A new article by William D. Hicks, Seth C. McKee, Mitchell D. Sellers and Daniel A. Smith is available on FirstLook for the Political Research Quarterly.  From the abstract:

We undertake a comprehensive examination of restrictive voter ID legislation in the American states from 2001 through 2012. With a dataset containing approximately one thousand introduced and nearly one hundred adopted voter ID laws, we evaluate the likelihood that a state legislature introduces a restrictive voter ID bill, as well as the likelihood that a state government adopts such a law. Voter ID laws have evolved from a valence issue into a partisan battle, where Republicans defend them as a safeguard against fraud while Democrats indict them as a mechanism of voter suppression. However, voter ID legislation is not uniform across the states; not all Republican-controlled legislatures have pushed for more restrictive voter ID laws. Instead, our findings show it is a combination of partisan control and the electoral context that drives enactment of such measures. While the prevalence of Republican lawmakers strongly and positively influences the adoption of voter ID laws in electorally competitive states, its effect is significantly weaker in electorally uncompetitive states. Republicans preside over an electoral coalition that is declining in size; where elections are competitive, the furtherance of restrictive voter ID laws is a means of maintaining Republican support while curtailing Democratic electoral gains.

Image courtesy of ballot.hackoregon.org

A great new site with an unfortunate name, “HackOregon” (message to 20 somethings, not all end users view “hacking” as a positive), provides assorted visualizations of campaign spending in Oregon, using information available from Orestar.

The most revealing thing to me is the fact that ALL the initiative and referendum campaigns rely on substantial donations from out of state donors and from very wealthy individuals.  Nearly every campaign ad I’ve seen this year charges that “outsiders” and “billionaires” are influencing Oregon elections.  Welcome to the post Citizens United / McCutcheon world of campaign finance!

The site could use some improvement in the search mechanism; right now you have to know what (phony) name is being used by many committees in order to search for their spending.  For example, search on “Measure 89” or “Measure 90” and you only get one or another of the campaigns.

Very nice visualizations!

Powerful blog posting by Michelle Michelson about the controversial political science field experiment that sent voter information cards to Montana voters.  She makes some extremely effective points that anyone interested in conducting field experiments should pay attention to.