The election of an African American as President of the United States has raised questions as to the continued relevance and even constitutionality of various provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Barack Obama’s apparent success among whites in 2008 has caused some to question the...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a data-focused assessments of the consequences of election administration reforms put in place following the 2000 presidential elections, particularly those supported by the Governor's Task Force on Election Procedures and the Help America Vote Act. The...

This paper examines how the growth in vote-by-mail and changes in voting technologies led to changes in the residual vote rate in California from 1990 to 2010. We find that in California’s presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of optical scanning enjoyed a...

This paper explores public attitudes about voting technologies from 2012 to 2018. Among the attitudes studied are those related to usability, security, and voter confidence. Scales are created to help explore the relationship between these attitudes and computer anxiety, computer self-efficacy,...

The purpose of this paper is to put the issues of election integrity that arose in 2016 in context, and to suggest along the way how it is that one should be sanguine about the administration of elections in the United States. First, I identify four integrity-related themes that have arisen in...

This paper revisits Nelson Polsby's classic article “The Institutionalization of the House of Representatives” nearly fifty years after its publication, in order to examine whether the empirical trends that Polsby identified have continued. This empirical exploration allows us to place...

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the increase in the residual vote rate from 2012 to 2016, when it increased from 0.99% to 1.87% nationwide. It is reasonable to assume that this spike in the residual vote rate is due to a rise in abstentions. However, there are currently other...

Using data from a variety of public opinion sources, we explore changes in trust in the vote count. A historic gap in confidence between Democrats and Republicans has grown, caused by two reasons: (1) an unusually big increase in Democratic confidence coupled with a modest decrease in Republican...

We consider the vulnerabilities attending the reporting of election results to the public that arise because of the use of technology. Attacks on election reporting capabilities in Knox County, Tennessee in 2018 and Ukraine in 2014 illustrate many aspects of the challenges facing election...