Invalid Voting Research Articles

An Empirical Analysis of Invalid Voting in Municipal Elections

ABSTRACTThis paper examines blank and null voting in Brazilian mayoral elections using a large dataset covering 5570 municipalities between 2000 and 2020. The study finds that more competitive elections reduce blank and null percentages, with re‐election scenarios leading to more valid votes. Blank and particularly null voting are found to be more prevalent in municipalities where a second round is possible. Economic factors and age categories also contribute to determine unconventional voting patterns. The results also highlight important differences between blank and null voting patterns and between urban and rural areas, the later suggesting that more sophisticated voters tend to be less prone to invalidate the vote.

Ideological extremism, left-right orientations, and invalid voting in two-round presidential elections in Latin America

ABSTRACT Ideology is one of the most studied factors affecting voting behavior in modern mass democracies. Despite that, literature on invalid voting has focused on other explanatory factors at the aggregate and individual levels. This article argues that ideology is a relevant explanatory factor affecting invalid voting at the individual level and advances two hypotheses. Specifically, voters with known preferences on the left-right dimension and those further from the center will be less prone to cast an invalid ballot in presidential elections. I test these hypotheses in the first and second rounds of nine presidential elections in four Latin American countries between 2002 and 2019. Additionally, the hypotheses were tested for voters caught in the runoff dilemma, i.e. those who did not vote for one of the two candidates who advanced to the second round. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data, the analysis confirms that left-right orientations and ideological extremism are negatively associated with the probability of casting an invalid vote. The article’s findings help expand our knowledge about how some specific features of ideology affect voting behavior, thus contributing to the literature on ideological and invalid voting.

Invalid Votes as Protest: Compulsory Voting and the Democratic Context in Ecuador

AbstractInvalid votes are pervasive in many democracies and can threaten the legitimacy of elections. While often associated with factors such as choice complexity and disengagement, especially under compulsory voting rules, intentional ballot spoiling can also signal a political protest. We examine the argument that spoiling ballots as protest should occur under compulsory voting where voters perceive limited legitimacy to the electoral process and a lack of viable options. Using municipal elections in Ecuador, a context featuring both compulsory voting and a period of democratic erosion, we examine subnational variation in both spoiled and blank ballots. While factors related to sophistication and choice complexity explain variation in both forms of invalid voting, our results also reveal patterns consistent with the expectation that spoiled ballots reflect a protest of a lack of competition in the political system. Specifically, we find that areas opposed to Rafael Correa’s dominant party had a higher rate of spoiled ballots in the 2014 mayoral elections, a period when party dominance was consolidated and competition weak. This pattern declined in 2019 when the system’s competitiveness increased. A separate analysis of the 2019 elections for the Correa-era participatory governance body suggests continued use of spoiled ballots as protest by opposition voters, but primarily in higher connectivity areas where the online coordination on use of this tactic may have had greater influence. Overall, our study sheds light on factors shaping invalid vote patterns in compulsory systems and highlights spoiled ballots’ potential as a means to signal protest under conditions where some voters would perceive a decline in the legitimacy of democratic institutions.

More Options, but Less Willing to Cast a Valid Vote: Evidence From Electoral Reform in Chile

How do large-magnitude proportional systems affect invalid voting? We evaluate a Chilean electoral system reform that introduced proportionality. Voting is voluntary, and legislative and presidential elections are held concurrently. We compare the invalid votes between different types of elections before and after the reform using various difference-in-differences strategies. We find that invalid voting increased in legislative compared to presidential elections (pre-trends were parallel). The increase in invalid voting is greater in post-reform districts with higher magnitude and is not due to pre-reform district characteristics. The results of heterogeneity analyses and a survey experiment suggest the mechanism behind these findings is the cognitive burden associated with a longer ballot. This research highlights an understudied aspect of electoral systems: higher district magnitudes may be demobilizing in terms of valid voting for citizens who are more vulnerable to cognitive burden, even among those motivated enough to vote in the first-order election.

“I Would Prefer Not To”: Establishing the Missing Link between Invalid Voting and Public Protest in Latin America

ABSTRACTWhile invalid voting is often treated as protest behavior in an electoral context, its association with actual political protests has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The relative scarcity of research on the topic is likely due to the hybrid nature of invalid voting as a both formal and informal political gesture. The novel availability of event-based data for public protests in Latin America allows for testing whether their occurrence is connected with changes in spoiled and blank ballots. Using an appropriate dynamic regression model covering variations in the 148 intervals between Latin American legislative elections in the 1979–2021 period, this study finds a strong connection between the emergence of antigovernment protests and surges in invalid voting (and vice versa). This relationship still holds at parity of economic conditions and it is reinforced by a lack of alternation in the party of power. Conversely, the appearance of workers’ strikes appears to work as a substitute for this behavior, which is also chosen by voters when democracy deteriorates, while corruption has no independent impact on invalid voting. Overall this work’s findings promise to send the research agenda on invalid voting in a new direction, previously unexplored because of an absence of fitting data.

Democratizing urban governance through mayoral term limits: Quasi-experimental evidence from a reform in Chilean municipalities

Term limits on elected mayors are often advocated because they eliminate the incumbency advantage and promote higher representativeness and citizen participation through a more open and reinvigorated electoral competition in local governments. We examine whether key dimensions of local democracy (election competitiveness, turnout, invalid voting, descriptive representation of women) are affected by the imposition of term limits. This article uses a quasi-experimental technique (difference-in-differences design) which leverages a unique and rare institutional reform in Chile that exogenously imposed term limits on some - but not all - mayors in 2020. The as-good-as random assignment of municipalities to either group allows to exploit comparisons which yield robust causal estimates. The overall contribution of term limits to local democracy has been positive because they promote electoral competition, the emergence of female candidates and voter participation, as well as reduce invalid voting rates.

Geospatial Analysis of Invalid Voting in the 2019 Presidential Election in Nigeria

Geospatial Analysis of Invalid Voting in the 2019 Presidential Election in Nigeria

Who would vote NOTA? Explaining a ‘none of the above’ choice in eight countries

AbstractIn this study, we investigate who would vote ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) if this were available on the ballot paper using original data from eight European countries. In particular, we examine whether NOTA would be used by abstainers and voters to protest within the electoral process. We also test whether socioeconomic factors and specific and diffuse support for democracy and its institutions correlate with a NOTA vote. We find that having NOTA on the ballot would reduce invalid balloting more than abstention and much more than protest party voting. Our results also suggest that NOTA is related to socioeconomic status, political interest, political knowledge and distrust in political institutions and authorities, but not to broadly undemocratic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the increasingly large amounts of abstention and invalid voting, as well as the growing distrust of political institutions, in democratic countries. They also hold lessons for electoral reformers.

Examining the Effects of Convenience Voting on Accidental Invalidity

Accidental invalid voting is a scourge of voting because an elector has acted contrary to their intentions. This problem has been shown to be more acute in settings where the requirement to vote is...

The Unintended Costs and Unfulfilled Promises of Concurrent Elections: A Natural Experiment on Turnout and Invalid Voting

Holding two second-order elections simultaneously is expected to increase electoral participation. We exploit a natural experiment in which one group of Czech precincts was “as if” randomly assigned to holding subnational elections concurrently with senatorial ones. Using a unique data set containing variables on more than thirteen thousand precincts in five elections between 2000 and 2016, we detect a modest effect of concurrency only in the first election but no or inconsistent effect in the four subsequent contests. Furthermore, we report a strong effect of concurrency on invalid voting. We check for robustness using difference-in-differences design and matching techniques. Incongruent with existing theories, concurrency does not deliver on its promises and may come at a substantial cost to political representation. The surprising null effect on turnout is attributable to analyzing the effect of concurrency of the less salient on more salient elections.

Institutions or the Societal Setting? Explaining Invalid Voting in Local Elections in Sweden

Research on invalid voting has expanded over the past few years. Scholars largely agree on the most important determinants of invalid voting, foremost compulsory voting, quality of democracy, and ballot structure. However, disagreement prevails concerning several factors; more exactly, whether the effect is positive or negative. We examine determinants of invalid voting in the four most recent local elections in a single country, Sweden, all municipalities included. Applying a subnational research design allows us to control for several determinants that have been reported to be of significance in explaining varying levels of invalid voting, and, consequently, to examine factors with theoretically contradictory directions of effects. Two theoretical models of invalid voting are tested, an institutional and a societal model, each consisting of four variables. The latter explains considerably more of the variation in the dependent variable than the former. The most important determinant is education: higher levels of education among the population decrease the share of invalid votes. Concerning the institutional model, only district magnitude significantly affects the dependent variable, indicating that larger district magnitude depresses invalid voting. However, the effect disappears when societal variables are included, due to higher levels of education among the population in municipalities with high district magnitudes. Proportion of the electorate born abroad also significantly affects levels of invalid voting; higher proportions decrease invalid voting. We suggest that this is a consequence of political sophistication, interest, and being politically informed combined with who decides to vote and who decides to abstain amongst immigrants.

Compulsory voting and political participation: Empirical evidence from Austria

We examine whether compulsory voting influences political participation as measured by voter turnout, invalid voting, political interest, confidence in parliament, and party membership. In Austria, some states temporarily introduced compulsory voting in national elections. We investigate border municipalities across two states which differ in compulsory voting legislation using a difference-in-differences approach. The results show that compulsory voting increased voter turnout by 3.5 percentage points but we do not find long-run effects. Once compulsory voting was abolished, voter turnout returned to pre-compulsory voting levels. Microdata evidence suggests that compulsory voting tends to crowd out intrinsic motivation for political participation which may explain why compulsory voting is not found to be habit-forming.

Exploring citizen turnout and invalid voting in Indonesia: two sides of the same coin?

ABSTRACTScholarship on citizen turnout and invalid voting has developed along parallel trajectories. Many empirical studies investigate the determinants of turnout or invalid voting, but existing research hardly ever analyses the two together. Yet while turnout and invalid voting are conceptually distinct, their practice is closely intertwined. In this paper, we thus advocate the need for research jointly adopting these two different but complementary perspectives on participation. We illustrate the potential of this approach with an analysis of the 2014 legislative elections in Indonesia, the third largest democracy in the world. We exploit the exceptional subnational variation in electoral participation and socioeconomic development in this country by matching Indonesian Electoral Commission data with official statistics to create a rich districtlevel dataset. We find that turnout and invalid voting are associated with distinct but related mechanisms, which suggests the need of further research studying the two outcomes with unified research designs.

Turning out but not voting: invalid ballots in post-communist parliamentary elections

Large numbers of invalid votes in elections can present a threat to the legitimacy of democratic systems. Focusing on the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, three theoretical models explaining the incidence of invalid votes are tested using aggregated data from all legislative elections. While the protest behavior powerfully shapes the incidence of invalid votes in less democratic countries, complex electoral systems and concurrent elections are also associated with high levels of invalid voting (indicating voters’ error). Conversely, we find that most socioeconomic variables are weak predictors of invalid voting while controlling for institutional and political variables in the region. The study has policy implications that the simple electoral design should be preferred.

What Affects Invalid Voting? A Review and Meta-Analysis

Research on invalid voting has expanded rapidly over the past few years. This review article for the first time examines its principal findings and provides a new theoretical perspective on the origins of invalid votes based on a two-dimensional framework. The main results of 54 studies using both individual-level and aggregate-level data as well as the results of experimental and qualitative studies are analysed. The meta-analysis of all existing aggregate-level studies finds that compulsory voting, quality of democracy, fragmentation and closeness of the electoral race play important roles in explaining invalid voting. On the other hand, the research is accompanied by many theoretical and empirical contradictions that hamper the accumulation of knowledge in this field. We therefore conclude by suggesting the challenges for future research.

Casting an invalid vote at the 2017 French presidential election

France voted for a new president on May 7, 2017. Emmanuel Macron, the candidate for the social liberal party En Marche!, won in a runoff election against Marine Le Pen, the candidate for the right-wing populist and nationalist party Front National. An enormous increase can be recorded comparing the shares of blank and spoiled ballot papers in the first round on 23 April, when no candidate won a majority, with that of the runoff election, which was held between the top two candidates less than a month later. Exceeding 11% in the 2017 runoff election all in all, invalid voting is more common than it has ever been before. In light of this, there is a strong suspicion that numerous voters—in particular those who did not vote for one of the top two candidates in the first round—decided to vote blank or spoiled their ballot paper in the second round. However, this conventional wisdom has not yet been tested empirically.

Compulsory voting and ethnic diversity increase invalid voting while corruption does not: an analysis of 417 parliamentary elections in 73 countries

ABSTRACTInvalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around the world. When its share is larger than the margin of victory or greater than the vote share of some of the large parties in the country, invalid voting becomes a problem for democratic legitimacy. This article investigates its determinants in 417 democratic parliamentary elections in 73 countries on five continents from 1970 to 2011. The analysis shows that enforced compulsory voting and ethnic fragmentation are strong predictors for invalid voting while corruption has less impact. Our findings suggest that the societal structure is crucial in understanding invalid voting as a problem for democratic legitimacy because greater social diversity seems to lead to either a greater rate of mistakes or lesser attachments of social groups to the democratic process. Thus, rising levels of invalid voting are not only concerning in themselves but also for the divisive factors driving them.

A dynamic model of the invalid vote: How a changing candidate menu shapes null voting behavior

Existing scholarship attributes invalid voting to independent variables that are largely time invariant (e.g., levels of education, political institutions). Yet, rates of invalid voting vary widely across countries and over time. In this paper, I argue that dynamic features of political competition (e.g., the number of candidates competing) affect invalid voting in presidential elections in predictable ways. High levels of candidates should have a positive association with invalid voting, as voters frustrated by the status quo opt out of the process when political options are confusing or objectionable. Yet, positive change in the number of candidates ought to reduce null voting, as the entry of more candidates presents new options over which to cast valid ballots. I test these expectations, and find support for them, in multivariate analyses of aggregate electoral data from the Latin American region for 1982–2015.

Subnational Patterns of Participation: Compulsory Voting and the Conditional Impact of Institutional Design

Cross-national studies of turnout find that compulsory voting has the strongest impact on participation, boosting turnout by 10 to 18 percent. We argue that in the absence of compulsory voting, other institutional factors such as small district size, strong electoral competition, and moderate candidate fragmentation may be similarly effective at mobilizing turnout. Where voting is mandatory, these factors should instead primarily influence how people vote once they are at the polls—diminishing levels of invalid voting, and consequently increasing effective turnout. We take advantage of the abolition of compulsory voting in Chile to test our expectations immediately before and after reform, in the exact same electoral districts. Using this unique subnational research design, we leverage data from more than 1,000 mayoral elections over the course of three electoral cycles and across 345 municipalities to examine patterns of turnout and invalid voting. Results show that small district size, strong electoral competition, and moderate candidate fragmentation are effective at reducing invalid voting when turnout is compulsory, and fostering higher levels of turnout when voting is voluntary.

Protesting via the Null Ballot: An Assessment of the Decision to Cast an Invalid Vote in Latin America

Rates of invalid voting in Latin America are among the highest in the world. Yet, scholars have not reached an agreement about whether these votes are driven by voter protest and, if so, what voters are protesting. Understanding whether these high invalid vote rates signify anti-democratic tendencies is particularly relevant given recent recessions in democratic quality across the region. This paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical tests using individual level data from 14 Latin American countries to show that invalid voting in presidential contests is used by individuals, particularly those high in knowledge, to protest poor government performance. However, invalid voting is not, on balance, an anti-system behavior. While political alienation differentially predicts invalid voting in countries with mandatory vote laws, the link between performance assessments and self-reported invalid voting is consistent across various contextual features that scholars link to invalid voting behavior.