Publications

News media coverage on Election Day often focuses on longlines at polling places. News outlets are incentivized to cover long lines, as they make for dramatic television–despite long waits being rare. Coverage of long lines potentially deters turnout due to public perception of long wait times, reduces confidence in election administration, and undermines trust in government institutions. However, we know little about the potential deleterious effects of emphasizing longlines. Improving understanding of Election Day coverage has important implications for scholars, election officials, and journalists.

This paper has two parts: First, a systematic content analysis of television news coverage of voting on Election Day: we analyze coverage of Election Day in the 2016 and 2018 elections on six national television news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC) plus a sample of local network news. Second, we will conduct a survey experiment in which each subject is randomly assigned to a television news story about polling place lines with a different news frame: a baseline condition with a news story unrelated to voting and treatment conditions varying the video imagery, chryons (bottom of screen text characterizing story), and reporter voiceover. We will measure attitudes about vote intention, confidence in elections, expected wait time, blame attribution for long lines, and credibility and fairness of the coverage

Voters who use the straight party voting option (SPVO) are more likely than others to roll off when voting for nonpartisan offices and ballot questions. Previous research has theorized that this effect is due to voter error, as individuals fail to understand that they must still complete nonpartisan questions after selecting the straight party option. Using cast vote records, we find the SPVO leads both to voter error in some individuals and satisficing in others. About half of voters using the SPVO who engage in nonpartisan roll-off leave all nonpartisan elected offices blank. At the same time, among voters who vote for at least one nonpartisan elected office, individuals using the SPVO are still more likely than other voters to engage in nonpartisan roll-off. Survey data confirm both of these patterns. Among voters using the SPVO, those with college education are more likely to state that they intentionally rolled off rather than were confused about their vote while those without college education are more likely to be unsure about who they voted for. We also find that the effect of the straight party option on nonpartisan roll-off increases with voter fatigue and decreases with campaign spending, supporting the explanation of satisficing. Our results highlight the unintended effects of ballot design in influencing voter behavior.

Large-scale ballot and survey data hold the potential to uncover the prevalence of swing voters and strong partisans in the electorate. However, existing approaches either employ exploratory analyses that fail to fully leverage the information available in high-dimensional data, or impose a one-dimensional spatial voting model. I derive a clustering algorithm which better captures the probabilistic way in which theories of political behavior conceptualize the swing voter. Building from the canonical finite mixture model, I tailor the model to vote data, for example by allowing uncontested races. I apply this algorithm to actual ballots in the Florida 2000 election and a multi-state survey in 2018. In Palm Beach County, I find that up to 60 percent of voters were straight ticket voters; in the 2018 survey, even higher. The remaining groups of the electorate were likely to cross the party line and split their ticket, but not monolithically: swing voters were more likely to swing for state and local candidates and popular incumbents.

Many democracies changed their electoral systems since 1990s either to permit or restrict the access of small parties into parliament. In some others, governments initiated an electoral system change, yet failed to enact the reform as in the examples of New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Poland. These failed electoral reforms receive scant attention in the literature, save for a few case studies. In this paper, I model electoral reforms as driven by strategic calculations of the ruling-party whose preferences about alternative electoral systems are shaped by the dynamics of the party competition. I specifically focus on the impact of small parties on the competition between the largest two parties and develop different scenarios of permissive and restrictive reforms. This novel account expects that the ruling party initiates an electoral reform depending on whether small or new parties draw votes from its vote base or from that of its main competitor in the election. For the success of reforms, I examine the role of institutions, in particular the level of institutional protection that electoral systems have. I test the hypotheses by using an original dataset of cross-national electoral reform attempts in 32 parliamentary democracies between 1945and 2015.The findings of the study support the main hypotheses. I find that ruling parties are more likely to initiate an electoral reform restricting small party access when small parties draw votes from its vote base, but an opposite one when small parties draw votes from its main competitor in the election.

A model is developed to forecast monthly county level voter registration totals by party for Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Oregon and Wyoming. A prediction model of change in voter registration can help election administrators prepare for periods of high workload. Another application is to aid the adjustment of voter registration figures with an eye towards removing deadwood registrants. The aim of doing so is to boost voter registration data’s efficacy in predicting phenomena such as postcensal population growth, election outcomes and voter turnout. Descriptive statistics on the concentration of drops and negative net changes in total registrants are presented to discuss how much information such data can yield to help estimate deadwood in conjunction with prediction models utilizing demographic and other factors

How do we ensure the accuracy and integrity of a statewide voter registration database, which often depends on aggregating decentralized, sub-state data with different list maintenance practices? We present Bayesian multivariate multilevel model to account for common patterns in local data while detecting anomalous patterns, using Florida as our example. We use monthly snapshots of state’s voter database to estimate countywide change rates for multiple response variables (e.g., changes in voter’s partisan affiliation), and then jointly model their changes. We show that there is much heterogeneity in how counties manage voter lists, resulting in very different patterns in additions, deletions, or changes of records. Our method identifies several Florida counties with anomalous rates of changes in the 2016 election.

Voter list maintenance has received increasing attention in the popular press and from advocacy groups in the past few years. Little scholarly work, however, has detailed who is removed - or "purged" - despite no change in their legal eligibility to vote. This paper leverages data from North Carolina to investigate the characteristics of purged individuals between 2010 and 2016. Although we find that minority voters were less likely than white voters to be purged, they were significantly more likely to cast a provisional ballot after being purged despite no change in their eligibility to vote. Purged minorities who cast a provisional ballot were also less likely to have their provisional ballots counted than white voters. This paper presents the first evidence that imprecise voter list maintenance disproportionately disenfranchises voters of color.

Maine recently became the first state to implement instant-runoff voting, or ranked choice voting (RCV) in U.S. Senate and House elections. Before a court ruling, the state also successfully conducted RCV primary elections for governor in the summer of 2018. With seven candidates vying for the nomination, and as the first time voters in the state would try RCV, this race offered an opportunity to examine voting behavior to see how voters acted in a new electoral system.

This paper explores three areas of RCV voting through the analysis of Maine’s 2018 gubernatorial primary. First, this paper offers a descriptive analysis of the ballots cast in the primary, examining various voting propensities and patterns. Second, the paper attempts to address questions about the confusing nature of RCV by looking broadly at ballot errors. Third, the paper addresses the criticism that RCV does not always guarantee majority winners by examining ballot exhaustion in close detail. As the extant literature on RCV has looked at many of these areas separately, it is worthwhile to examine Maine in a broad context rather than through reexaminations of any one single avenue. Using this method, we can see how the inclusion of new data from Maine might bolster or weaken current arguments about RCV. In sum, voting behavior in Maine seems to be in line with many other studies. Rates of single-shot voting seem to be lower than reported in other locations, suggesting more participation in ranking, but the rate of completely ranked ballots was also lower, likely due to the large number of rankings allowed. Error rates seemed to be in line with other studies, but we find that the actual effect of any ballot errors was minimal. Finally, the number of completely blank ballots was at the low end of one study, but it is difficult to find comparable data. These blank ballots should be the subject of additional study.