Publications

What does it take to make American voters feel more confident in the electoral process? Recent work has explored questions along these lines, assessing voter trust as a function of information diets, endorsements of the electoral process by co-partisan elites, past experiences, modes of voting, and election outcomes. We investigate whether public opinion about the accuracy and security of elections in America are anchored by how much is spent on them. Applying this “price-quality” heuristic to the context of elections, we specifically test whether increased funding for elections increases voter confidence. Using a preregistered survey experiment fielded by YouGov on a sample of 2,000 American voters, we provide novel insights into what voters know about
the sources of election funding, how they evaluate the competing fiscal demands of local governments, how they prioritize various tasks of election  administration, and their support for proposals to increase elections funding. To our knowledge, this study represents the first instance in which such questions have been asked in an experimental context. The overall pattern of results suggest that voters are generally misinformed about how elections are funded; voters are divided on how election administrators can improve elections; and while voters generally view current levels of spending on election 
as excessive and are not motivated to broadly increase funding, spending on elections nevertheless factors into evaluations of election quality. Taken together, these findings shed light on what voters think about election administration and the capacity for money to shape attitudes about the electoral process.

We examine changes to 175,311 precincts between the 2016 and 2020 general presidential elections. Our data are the result of a unique effort to collect precinct boundaries that has never been accomplished before: on a national scale across multiple elections. We observe that precincts that underwent major changes – beyond minor changes that are generally reflective of city and town annexations affecting small populations – contain a greater share of Hispanic and Black residents and are more likely to be found in denser population areas than those that do not change. We find precincts that underwent major changes on average experienced slightly lower turnout rate increases in 2020 than those that did not change.

Voting Buddy (votingbuddy.com) was launched during the 2022 election cycle to help voters with their decision-making. The tool asks users five “Myers Briggs” style questions related to political ideology. The five questions include an overview question, and more detailed questions regarding sentiments towards non-Americans (domestically and abroad), social welfare and fiscal policy, social policy, and industrialization and corporate policy. The tool then provides textual and graphical assessments of each user and matches each user with like-minded politicians/candidates. The tool can match users with politicians/candidates nationwide or within Congressional voting districts based upon user provided zip codes. Prior to the 2022 election, Voting Buddy was preloaded with assessments of all U.S. Senators and Representatives and all of their opponents (including third party and non-affiliated candidates). Because Voting Buddy’s core team includes political scientists, educators, and engineers, Voting Buddy’s algorithms, assessments, and comparisons were all found to be impartial by Voting Buddy users (voters and news media). The proposed paper will discuss Voting Buddy’s role to date in helping to foster an informed and engaged voting public. Examples include Voting Buddy’s use at voter registration events to engage voters, engaging first-time voters (high school/college students) with Voting Buddy, etc. In addition, the paper will discuss ways that Voting Buddy can be used in the future to inform and engage the voting public. This discussion will also project the election-related implications (related to turnout, voters more confidently participating in the election process, etc.) if Voting Buddy is successful.

COVID-19 caused worldwide disruption to virtually every aspect of human life, including elections. This study assesses the impact of potential COVID exposure, convenience voting policies, and partisanship on voter behavior in the 2020 US general election. Using a new data set comprising county and state data, we demonstrate that countywide COVID-death rates depressed turnout from 2016 levels. COVID mortalities, partisanship, and the availability of different balloting options contributed to changes in the use of mail and early-in person voting. Early spikes in COVID deaths had the largest impact, suggesting once voters chose whether or how to vote, they kept to their decisions, despite the availability of new information about declining infection rates, new vaccines, and improved treatments.