Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes

In 2010, tens of thousands of votes in New York did not count due to overvotes -- the invalid selection of more than one candidate. This report demonstrates how the lack of adequate overvote protections disproportionately affected the state's poorest communities, suggests commonsense reforms, and examines national implications

Donor Diversity through Public Matching Funds

New York State is considering a system of public campaign financing for state elections similar to the one New York City uses for municipal elections. In that system, the city puts up six dollars in public matching funds for each of the first $175 that a city resident contributes to a candidate participating in the voluntary program.One of the key purposes of the city's matching fund program is to strengthen the connections between public officials and their constituents by bringing more small donors into the process and making them more important to the candidates' campaigns. A previous paper by the Campaign Finance Institute showed that matching funds heighten the number and role of small donors in city elections and would be likely to do the same at the state level.This joint study by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Campaign Finance Institute tests whether these powerful but anecdotal claims are supported by the available evidence from the most recent state and municipal elections. To do so, we compared donors to candidates in the City Council elections of 2009, where there was a public financing program, to the donors to candidates in the State Assembly elections of 2010, where there was no such program. We compared the City Council and State Assembly races because those electoral districts are similar in size and because doing so allowed us to look at the giving patterns of the same city residents in different elections

Election Spending 2012: 25 Toss-Up House Races

This election season, an influx of outside money made possible by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens Unitedhas redrawn the political landscape. Using the most recent Federal Election Commission campaign finance filings, this report examines the role of spending by independent groups, political parties, and candidates in the 25 most hotly contested House races, which will likely determine which party will control the House

Nations within a nation: variations in epidemiological transition across the states of India, 1990–2016 in the Global Burden of Disease Study

18% of the world's population lives in India, and many states of India have populations similar to those of large countries. Action to effectively improve population health in India requires availability of reliable and comprehensive state-level estimates of disease burden and risk factors over time. Such comprehensive estimates have not been available so far for all major diseases and risk factors. Thus, we aimed to estimate the disease burden and risk factors in every state of India as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2016

The Fleeting Benefits of Appointments Commissions for Judicial Gender Equity

Parity in gender representation on the bench is crucial if the judiciary is to reflect the population it serves. This paper determines whether judicial appointments commissions, recently adopted in the UK, have made UK courts more diverse and whether they could increase judicial diversity in other commonwealth countries. I argue that while the appointment of women judges increased in the first year after appointment commissions were established in the UK, any increase in the gender equity of appointments vanished soon thereafter. Had UK-style commissions been implemented in Australia or New Zealand, the number of appointed women might have increased in the first year after the commissions were established, but that increase would not have been sustained in the long-term

Do Self-Identified Tactical Voters Actually Vote Tactically? Evidence from the 2010 British Election

The typical conception of tactical voting in the political science literature suggests that tactical voters vote for a party other than the one they prefer most. Previous research in the British Journal of Political Science on the measurement of tactical voting in Britain has assumed that voters who say they have voted tactically have actually behaved as the political science conception suggests. This Article tests that assumption. I find that one-half of voters who self-identify tactical motivations do not fit the political science definition of tactical voting. The result indicates that scholars have dramatically overestimated the level of tactical voting (at least as political scientists define it) in Britain and, more importantly, that the methodological foundations of existing tactical voting research are invalid