Making Votes Count with Internet Voting

This paper reassesses the claim that electronic voting systems help voters to avoid common mistakes that lead to their votes remaining uncounted. While prior studies have come to mixed conclusions, I provide new, more robust evidence based on a case study of extended Internet voting trials in Geneva canton, Switzerland. The trials almost exclusively involved referendum votes. For causal identification I exploit the unique circumstance that federal safety legislation created a near-natural experiment, with some of the canton’s municipalities participating in the trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, I find that the residual vote rate decreased by an average of 0.3 percentage points if municipalities offered the possibility to vote online in addition to (mostly optically scanned) paper ballots. For cantonal measures, which are located towards the bottom of ballot papers in Geneva, the reduction increases to 0.5 percentage points. These remain relatively modest effects, and I find no evidence for a knock-on effect on electoral outcomes. However, on average only around 20% of votes were cast online where the opportunity existed, and online voting was most popular among voters with high levels of education. Despite the small effect sizes, the results of this study therefore point to the potential of Internet and, more generally, electronic voting technology to reduce avoidable voter mistakes.

     

When Payouts Pay Off: Conditional Cash Transfers and Voting Behavior in Brazil 2002–10

This article estimates the electoral effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in three presidential elections in Brazil. It analyzes municipal‐level electoral results and survey data and employs matching techniques to reduce causal inference problems typical of observational studies. Results show that CCTs are associated with increased performance by the incumbent party presidential candidate in all three elections but that these effects have been reaped by incumbents from different parties. It also shows that CCTs have had no discernible impacts on party identification and the performance of incumbent parties in legislative elections. Together, these findings suggest that CCTs are significant in the short run, but lack the capacity to induce substantial long‐term voter realignments.     

The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems

Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.

State Tax Credits and "Making Work Pay" in Post-Welfare Reform Era

This article outlines the work incentives and income support provided by the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and illustrates how state earned income and dependent care credits assist working poor families. State earned income and dependent care tax credits serve as critical complements to the EITC, the federal government's largest antipoverty program. By attending to specific components of each tax credit, state policymakers can maximize state funds that qualify for federal maintenance of effort requirements under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PROWRA), and they can reinforce positive effects and offset work disincentives stemming from current federal tax parameters.     

Expressiveness and Voting

It has been suggested that voting may be an ``expressive''action taken without regard to any hope of actuallyinfluencing election outcomes on the margin. However, therehas been no real-world evidence brought to bear on thequestion of whether the propensity of an individual to voteand the propensity of that same individual to engage in otherforms of ``expressive'' behavior are correlated in anystatistically meaningful sense. Drawing from longitudinal datafound in the National Election Surveys we report compellingevidence of a strong, positive relationship between what weterm ``political expressiveness'' and the act of voting.     

Voting on standardisation

This paper analyses equilibria of voting on commodity standards within the framework of a Farrell-Saloner model which takes into consideration the trade-off between network effects and losses from a reduction of variety. Social welfare implications are derived and discussed with respect to manipulations of majority rules. The findings indicate that welfare implications of standards are highly sensitive to the decision procedure and that the choice of the decision rule is non-trivial as it can at least prevent worst outcomes if not guarantee optimal results.     

Spatial Approval Voting

This article provides a model for analyzing approval votingelections. Within a standard probabilistic spatial voting setting,we show that principal component analysis makes it possibleto derive candidates' relative locations from the approval votes.We apply this technique to original experimental data from theFrench 2002 presidential election.     

Voting by proxy

I introduce voting by proxy for constructing and operating legislatures, and then compare it to direct representation, plurality, and single transferable vote (STV), which voting by proxy most closely resembles. When each voter uses voting by proxy to select his proxy among given legislators and elections are costless, voting by proxy maximizes the legislature's representation of the voting population. When each voter uses preferential voting by proxy, selecting a proxy during the vote count as well as a proxy in the legislature, and some ancillary rules are followed, I find that voting by proxy dominates STV and offers favorable tradeoffs against plurality. It improves representation and constituent service; eliminates gerrymandering; improves voter turnout; ranks the legislature's representatives by the proxies they hold rather than seniority; creates tighter representative-constituent links that lead to better informed voters, reducing the influence of special interests; and eliminates primary and runoff elections. Extra costs associated with its relative complexity or better representation can be made small.     

Compulsory Voting Rules,Reluctant Voters and Ideological Proximity Voting

Political Behavior - Political theorists have argued that democracies should strive for high turnout, leading to an argument for the introduction of compulsory voting, one of the surest ways to...     

Reprecincting and Voting Behavior

Despite the expansion of convenience voting across the American states, millions of voters continue to cast ballots at their local precincts on Election Day. We argue that those registered voters who are reassigned to a different Election Day polling place prior to an election are less likely to turn out to vote than those assigned to vote at the same precinct location, as a new precinct location incurs both search and transportation costs on reassigned voters. Utilizing voter file data and precinct shape files from Manatee County, Florida, from before and after the 2014 General Election, we demonstrate that the redrawing of precinct boundaries and the designation of Election Day polling places is not a purely technical matter for local election administrators, but may affect voter turnout of some registered voters more than others. Controlling for a host of demographic, partisan, vote history, and geospatial factors, we find significantly lower turnout among registered voters who were reassigned to a new Election Day precinct compared to those who were not, an effect not equally offset by those voters turning to other available modes of voting (either early in-person or absentee). All else equal, we find that registered Hispanic voters were significantly more likely to abstain from voting as a result of being reassigned than any other racial group.     

Mobilization Around New Convenience Voting Methods: A Field Experiment to Encourage Voting by Mail with a Downloadable Ballot and Early Voting

Political Behavior - Election reform has allowed citizens in many states to choose among convenience voting methods. We report on a field experiment that tests messages derived from theories about...     

Congressional Voting on Term Limits

Between 1990 and 1995,twenty-three states unilaterally imposedterm limits on their own delegations toCongress. In 1995 the House ofRepresentatives defeated a constitutionalamendment that would have limited the termsfor all of Congress. Only weeks later, theSupreme Court struck down the individualstate laws. In 1997 the House againbrought the issue to a vote, which alsofailed. This paper models congressionalvoting on term limits with a simple gamewithin an interest-group theory withlegislators as imperfect agents ofconstituents. The game foremost predictsthat members from term-limited states wouldbe more likely to support term limits inthe first vote but no more likely on thesecond vote. The empirical section employsprobit, multinomial logit, and orderedprobit maximum likelihood estimations toconfirm the stated hypotheses. Among otherresults, in particular both the joint andconditional probability of a `yea' on thefirst vote and a subsequent `nay' on thesecond vote is higher for members fromstates that had unilaterally self-imposedterm limits. The results are robust tomodel specification, estimator, andalternative sampling. Implications areproposed in the concluding comments.     

Voting, Rationality and Reputation

Why do people vote? This paper presents a solution to the voting paradox in rational choice theory, based on the interaction between two concepts: externalities (James Coleman) and reputation (Einar Overbye). Elaborating on the idea that voting is an investment in one's reputation, I will argue that there are two concepts of reputation: reputation-of-power and reputation-of-trust. The solution to the voting paradox can be found in the reputation-game between social actors holding these two different forms of reputation. During an electoral campaign, powerful opinion leaders can employ their reputation-of-power (power to impose sanctions) in order to get mere voters to vote in a certain way. The aim of the powerful opinion leaders is not to influence the outcome of the election but simply to acquire or maintain their reputation, while mere voters have an interest to vote as told in order to appear trustworthy (reputation-of-trust) to powerful opinion leaders. The act of voting is an unintended consequence of this power game.