Human dimension of elections: how poll workers shape public confidence in elections

Working PaperThe role of voting technologies has received considerable attention since the 2000 election. However, the voter experience at the polling place and especially the voter-poll worker interaction is also of critical importance. Rarely are poll workers considered an arm of the government, even though they clearly operate as extensions of governmental actors as street-level bureaucrats. Poll workers exercise discretion in ways that directly affect the voting experience. We examine the relationship between voters ¢ perceptions of the poll worker job performance and confidence that the election process produces fair outcomes and that ballots were counted accurately. In an ordered logit model, perceptions of poll workers is a significant predictor of both variables related to voter confidence in the presence of numerous controls suggesting that overlooking the recruitment and training of competent poll worker can have a detrimental effect on voter confidence

Poll workers and the vitality of democracy: an early assessment

Journal ArticleThe aftermath of the 2000 election has been a time of constant learning in regards to election administration in the United States. Both scholars and policy makers initially focused primarily on voting technology and on which voting technologies were best at capturing votes. In early 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project developed the "residual vote" metric; numerous studies have since examined residual vote rates across different voting platforms.1 Congressional reform of elections-exemplified in the "Help America Vote Act ~HAVA! of 2002" (P.L. 107-252)- also focused largely on voting technology, with HAVA imposing new standards for voting equipment and providing states with one-shot funding to aid in its purchase

Replication Data for: How to Elect More Women: Gender and Candidate Success in a Field Experiment

Women are dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies, and most scholars agree that the greatest limiting factor is the lack of female candidates (supply). However, voters’ subconscious biases (demand) may also play a role, particularly among conservatives. We designed an original field experiment to test whether it is possible to increase women’s electoral success through political party leaders’ efforts to exogenously shock the supply of female candidates and/or voter demand for female representatives. The key experimental treatments involved messages from a state Republican Party chair to the leaders of 1,842 precinct-level caucus meetings. We find that party leaders’ efforts to stoke both supply and demand (and especially both together) increase the number of women elected as delegates to the statewide nominating convention. We then replicate this finding with a national sample of validated Republican primary election voters (N=2,897) using a vignette survey experiment. Our results suggest that simple interventions from party leaders can affect the behavior of candidates and voters and ultimately lead to a substantial increase in women’s electoral success

Replication data for: Online Polls and Registration-Based Sampling: A New Method for Pre-election Polling

This paper outlines a new method for surveys to study elections and voter attitudes. Pre-election surveys often suffer from an inability to identify and survey the likely electorate for the upcoming election. We propose a new and inexpensive method to conduct representative surveys of the electorate. We demonstrate the performance of our method in producing a representative sample of the future electorate that can be used to study campaign dynamics and many other issues. We compare pre-election outcome forecasts to election outcomes in seven primary and general election surveys conducted prior to the 2008 and 2010 primary and general elections in three states. The results indicate the methodology produces representative samples, including in low-turnout elections such as primaries where traditional methods have difficulty consistently sampling the electorate. This new methodology combines Probability Proportional to Size (PPS) sampling, mailed invitation letters, and online administration of the questionnaire. The PPS sample is drawn based on a model employing variables from the publicly available voter file to produce a probability of voting score for each individual voter. The proposed method provides researchers a valuable tool to study the attitudes of the voting public

Replication data for: Response Latency Methodology for Survey Research: Measurement & Modeling Strategies

In public opinion research, response latency is a measure of attitude accessibility, which is the ease or swiftness with which an attitude comes to mind when a respondent is presented with a survey question. Attitude accessibility represents the strength of the association in memory between an attitude object and an evaluation of the object. Recent research shows that attitude accessibility, as measured by response latency, casts light on a wide range of phenomena of public opinion and political behavior. We discuss response latency methodology for survey research and advocate the use of latent response latency timers (which are invisible both to respondents and interviewers) as a low cost, low-maintenance alternative to traditional methods of measuring response latency in public opinion surveys. We show that with appropriate model specification latent response latency timers may provide a suitable alternative to the more complicated and expensive interviewer-activated timers

Replication Data for: What Leads Racially Resentful Voters to Choose Black Candidates?

These files replicate the analysis in "What Leads Racially Resentful Voters to Choose Black Candidates?" The files include both do files and data files for the observational and experimental data analyzed in the article. Do files also include all code necessary to replicate the appendix material. Observational data are drawn from the 2010, 2012, and 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Experimental data were drawn from modules fielded as part of the 2014 CCES and a separate study fielded on MTurk. In addition, we also include a dataset used to compare cases where white candidates ran against black candidates to cases where two white candidates ran against each other. This final dataset is needed only to replicate analysis found in the appendix

Causes of Noncompliance with International Law: A Field Experiment on Anonymous Incorporation

20110302 into the Experiments on Governance and Politics Registry once that registry was begun at e-gap.org. Of those interventions registered, we report on the FATF, Premium, Corruption, and Terrorism conditions in this article. All other interventions outlined in the registered document are reported in other work. In our registration, we indicated that we would report results dichotomously as compliant or noncompliant, given a response. We still report response and nonresponse followed by a compliance level, but we expanded the set of possible types of compliance (nonresponse, noncompliance, partial compliance, compliance, and refusal). Presenting the information this way is more precise and is also consistent with the registry document because the fuller set of outcomes contains all information the dichotomized measures capture (se