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,...

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...

A renewed, energetic interest in voting technologies erupted in political science following the 2000 presidential election. Spawned initially by the recount controversy in Florida, the literature has grown to consider the effects of voting technologies on the vote choice more generally. This...

We use a model drawn from population ecology to propose a method to estimate the true number of registered voters in a state, independent of the "deadwood" that may be present on the registration rolls. The paper first presents a conceptual model that distinguishes the "true registration rate"...

We develop an incomplete-information theory of economic voting, where voters' perceptions of macro-economic performance are affected by economic conditions of people similar to themselves. Our theory alleviates two persistent issues in the literature: it shows how egotropic motivations can lead...

We examine the relationship between parliamentary seats and cabinet posts in European governments between 1946 and 2001. Our specification improves on past studies in two respects. First, it derives and uses the voting weights of the underlying coalition formation games. This reduces the...

Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system - the first step in the voting process. In this model, older people are more apt to participate than younger...