Publications

State election officials play a unique role in the information ecosystem of American elections. They operate largely as information leaders, educating the  public about how to vote, but can also serve as a form opinion leaders, shaping voters’ attitudes towards election administration. In this paper, we merge a novel dataset of social media use by state election offices during the 2022 election cycle with two nationally representative surveys fielded before and after the election to evaluate the impacts of state EOs on voters’ information-seeking behavior and attitudes towards election administration. Specifically, we evaluate whether EOs’ trust-building social media campaigns motivate voters to look to them as sources of election information, and shape prospective and retrospective voter attitudes about ballot accuracy. In states where state EOs shared trust-building messages during the early weeks of the general election cycle, voters were more likely to look to these officials for information about how to register and vote. Comparing voter confidence at the state level before and after the election, our findings suggest trust-building messages by EOs help voters identify them as information leaders about how to vote, but that voters may require more time to view EOs as opinion leaders about ballot accuracy in their state. Our research has important implications for understanding how state EOs can connect with voters and build statewide voter confidence at comparable rates to confidence at the personal and local levels.

Do local election officials descriptively and substantively represent their constituents? Election officials are uniquely situated to influence participation rates and alleviate persistent racial and ethnic disparities in voter participation. Yet recent surveys of election officials have found them to be overwhelmingly white. Using a newly collected panel of local election officials across hundreds of counties and over two decades, a series of race
imputation methods, and large scale administrative and vendor datasets on turnout and race, along with a differences-in-differences design, I test whether minority election officials increase turnout and registration rates of their non-white constituents. Additionally, I examine whether minorities administer elections differently. I find that descriptive representation of Black voters is increasing among election officials, and that minority and white election officials administer elections in similar ways. These findings have implications for the importance of representation among local election officials and may provide insight into reducing the racial turnout gap.

Politicians and pundits have made trust in the administration of American elections an issue of political disagreement. Combining politicization with inflexible partisan  polarization could undermine an essential condition of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power following elections. Can messaging about trust in elections break through partisan polarization? Partnering with election officials from Los Angeles County, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, we used messaging experiments with nearly 8,500 Americans following the 2022 US midterm elections to measure the impact on trust in elections. We find that state and local election officials are particularly effective at increasing trust in their own state elections. Our pooled estimate suggests that one 30-second official advertisement increases trust in local elections by about one-fifth of the pre-treatment difference between Democrats and Republicans. Videos explaining protections on election integrity in Arizona and Virginia increase trust that our national sample reports in elections administered outside their own state. Our results suggest election officials can break through partisan politics and play an important role in rebuilding trust in the democratic process.
 

Drawing on theories of principal-agency and street-level bureaucracy, we fashion and test different explanations for the recruitment and retention of poll workers. Our explanations focuses on the training poll workers receive, their experiences at the polls and interactions with other poll workers. Prior experience working the polls shaped by poll worker training and successful collaborations with other poll workers positively affects a person’s willingness to work the polls. These effects match the effect of age and prior work at the polls in explaining workers willingness to continuing working the polls. Moreover, we find those persons who worked the polls in 2020 continue to have a strong positive attitude about working the polls. Our findings identify efficacious steps local election officials can take to recruit and retain persons to work the polls in future elections.

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.