In the current debate over the constitutionality of voter identification laws, both the Supreme Court and defenders of such laws have justified them, in part, as counteracting a widespread fear of voter fraud that leads citizens to disengage from the democracy. Because actual evidence of voter...

We compare the results of two recent statewide recounts in Wisconsin — the 2011 Supreme Court election and the 2016 presidential election. We argue that recounts provide a valuable window into the accuracy of initial vote counts. Recount accuracy is best measured in terms of the absolute...

This article is the first to test the empirical assumptions about American public opinion found in the Supreme Court's opinions concerning campaign finance reform. The area of campaign finance is a unique one in First Amendment law because the Court has allowed the mere perception of a problem...

This Article assesses the political consequences of the Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Carr and the related cases establishing the one-person, one-vote rule for legislative redistricting. Through a set of new empirical tests, the Article examines the often-perverse effects of one person,...

The Framers of the American Constitution viewed the decennial census as providing a certain rhythm to American politics. Every ten years a state’s tax burdens and representation in the House of Representatives would change to reflect its share of the national population as revealed in the...

This essay recounts the history of election dysfunction in the United States over the past ten years with an eye toward lessons it can teach the rest of the world. The U.S. experience has been plagued by three deeply rooted problems, each of which exists in other countries, but which, in...

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...