Residual Votes Research Articles

Abstention, Protest, and Residual Votes in the 2016 Election

ObjectiveWe analyze the significant increase in the residual vote rate in the 2016 presidential election. The residual vote rate, which is the percentage of ballots cast in a presidential election that contain no vote for president, rose nationwide from 0.99 to 1.41 percent between 2012 and 2016.MethodWe use election return data and public opinion data to examine why the residual vote rate increased in 2016.ResultsThe primary explanation for this rise is an increase in abstentions, which we argue results primarily from disaffected Republican voters rather than alienated Democratic voters. In addition, other factors related to election administration and electoral competition explain variation in the residual vote rates across states, particularly the use of mail/absentee ballots and the lack of competition at the top of the ticket in nonbattleground states. However, we note that the rise in the residual vote rate was not due to changes in voting technologies.ConclusionOur research has implications for the use of the residual vote as a metric for studying election administration and voting technologies.

Residual Votes and Abstentions in the 2016 Election

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 trends in election administration, such as an increasing reliance on vote-by-mail, that could also be driving up the residual vote rate. And, even if the recent up-tick in the residual vote rate is primarily due to an increase in abstentions in 2016, it is not a priori obvious that the source of new abstentions was equally distributed among disaffected Democrats and Republicans. The analysis in this paper relies on a combination of public opinion data and election returns to address these issues. We find, first, that the increase in abstentions in 2016 was most likely due to disaffected Republicans, rather than an across-the-board phenomenon. We also confirm that the increase in the 2016 residual vote rate was not due to changes in voting technologies between 2012 and 2016. We address three issues in the conclusion that this analysis raises: (1) the potential for the growth of protest voting in the U.S., (2) the likelihood that there is a significant under-reporting of voter abstentions in public opinion surveys, leaving a role for aggregate analysis to study this phenomenon, and (3) cautions about the use of the residual vote rate as a metric to gauge the accuracy of voting technologies.

Estimation of time-varying average treatment effects using panel data when unobserved fixed effects affect potential outcomes differently

This paper proposes a new approach to estimate the time-varying average treatment effect using panel data to control for unobserved fixed effects. The approach allows identifying the average treatment effect on the entire population, even if the fixed effects affect potential outcomes under treatment and no treatment differently, which can cause heterogeneity in treatment effects among unobserved characteristics. Note that a popularly used standard difference-in-differences approach can only identify the average treatment effect on the treated. Moreover, the proposed approach allows time-varying treatment effects. The approach exploits panel data with a specific structure in which the treatment exposure expands to the entire population over time. I apply the proposed approach to estimate the effect of the introduction of electronic voting technology for the reduction of residual votes in Brazilian elections.

Voting Technology, Political Responsiveness, and Infant Health: Evidence From Brazil

This paper studies the introduction of electronic voting technology in Brazilian elections. Estimates exploiting a regression discontinuity design indicate that electronic voting reduced residual (error-ridden and uncounted) votes and promoted a large de facto enfranchisement of mainly less educated citizens. Estimates exploiting the unique pattern of the technology's phase-in across states over time suggest that, as predicted by political economy models, it shifted government spending toward health care, which is particularly beneficial to the poor. Positive effects on both the utilization of health services (prenatal visits) and newborn health (low-weight births) are also found for less educated mothers, but not for the more educated.

North Carolina Election Reform Ten Years After the Help America Vote Act

To what extent have the reforms of the last decade led to measurable improvements in election administration? Enacted in 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) addressed a variety of election reform issues, but emphasized modernizing voting equipment across the country (Kropf and Kimball, 2012). It did not require changes in ballot design, although states and localities have implemented some new practices in this area. This article examines changes in voting technology and ballot design in North Carolina, focusing on residual votes in the state's 2004 and 2008 general elections. North Carolina is an especially useful state to study, because county-level early and absentee voting data are available by race. It is also a presidential battleground state covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This study finds that residual votes went down in North Carolina from 2004–2008 due to new voting equipment. It also finds evidence that ballot design marginally improved over that time period.

Voting Technology, Vote-by-Mail, and Residual Votes in California, 1990–2010

We examine 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. In California’s presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of optical scanning enjoyed a significant improvement in the residual vote rate. We also conduct the first analysis of the effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the election, increased use of the mail to cast ballots is robustly associated with a significant rise in the residual vote rate.

Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Voting by Mail

Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Voting by Mail

Voting Technologies

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 literature has explained why localities have the voting technologies (lever machines, punch cards, etc.) they use. Although there are racial differences in the distribution of voting technologies used across localities, the strongest explanations for why local jurisdictions use particular technologies rest on legacies of past decisions. The bulk of the voting technology literature has focused on explaining how voting technologies influence residual votes, that is, blank, undervoted, and overvoted ballots. With the relative homogenization of voting technology since 2000, prospects for research that examines the effects of different machines on residual votes seem limited. However, opportunities exist to study the effect of voting machines historically, the effect of voting technologies on down-ballot rates, and the role of interest groups in affecting which voting technologies are made available to voters.

Voting Technology, Vote-by-Mail, and Residual Votes in California, 1990-2010

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 significant improvement in the residual vote rate. However, these findings do not always translate to other races. For instance, find that the InkaVote system in Los Angeles has been a mixed success, performing very well in presidential and gubernatorial races, fairly well for ballot propositions, and poorly in Senate races. We also conduct the first analysis of the effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the race, increased use of the mails to cast ballots is robustly associated with a rise in the residual vote rate. The effect is so strong that the rise of voting by mail in California has mostly wiped out all the reductions in residual votes that were due to improved voting technologies since the early 1990s.

More evidence of the effects of voting technology on election outcomes

Using two different data sources—municipal level data and individual data—we consider several hitherto unexplored aspects of the relationship between voting technology and election outcomes. We distinguish between introductory and permanent effects of electronic voting, and between national and municipal elections. We test for a possible asymmetry between the effect of moving from paper ballots to electronic voting, and vice versa, and we control for polling station density. We find a positive but temporary effect of electronic voting on voter turnout, a negative effect on the fraction of residual votes, and no effect on the share of left wing parties.

Losing Fewer Votes

Problems in the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida, initiated a large-scale shift toward new voting technology. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we report on the effects of changes in voting systems in Florida and Michigan. The variety of initial conditions and the numerous changes make these excellent case studies. We find that reforms succeeded in reducing the residual vote. Every change from old to new technology resulted in a decline in residual votes that was significantly greater than in areas that did not change voting equipment. The percentage of residual votes in the 2004 presidential race in localities that changed voting systems was well under 1 percent, representing a 90 percent reduction in error in Florida and a 35 percent reduction in Michigan. We run these analyses separately for undervotes and overvotes. Using ecological-inference techniques, we investigate the persistence of residual votes when technology changed and find very little persistence.

Voting Technology, Ballot Measures, and Residual Votes

An increasing number of public policy issues are decided by ballot measures in the United States. We examine residual votes (the difference between the total ballots cast and the votes cast in a particular contest) on ballot issues and the presidential contest in 34 states that had issues on the ballot in the 2004 election. Residual vote levels for ballot issues are substantially higher and more varied than for the presidential contest. Residual votes in both types of contests are a function of ballot features, voting technology, campaign context, and demographic measures. However, some factors, especially voting machinery, have different effects on residual votes for president than on residual votes for ballot issues. A case study further indicates that full-face electronic voting machines sharply increase the number of residual votes on ballot measures. The results have implications for direct democracy and election reform in the United States.

The unfortunate natural experiment in ballot design: The Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2007

The 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections were notable for the extensive variation across constituencies in rejected ballots (ranging from 1.90% to 12.09%). This paper uses an unfortunate natural experiment to identify the influence of ballot design on the occurrence of rejected ballots, or ‘residual votes’. In two electoral regions, visual prompts were removed and instructions were abbreviated on the (already poorly designed) ballot papers. Using zero-truncated negative binomial regression to model total residual votes as well as constituency and regional undervotes and overvotes, we find clear evidence that these changes made a major contribution to the extent of residual votes in constituencies within those regions. The findings emphasise that ballot design is not a trivial subject that can be neglected by electoral administrators.

Technology and Voter Intent: Evidence from the California Recall Election

Abstract Conventional evaluations of voting systems focus on ballots for which no vote can be recorded (that is, “residual” votes). However, recorded votes that misrepresent voter intent are another potentially important, but less easily measured, source of error. I present evidence that a nontrivial number of voters in the recent California recall election mistakenly voted for one of the four candidates positioned next to the two major candidates on the ballot. I also find that punch-card systems significantly increased the frequency of these errors. These results indicate that future assessments of voting technologies should consider their effects on both recorded and residual votes.

Residual Votes Attributable to Technology

We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed-effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e., “residual votes”), followed by optically scanned ballots, mechanical lever machines, direct register electronic machines (DREs), and punch cards. In gubernatorial and senatorial races, paper, optical scan ballots, and DREs are significantly better in minimizing the residual vote rate than mechanical lever machines and punch cards. If all jurisdictions in the United States that used punch cards in 2000 had used optically scanned ballots instead, we estimate that approximately 500,000 more votes would have been attributed to presidential candidates nationwide.

Black Candidates and Black Voters: Assessing the Impact of Candidate Race on Uncounted Vote Rates

Numerous studies show that the rate at which African-Americans cast ballots with missing or invalid votes, i.e., the African-American residual vote rate, is higher than the corresponding white rate. While existing literature argues that the plethora of African-American residual votes is caused by administrative problems or socioeconomic factors, we show using precinct-level data from two recent elections in Cook County, Illinois, that the African-American residual vote rate in electoral contests with black candidates is less than half the rate in contests without black candidates. African Americans, therefore, are able to reduce their residual vote rate when they wish to do so. We present complementary findings for white voters, whose residual vote rate often substantially increases in contests which feature dominant black candidates.

Punch Card Technology and the Racial Gap in Residual Votes

Votomatic-style punch card voting systems produce higher rates of residual voting than other technologies, but the effect of punch card voting systems is not uniform. Minority voters are less likely to have their votes properly recorded with punch card systems than are nonminorities. This racial gap occurs, for the most part, because punch card systems lead to higher rates of “undervoting” by minorities. When election administrators switch to other systems, such as optical scan systems, the racial gap is significantly reduced. Punch card voting systems, then, constitute a disproportionate obstacle to minority voting. This effectively gives less weight to votes cast by minorities than to votes cast by nonminorities, and arguably violates constitutional requirements for equal voting rights. The mechanism is similar to the literacy tests that were abandoned after the 1970 amendments to the Voting Rights Act.The authors are grateful to UC Berkeley's Survey Research Center for research support and are deeply indebted to Henry E. Brady. Our thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and to the editorial staff at Perspectives on Politics for their helpful suggestions and hard work on our behalf.

Voting Machines, Race, and Equal Protection

61 IMAGINE taking a test for which there are five different graders, and your score depends on which grader corrects your exam. You may feel the test capricious and unfair, especially if you received a poor grade. That is the situation with voting in the United States today. The United States employs five different types of voting technology: handcounted paper ballots, punch cards, optically scanned paper ballots, lever machines, and electronic voting machines (also known as direct recording electronic machines, or DREs for short). The incidence of unmarked, uncounted, and spoiled ballots—called residual votes—depends on which equipment a locality uses. The presidential election contest in Florida in 2000 exposed an important weakness with some of these technologies, especially with punch card ballots. Subsequent study has shown that over the last four presidential elections punch cards and electronic voting machines have produced higher rates of unmarked and unrecorded ballots than hand-counted paper ballots, optically scanned paper ballots, and lever machines.1 It is unclear whether the equal protection standard in Bush v. Gore requires uniform technologies.2 The first legal challenges to the nonuniform system of voting equipment are underway. One of these complaints, Common Cause v. Jones,3 invokes Bush v. Gore to test the equal protection claim generally and makes a specific claim for equal protection of racial groups. The general equal protection claim holds that different technologies count votes differently. Specifically, punch cards may have higher rates of uncounted votes and spoiled ballots. Voters residing in counties using punch card technologies are less likely to have their votes counted. A number of studies have addressed this matter, for example the Caltech/MIT Report, and this claim appears correct. In this paper, I consider the second argument—equal protection of racial groups. This argument rests on two premises. First, punch cards are an inferior technology for casting and counting votes. Second, counties with higher densities of minority voters disproportionately use inferior technologies, especially punch cards. A more subtle version of the racial argument holds that some technologies might be particularly problematic in areas with high densities of minorities. Some technologies may have disproportionately high rates of uncounted, unmarked, and spoiled ballots in counties with high numbers of nonwhite voters, owing to the particular difficulty implementing the equipment in those counties. These race-based claims may be relevant not only for the equal protection argument, but also for challenges under the Voting Rights Act. Is there statistical evidence to support the race-based equality argument? This paper examines the statistical evidence for the argument that race and voting equipment together affect the casting and counting of votes in ways disadvantageous to minority voters. I focus on

Florida’s residual votes, voting technology, and the 2000 election

Abstract This essay examines the county-level pattern of Florida’s residual votes in the 2000 presidential election, focusing on voting problems in optical scan ballot counties. Differing methods for counting optical scan ballots had a considerable impact on county-level residual vote rates. Differences in residual vote rates were also associated with race and poverty