to adopt the
Rutgers study had little to do with the study's science. The EAC
simply is having buyer's remorse for a lightly managed project
involving a sensitive subject that is being forced into a politically
charged environment.

"This is a bipartisan commission and I suspect this was simply too hot
to handle - especially with regards to the Republicans on the
commission," the source said. "If what they were looking for was a
different kind of study, the EAC should have been clearer up front on
what it wanted."

While some experts dispute the math, others say the agency's lack of
transparency during the process is troublesome. Wendy Weiser of the
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law agrees
that while the agency decides what guidelines to adopt, it must
disclose its rationale for not disclosing even shoddy results.

"It was a serious mistake for the EAC to withhold this information
that was submitted to them at a time when the country has been
immersed in debates on these issues at both the state and federal
levels and in the courts," Weiser said. "It seems to me to be highly
improper for an agency whose mission is to make information about
election administration issues available to the public to suppress or
withhold that information. At the time the report was submitted to the
EAC, there were voter ID bills pending in roughly half the states to
try and create more stringent documentation requirements for voting."

Weiser concluded: "And they're using substantial federal dollars to do so."

An unwillingness to disclose a potentially embarrassing snafu is at
the forefront of Hinchey's concerns. He also wants the agency to
release an earlier draft on voter fraud, arguing that study could
contain vital information that has remained hidden from public
scrutiny.

"The primary concern he has with the EAC has to do with transparency,"
said Hinchey spokesman Jeff Lieberson. "And the fact that these
studies were commissioned ... the public has a right to see what the
findings were."