Correction to Prof. Tokaji's post "Provisional Voting in Illinois"

In a recent post at the new site for his EqualVote blog, Dan Tokaji said:

Provisional Voting in Illinois

Wide disparities in the percentage of provisional ballots counted occurred in Illinois, according to this Chicago Tribune report. As an example, the Tribune notes that only 26% of provisionals were counted in DuPage County, compared to 61% in Chicago.

Such disparities reflect the lack of any uniform standards across the state for determining which provisionals should count. [...]

I talked to Prof. Tokaji offline and said the following:

Joe Hall from Berkeley here (and no, I was not associated with the Hout study!)... :)

I was wondering... in your recent post on provisional ballot counting in Illinois you say, "Such disparities reflect the lack of any uniform standards across the state for determining which provisionals should count."

How confident are we that this variation wouldn't still be there (in some form) if we recounted the provisional ballots using a uniform standard? It would seem we won't know this until someone actually does this, right? Is there historical data (even with provisionals being so new) where a uniform standard was applied in the counting of provisional ballots across all counties in a state?

Prof. Tokaji said that no, in fact, no such study had been done so there could most definitely be other effects that cause this disparity. For example, if 527 groups improperly registered people in certain places (like Cook County -- Chicago), this would show up as a spike in invalid provisional ballots.