Voters In States Research Articles

California voters approve rollback of 2014 criminal justice measure

Concerns about the effects of crimes on local communities have convinced California voters to approve a rollback of a criminal justice initiative they had backed in 2014, in a vote that is expected to have a significant impact on mental health funding streams. With just over half of votes counted, Proposition 36 last week appeared headed for an overwhelming victory, standing at just over 70% support. The measure will reclassify as felonies some nonviolent offenses that had been reduced to misdemeanors when the state's voters approved Proposition 47 in 2014. Savings from the 2014 initiative's reduction in incarceration were directed to investment in mental health and related services (see “California ballot item could reduce major mental health funding source,” MHW, Oct. 14, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1002/mhw.34205). California Gov. Gavin Newsom had spoken out strongly against the new initiative, but voters appeared swayed by the effects of thefts, drug crimes and related acts on local communities' quality of life. Under the earlier act's funding formula, 65% of the state's savings from reduced incarceration were directed to mental health, substance use and diversion programs.

Access to Healthcare and Voting: The Case of Hospital Closures in Rural America

We investigate how hardships affect rural politics, considering the case of hospital closures. In the last two decades, more than two hundred rural hospitals have closed their doors or drastically reduced their services. Drawing from resource models of voting, our hypothesis is that personal- and community-level deprivations brought about by hospital closures should reduce election turnout. Empirical tests pair geographic information on the location of open and closed hospitals with data from state voter files to create a panel of over 10 million rural residents for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 national elections. Results show that individuals whose nearest hospital closed prior to the proximate election were less likely to vote than their unaffected counterparts. These effects are strongest for older and lower-income residents, but they decay over time so that voting likelihood resembles a pre-closure baseline within 12 months.

EU issue voting in European member states: the return of the pro-EU voter

In the member states of the European Union (EU), there are increasing signs of waning EU support, particularly in the form of anti-EU sentiment and voting. Yet, the salient role of pro-EU voting has not been side-lined entirely. Using a combination of data from EES and CHES that estimates the positional distance between voters and parties on the EU, the results suggest that voters are significantly mobilised on support for the EU. This is congruent to recent evidence that has shown that voters have rewarded parties with more polarised stances on the EU and, contrary to Eurosceptic party mobilisation, those parties with a more extreme pro-EU stance. Here, the more vocal a Europhile party, the more likely that citizens will vote for that party given their positional closeness to the EU. The findings in this article suggest the (re-) emergence of an EU dimension with mobilising effects on parties and voters and serious consequences for the dynamics of party competition.

Federal Judges, States Legislators, and State Voting Rights Rollback

Abstract This article claims that recent Supreme Court decisions have allowed state lawmakers to suppress and skew but not subvert the vote. The Court relaxed federal oversight of state election administration in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Abbott v. Perez (2018), and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), and gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), while prohibiting independent state legislative election regulation in Moore v. Harper (2023). These decisions guided state lawmakers toward vote suppression and skewing, and away from election subversion. Consequently, Republican state legislatures have passed state constitutional amendments and statutes limiting ballot access and reforming state redistricting practices. While some Democratic state legislatures have protected ballot access and independent redistricting, these recent Supreme Court decisions help Republicans win a disproportionate share of state legislative seats. National courts thus help preserve the national party coalition by opening subnational jurisdictions to party entrenchment.

DNS root server resolution anomaly detection

The DNS root server is at the top of the hierarchical structure of the DNS system and is the initial node that bootstraps all DNS queries. If the root server resolves abnormally, all domain name resolutions will fail, and many users cannot access the Internet. For this reason, this paper detects the root server itself resolution anomalies and non-self resolution anomalies by constructing high-confidence root zone file and anomaly judgment rules. First, we use the weighted voting statistics method to build high-confidence root zone file by calculating the confidence of multi-source root zone files. Based on high-confidence root zone files, we construct three types of anomaly detection judgment rules: (1) root-side resolution anomaly judgment rules based on feature value matching, (2) response hijacking judgment rules by correlating response anomaly features and resolution routing information, (3) root zone file synchronization anomaly judgment rules by calculating the relative synchronization delay of multi-source root zone files. Finally, using three anomaly judgment rules, we perform anomaly detection on the root resolution data obtained by active measurement. Our detection results show that root zone file synchronization delay distributions of different root server instances vary greatly. Some instances even show minute-level convergence, resulting in incorrect resolution for some TLDs. We also detect one response hijacking incident for 2 TLDs resolution, caused by the domain takeover mechanism adopted by the ISP to reduce inter-domain traffic settlement and decrease resolution latency. Except for the unresponsive exception caused by network packet loss, no root-side resolution anomaly is found, indicating that there is no artificial manipulation of TLD resolution on the root server and reflecting the responsibility of each root server operator aiming to maintain global Internet interconnection. The detection results show that the detection rules proposed in this paper can effectively achieve the anomaly detection of root server resolution and help to maintain the health and stability of the DNS system.

A sociocultural approach to voting: Construing voting as a duty to others predicts political interest and engagement

A representative democracy requires citizens to be politically engaged; however, a substantial portion of eligible United States voters do not vote. While structural (e.g., ease or difficulty of voting) and individual (e.g., political efficacy, civic knowledge) factors contribute to (a lack of) turnout, the present work adopts a sociocultural perspective to investigate an additional contributor: how people construe-or make sense of-the duty to vote. We examine whether, and for whom, construing voting as interdependent (i.e., voting as a duty to others), compared to independent (i.e., voting as a duty to self), is associated with increased perceived duty and political engagement. Archival analysis (n[Formula: see text] 10,185) documents how perceived duty to vote relates to voter turnout in a nationally representative sample of Americans (Study 1). Two preregistered studies (total n[Formula: see text] 1,256) provide evidence that naturalistically construing one's duty to vote as interdependent (Study 2) and experimentally reflecting on interdependence (Study 3) both predict increases in perceived voting duty. Perceived duty to vote, in turn, is associated with heightened political engagement intentions. Taken together, the present work suggests that how voting is construed-as an independent duty to the self or an interdependent duty to others-may meaningfully influence political engagement, with implications for voter turnout interventions.

Mapping citizens, voters, and parties’ preferences on European solidarity across EU member states

ABSTRACT Since 2008, the European Union (EU) witnessed a growing tension between the social and economic dimensions of integration as a consequence of the ‘polycrisis’. The increasing politicisation of EU issues in national political arenas that led to the rise of Eurosceptic parties mostly revolved around the issue of European solidarity. Against this background, this study investigates the congruence between voters and incumbent members of national parliaments on the highly contentious aspects of EU solidarity. First, the article maps the extent to which national political elites share similar views on EU solidarity with their voters. Secondly, we assess members of parliaments (MPs)-voters’ congruence at the party level. Employing original data from an elite and a mass survey conducted in six EU countries between 2017 and 2018, we find that both voters and MPs expressed a high level of support for policies strengthening European solidarity in the Eurozone periphery. Instead, voters in Northern and Eastern EU member states shared more positive preferences than their national representatives. Furthermore, the party-voter distance was higher for radical-right Eurosceptic MPs, especially in Northern Europe, than for other parties.

Can Election Administration Overcome the Effects of Restrictive State Voting Laws?

Can Election Administration Overcome the Effects of Restrictive State Voting Laws?

The effect of signing ballot petitions on turnout

ABSTRACT Do ballot initiatives increase voter turnout? Some studies find a strong impact while others find the relationship to be modest and/or conditional. Either way, the underlying mechanism is not well understood. Here, we build on past work by hypothesizing that signing a ballot petition acts as a personalized form of campaign contact, increasing the likelihood of turnout. Previous investigations have been aggregate in nature, or have had to rely on either samples of petition signers or county-level inferences. We procured the complete lists of initiative petitions signers for two recent, high-profile state ballot measures in Arkansas, among the most frequent direct democracy users among the American states. By supplementing these individual-level data with the state voter file, we assess the impact of having signed a petition, controlling for age and vote history. Our results confirm earlier findings that signing a petition increases the probability of voter turnout, especially among irregular voters. This has consequences for both candidate and initiative elections in jurisdictions that, like Arkansas, conduct both elections at the same time.

The Influence of Campaign Contribution Disclosure on Voter Support for Tax Initiatives: Evidence from Washington’s “Keep Groceries Affordable Act of 2018”

ABSTRACT We examine the effect of campaign financial disclosures on support for Washington State Initiative 1634, a ballot initiative aimed at limiting tax increases on soda. In an experimental setting, we assess the effect of financial disclosures when paired with the actual textual arguments provided to Washington State voters and the effect of financial disclosures when paired with more complementary textual arguments. We find evidence that financial disclosures influence changes in voter support for the tax initiative. Specifically, our findings indicate that disclosing the top financial contributors “for” and “against” the initiative provides decision-relevant information to voters. Thus, policymakers should consider (1) making donor disclosures freely available in voter information guides, (2) eliminating special-interest group techniques that hide the sources of contributions, and (3) erring on the side of caution when constituents seek to remove ballot-related financial reporting requirements.

SEEDING DOUBTS ABOUT VOTING BROADLY AND STRATEGICALLY: TRUMP AND BIDEN RHETORIC ONLINE IN THE 2020 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

When rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that Donald Trump had been robbed of the presidency. Presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (Mercieca, 2020). Indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what Taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared reality that takes hold in public discourse and public consciousness. Trump’s rhetoric in 2020 around the vote continued a narrative that he had started when he took office. In this study, using the framework of social imaginaries, we qualitatively and inductively analyze messaging on campaign social media accounts around the 2020 presidential campaign. We also examine the Facebook advertisements and the targets of those ads specifically around the vote. We compare Trump’s rhetoric to that of his opponent Joe Biden to contrast the distinct imaginaries around the vote each political candidate articulated. We find that Trump relied on his social media accounts to sow distrust of the vote process and doubt about the accuracy of the vote count on Election Day. More concerning, we also find that Trump attacked the voting process through his paid advertising on Facebook, targeting voters in key battleground states.

Assessing COVID-19 pandemic policies and behaviours and their economic and educational trade-offs across US states from Jan 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022: an observational analysis

The USA struggled in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but not all states struggled equally. Identifying the factors associated with cross-state variation in infection and mortality rates could help to improve responses to this and future pandemics. We sought to answer five key policy-relevant questions regarding the following: 1) what roles social, economic, and racial inequities had in interstate variation in COVID-19 outcomes; 2) whether states with greater health-care and public health capacity had better outcomes; 3) how politics influenced the results; 4) whether states that imposed more policy mandates and sustained them longer had better outcomes; and 5) whether there were trade-offs between a state having fewer cumulative SARS-CoV-2 infections and total COVID-19 deaths and its economic and educational outcomes. Data disaggregated by US state were extracted from public databases, including COVID-19 infection and mortality estimates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's (IHME) COVID-19 database; Bureau of Economic Analysis data on state gross domestic product (GDP); Federal Reserve economic data on employment rates; National Center for Education Statistics data on student standardised test scores; and US Census Bureau data on race and ethnicity by state. We standardised infection rates for population density and death rates for age and the prevalence of major comorbidities to facilitate comparison of states' successes in mitigating the effects of COVID-19. We regressed these health outcomes on prepandemic state characteristics (such as educational attainment and health spending per capita), policies adopted by states during the pandemic (such as mask mandates and business closures), and population-level behavioural responses (such as vaccine coverage and mobility). We explored potential mechanisms connecting state-level factors to individual-level behaviours using linear regression. We quantified reductions in state GDP, employment, and student test scores during the pandemic to identify policy and behavioural responses associated with these outcomes and to assess trade-offs between these outcomes and COVID-19 outcomes. Significance was defined as p<0·05. Standardised cumulative COVID-19 death rates for the period from Jan 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022 varied across the USA (national rate 372 deaths per 100 000 population [95% uncertainty interval [UI] 364-379]), with the lowest standardised rates in Hawaii (147 deaths per 100 000 [127-196]) and New Hampshire (215 per 100 000 [183-271]) and the highest in Arizona (581 per 100 000 [509-672]) and Washington, DC (526 per 100 000 [425-631]). A lower poverty rate, higher mean number of years of education, and a greater proportion of people expressing interpersonal trust were statistically associated with lower infection and death rates, and states where larger percentages of the population identify as Black (non-Hispanic) or Hispanic were associated with higher cumulative death rates. Access to quality health care (measured by the IHME's Healthcare Access and Quality Index) was associated with fewer total COVID-19 deaths and SARS-CoV-2 infections, but higher public health spending and more public health personnel per capita were not, at the state level. The political affiliation of the state governor was not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 death rates, but worse COVID-19 outcomes were associated with the proportion of a state's voters who voted for the 2020 Republican presidential candidate. State governments' uses of protective mandates were associated with lower infection rates, as were mask use, lower mobility, and higher vaccination rate, while vaccination rates were associated with lower death rates. State GDP and student reading test scores were not associated with state COVD-19 policy responses, infection rates, or death rates. Employment, however, had a statistically significant relationship with restaurant closures and greater infections and deaths: on average, 1574 (95% UI 884-7107) additional infections per 10 000 population were associated in states with a one percentage point increase in employment rate. Several policy mandates and protective behaviours were associated with lower fourth-grade mathematics test scores, but our study results did not find a link to state-level estimates of school closures. COVID-19 magnified the polarisation and persistent social, economic, and racial inequities that already existed across US society, but the next pandemic threat need not do the same. US states that mitigated those structural inequalities, deployed science-based interventions such as vaccination and targeted vaccine mandates, and promoted their adoption across society were able to match the best-performing nations in minimising COVID-19 death rates. These findings could contribute to the design and targeting of clinical and policy interventions to facilitate better health outcomes in future crises. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J Stanton, T Gillespie, J and E Nordstrom, and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality

To secure his party's nomination in 1896, William McKinley courted Black Republicans. George Henry White, a Black attorney elected to Congress from North Carolina that same year, was an ardent McKinley supporter. Benjamin R. Justesen, the author of a 2001 biography of White, documents the fitful political partnership between McKinley and the congressman. Justesen argues, first, that biographers of McKinley have minimized his commitment to African American political equality; and second, that White and McKinley orchestrated the largest number of Black appointments to federal positions of any president. (Despite civil service reforms a decade earlier, both parties still expected their presidents to reward loyalists.) Justesen argues that “McKinley's role as a sincere friend and benefactor of African Americans may be among the best-kept secrets of American political history” (p. 2). White came to office at a precarious moment for Black rights. Raised on his free family's turpentine farm, he earned a law degree at Howard University and served in the North Carolina legislature before running for Congress. An erudite speaker, he stumped for McKinley during the 1896 campaign. Yet the importance of Black votes to Republican candidates was waning. Southern states were flagrantly stripping African Americans of the franchise. During White's first term, white supremacists carried out a violent coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, to oust Black officeholders. In 1900 the state's voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to disfranchise Black residents. White used his prominence in Congress to implore his fellow Republicans to stop this violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Dynamics of Hidden Partisanship and Crossover Voting in Semi-Closed Primaries

AbstractAmong US states with party registration, many allow the unaffiliated to choose either the Democratic or Republican primary. States with these semi-closed rules thus provide an option to voters with greater choice than registering with a single political party. Using the synthetic control method, I find that the introduction of semi-closed primaries is associated with growth in unaffiliated registration. However, the likelihood of unaffiliated registration is not even across the electorate in semi-closed states. I show that it is most common where a voter’s party is not competitive and the access unaffiliated registration provides to the strong party’s primary is valuable. Consistent with this instrumental motive, unaffiliated voters in semi-closed states use their freedom of choice to vote in the primary of the stronger party in the electorate. This leads to significant crossover voting among unaffiliated voters who do not identify with that party such as Democrats in red states or Republicans in blue states. These findings show the unintended consequences of electoral institutions and find primary crossover voting is more common under some circumstances than others.

Widen your vision: from technical accessibility to semantic intelligibility of information

Access to information and digital services is a fundamental right. To this end, websites and digital services must be designed in accordance with international technical standards, in particular the guidelines for the accessibility of Internet pages issued by the World Wide Web Consortium and, in addition, with national technical standards. However, people with disabilities are still at great risk of digital exclusion. Thus, our research is interested in examining (1) to what extent do technical standards support people with visual impairments (PVI) to overcome the digital divide, and (2) to what extent the digital information of an electronic state voting system is understood by PVI. To answer these research questions, we combined an interpretive literature review with a bibliometric analysis and conducted a three cycles action research in the context of an electronic state voting system in Switzerland. Inspired by the communication theory of Shannon and Weaver, our results show that to bridge the digital divide for PVI, it is necessary to improve (1) the technical accessibility of information and (2) the semantic intelligibility of information. Considering the comments of PVI on semantic intelligibility of information helps to improve information systems (IS) and to overcome the digital divide. IS designers and coders must rely on ex ante standards during development.

Clustering the states of the world by political indicators

The article presents the experience of clustering the states of the world, based on political indicators. Ten indicators were selected for analysis, divided into foreign and domestic political ones and including: the institutional foundations of democracy, turnout in elections, the representation of women in national parliaments, the number of NGOs, the share of state votes in the IMF, the number of diplomatic missions; the strength of the passport, the index of perception of corruption, the conflict potential of the state and military spending. With the help of geographic and geopolitical matrices of the neighborhood, a spatial econometric analysis was carried out, and using the method of geographic average and the Geary index, clustering of the states of the world was carried out. Based on the results of the analysis, we can say that the geopolitical neighborhood matrix allows more accurate clustering of the states of the world according to political indicators by taking into account the context. As for the clustering method in general, with its help it was possible not only to visualize the various parameters displayed on the cartogram of the world, but also to fix the prerequisites for integration processes, cleavages between groups of states, development trends of a particular cluster of states, etc.

Can Addressing Integrity Concerns about Mail Balloting Increase Turnout? Results from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in the 2020 Presidential Election

AbstractThe 2020 presidential election brought expanded vote-by-mail opportunities, a rise in attacks on this process’s integrity, and the implementation of novel programs such as California’s Where’s My Ballot? system to ensure confidence in mail balloting. Can heightening awareness of this ballot-tracking system and other election protections alleviate fraud concerns and raise turnout? We assess whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased participation in the 2020 election through a large-scale voter mobilization field experiment. California registrants were mailed a letter that described either existing safeguards to prevent vote-by-mail fraud or the ability to track one’s ballot and ensure that it was counted. Analysis of state voter records reveals that neither message increased turnout over a simple election reminder or even no contact, even among subgroups where larger effects might be expected. In the context of a high-profile, high-turnout presidential election, assurances about ballot and electoral integrity did not increase turnout.

Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Scheme Based on Vertical Federated Random Forest

Presently, under the condition of privacy preserving, vertical federated learning (VFL) has played an important role in training the machine learning (ML) models in the application scenarios, such as medical prediction, fraud detection, in which the data is distributed vertically. Random forest (RF) is one of the most widely used ML methods in VFL, which has the advantages of strong predictive performance, availability, and the ability to parallel tasks. However, current research on privacy preserving of vertical federated RF is limited, and none of them can achieve the application level of security, that is, in a system where users are dynamically changing, not only privacy can be preserved, but also data integrity can be verified. Therefore, we propose a verifiable privacy-preserving scheme (VPRF) based on vertical federated RF, in which the users are dynamic change. First, we design homomorphic comparison and voting statistics algorithms based on multikey homomorphic encryption for privacy preservation. Then, we propose a multiclient delegated computing verification algorithm to make up for the disadvantage that the above algorithms cannot verify data integrity. Finally, we used the data sets in UCI ML warehouse to evaluate the proposed scheme. The experiment results indicate that our scheme is more efficient than the existing ones that can achieve the same security level.

Disappearing Democrats

Pennsylvania has more registered Democrats than Republicans, yet Republicans control most of the statewide elected offices and both chambers of the state legislature. How is it possible that the Democrats' registration advantage does not lead to more Democratic electoral success? Using a random survey of Pennsylvania voters and comparative questions on party orientation and party registration, this article finds that many of the state's voters identify with a political party that is different from the party in which they are actually registered. Party identification is important because it is a better predictor of voting behavior than is party registration. The article finds that more registered Democrats in Pennsylvania identify with the Republican Party than vice versa, making the Democrats' registration advantage an advantage in name only.

Green with Envy? Heterogeneous Voter and Parent Preferences for Public School Expenditures and Teacher Salaries

In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, education policy debates have thrust a heightened focus on the provision of adequate school resources and on educator well-being and turnover, concerns particularly critical for school districts that serve large shares of economically disadvantaged students. In this article, we investigate voter and parent support for school spending initiatives in Missouri by analyzing data from two representative statewide surveys, one of the state’s voters and one of the state’s parents, focusing on total school spending and spending on teacher salaries. Missouri presents an especially salient setting in which to examine issues of equity in school spending, with below-average school spending and bottom-decile average teacher salaries. In this context, we investigate longstanding predictors of school spending support, including political ideology, alongside new hypotheses, including those pertaining to regional spending inequality and differences between voter and parent constituencies. While political ideology predicted school spending and teacher salary preferences, it did so more strongly for voters than for parents, an important consideration amid heightened political tensions in policy debates. Parent preferences, on the other hand, were more likely to be predicted by opinions of local and statewide school quality. Both voters and parents indicated sensitivity to regional spending inequality with respect to total school spending but not with respect to teacher salaries. Collectively, these findings may inform policymaking efforts in Missouri and similar prevailingly conservative contexts to use constituent preferences to guide legislative efforts.