EVIC Updates – Page 59 – Elections & Voting Information Center

Welcome to a preview of EVIC’s new and improved website. We know we’re a little late to the game––early voting is already well underway, as you know from the huge press coverage it is receiving.

All the same, we hope to use this website as a clearinghouse for some of the more important and notable early and absentee voting news over the next two to three weeks. In addition to some analysis of events, we’ll also be posting graphs of early voting (see our historical archive) ballot trends in major battleground states, data permitting.

You can still access all the information from our old site. Ultimately though, this new format will serve as the engine for EVIC’s new website in the Winter; consider this a soft launch!

This article is a brief overview of the place that election law scholarship can play in undergraduate education.

Gronke – 2012 – How and when to teach election law in the undergraduate classroom

Forms of convenience voting—early in-person voting, voting by mail, absentee voting, electronic voting, and voting by fax—have become the mode of choice for >30% of Americans in recent elections. Despite this, and although nearly every state in the United States has adopted at least one form of convenience voting, the academic re- search on these practices is unequally distributed across important questions. A great deal of literature on turnout is counterbalanced by a dearth of research on campaign effects, election costs, ballot quality, and the risk of fraud. This article introduces the theory of convenience voting, reviews the current literature, and suggests areas for future research.

Gronke, Galanes-Rosenbaum, Miller et al., – 2008 – Convenience Voting

Abstract:

Forms of convenience votingearly in-person voting, voting by mail, absentee voting, electronic voting, and voting by faxhave be- come the mode of choice for >30% of Americans in recent elections. Despite this, and although nearly every state in the United States has adopted at least one form of convenience voting, the academic re- search on these practices is unequally distributed across important questions. A great deal of literature on turnout is counterbalanced by a dearth of research on campaign effects, election costs, ballot quality, and the risk of fraud. This article introduces the theory of convenience voting, reviews the current literature, and suggests areas for future research.

Gronke – 2008 – Early Voting Reforms and American Elections

Gronke, Toffey – 2008 – The Psychological and Institutional Determinants of Early Voting

Abstract:

This article examines early voting, an institutional innovation whereby citizens can cast their ballots a time and location other than on election day and at the precinct place. Early voting has been proposed as way to expand the franchise, by making voting more convenient, and extend the franchise, by encouraging turnout among those segments of the population who are unable or unwilling to vote using traditional methods. The article draws on models of voter decision making that conceptualize voting as a choice reached under uncertainty. Voters vary by (a) their willingness to accept uncertainty, (b) their cognitive engagement with the campaign, and (c) their location in an institutional environment that makes early voting possible. We propose a multivariate model of early voting, contingent on a voter’s prior levels of political information, level of fixed political beliefs, and political information activity. These are also interacted with the institutional context (laws and procedures that allow early voting). At the descriptive level, we find most of the expected demographic and attitudinal patterns: early voters are older, better educated, and more cognitively engaged in the campaign and in politics. Because national surveys are ill equipped to capture nuanced campaign dynamics, many of the statistically significant relationships disappear in multi- variate analyses. Regardless, revealing differences emerge between midterm and presidential election years that allow us to make important inferences about the demographic and participatory characteristics of early voters.

Gronke, Cook – 2007 – Disdaining the Media- The American Public’s Changing Attitudes Toward the News

Abstract:

After spending two decades studying the news media as an institution, Tim Cook turned his attention to public attitudes about the press, a topic that lurked behind much of his work, most prominently Governing with the News, but one that he had never addressed directly in print. As was typically the case with Tim’s voracious intellectual appetite, the project grew into a larger study of public trust and confidence in institutions. This piece represents the first fruits of this collaboration, addressing what began our inquiry: what was the cause of the long known, but seldom explained, decline in pubic confidence in the press? Was it because they had become, in Cook’s words, just another “governing” institution? Or was there something distinct about the press as an institution in the array of public attitudes about the social and political world? In this piece, we demonstrate how confidence in the press is distinct from generalized confidence in other social and political institutions. In particular, we find that the same political indicators that lead to higher confidence in institutions in general drive down confidence in the press. We close by speculating on likely future trends given the adversarial tenor of press coverage.

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