Nice new article by Emily Beaulieu, “From Voter ID to Party ID: How Political Parties Affect Perceptions of Election Fraud in the U.S.”
in Electoral Studies (currently available in early access but this may be gated for some).
Here’s the abstract
This paper uses a survey experiment to assess what individuals understand about election fraud and under what circumstances they see it as a problem. I argue that political parties are central to answering both these questions. Results from the 2011 CCES survey suggest respondents are able to differentiate between the relative incentives of Democrats and Republicans where fraud tactics are concerned, but whether voters see these tactics as problematic is heavily influenced by partisan bias. The results show little support for the notion that partisan ideology drives fraud assessments, and suggest support for the idea that individual concerns for fraud are shaped a desire for their preferred candidate to win. These results offer insights that might be applied more broadly to questions of perceptions of electoral integrity and procedural fairness in democracies.
Courtesy of California Civic Education Project (regionalchange.ucdavis.edu)
Courtesy of Los Angeles County Clerk/Recorder Dean Logan’s twitter feed, researchers at the University of California, Davis’s California Civic Engagement Project has released a fascinating analysis of vote by mail usage in the Golden State.
Some of the patterns are not surprising to anyone who has followed vote by mail for a while: by-mail voters tend to be older and white and Asian. The report pays particularly close attention to lower Hispanic usage rates of VBM, but I’m a bit disappointed that there is no report of African American usage, which Charles Stewart and I have shown has grown enormously in Florida and other southeastern states.
Party differences are, as always, complex. A greater proportion of Republican affiliators use vote by mail, but because Democrats hold such an enormous registration advantage in the state, a larger proportion of the vote by mail electorate overall is Democratic (43%) vs. Republican (33%) and No Party preference (18%).
Nice posting by Nate Persily on Monkey Cage: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/22/american-elections-need-help-heres-how-to-make-them-better/
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, also known as the Bauer-Ginsberg Commission, has issued its final report. Rick Hasen, waking and working before all of us, has already provided a great summary of findings and recommendations. I’m particularly excited to see the Election Toolkit produced by the Voting Information Project.
I testified before the Commission in Denver, accompanied by Jacob Canter (exp. ’14). Our work last summer was partially supported by the Alta S. Corbett Summer Research Program of Reed College.
Congratulations to Nate, Charles, Tammy, Ann, Chris, Ben, Bob, Trey, and all the commission members and staff!
Links are courtesy of the Public Policy Institute of California, an active policy research shop in Sacramento. PPIC has a broad portfolio that includes high quality work on elections, election administration, and voter turnout.
- January 23: California’s Future: Voter Turnout.
DATE: January 23, 2014 TIME: 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. (registration 11:45 a.m.) LOCATION: CSAC Conference Center
1020 11th Street, second floor
Sacramento, CA - Brief video summarizing PPIC research findings on California voter turnout at You Tube.
This looks like a nice effort by Susan, Claire, and others at US Votes and the Overseas Vote Foundation:
https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/files/OVF_research_newsletter_vol4_issue2_winter2014.pdf
Figure 3 from Bentele and O’Brien
An interesting new article by Keith Bentele and Erin O’Brien at the University of Massachusetts, Boston came out in the December 2013 Perspectives on Politics. Titled “Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies.” It should be of interest to everyone in the political science, law, and policy side of election administration. (Hat tip to the Monkey Cage, which features a guest post by the authors.)
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in state legislation likely to reduce access for some voters, including photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements, registration restrictions, absentee ballot voting restrictions, and reductions in early voting. Political operatives often ascribe malicious motives when their opponents either endorse or oppose such legislation. In an effort to bring empirical clarity and epistemological standards to what has been a deeply-charged, partisan, and frequently anecdotal debate, we use multiple specialized regression approaches to examine factors associated with both the proposal and adoption of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006–2011. Our results indicate that proposal and passage are highly partisan, strategic, and racialized affairs. These findings are consistent with a scenario in which the targeted demobilization of minority voters and African Americans is a central driver of recent legislative developments.We discuss the implications of these results for current partisan and legal debates regarding voter restrictions and our understanding of the conditions incentivizing modern suppression efforts. Further, we situate these policies within developments in social welfare and criminal justice policy that collectively reduce electoral access among the socially marginalized.
Some exciting news out of TurboVote–they are partnering with the Pew Center on the States’s Elections Initiatives.
And more exciting for some–TurbeVote is hiring! Read all the news here: http://blog.turbovote.org/2013/11/05/wanted-talent-for-democracy/
