Voter Confidence Research Articles

Biometric Technologies, Electoral Fraud and the Management of Elections in Nigeria and Zimbabwe

The introduction of biometric technologies (BT) in Africa’s developing democracies has raised concerns on the BT effect on voter turnout and voter confidence. Questions have also been raised about BT effectiveness as an anti-rigging and anti-fraud solution that would ensure credible elections. Through secondary and survey data, the study used Nigeria and Zimbabwe in Africa as units of analysis, as both countries have similar historical trajectory and conditions like weak institutions, reliance on international donors and the use of BT. The study discovered that at the pre-election stage, BT use enhanced election credibility as evidenced in computerized voter register and Smart Card Readers (SCR). It also discovered that at the election stage, biometric technologies served as an effective anti-rigging measure by eliminating cases of unregistered voting, ballot stuffing and multiple voting. The study further shows that the application of biometric technologies affects voters’ confidence and turn out negatively. For instance, the more biometric technologies (BM) are deployed and used in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the modest the level of voters’ turnout (43.65% in 2015 elections and 52% 2000 elections respectively), showing the limitations of BT in resolving issues of voters’ confidence, turnout and electoral fraud in Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

Seeing Is Believing: An Experiment on Absentee Ballots and Voter Confidence

Since the 2000 election, researchers have taken an interest in the role of voter confidence and its importance as an assessment of public trust in electoral outcomes. Many factors may influence voter confidence including the way in which a voter casts their ballot. Previous research has found that absentee voters consistently report the lowest levels of confidence that their votes were counted correctly. This study uses an experiment to examine how voting method impacts voter confidence. Voters were randomly assigned to either an in-person or absentee voting condition. Participants assigned to the absentee condition expressed lower levels of confidence that their votes would be counted correctly than those assigned to the in-person voting condition. Voters who had to ask for assistance during the experiment also reported lower levels of confidence. This could have implications for voter confidence levels nationally as vote-by-mail continues to grow in popularity.

Winning cures everything? Beliefs about voter fraud, voter confidence, and the 2016 election

Rhetoric about “rigged” elections has raised concerns about the solidity of public trust in the integrity of the voting system. Mitigating these concerns, research by Sinclair et al. (2019) on the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign documents a robust “winner's effect” on voter confidence despite intense partisan messaging aimed at influencing citizens' acceptance of the legitimacy of the election. This suggests that regularly fluctuating electoral outcomes in competitive democracies limit the impact of elite messages on trust in electoral institutions. A critical question is whether similar dynamics apply to dimensions of electoral trust that are more clearly partisan-branded and targeted, such as beliefs about the prevalence of illicit voting. This paper uses a panel study with waves conducted before and after Election Day 2016 to compare the effect of election on beliefs about the extent of illicit voting and voter confidence. Underlining both the promise and limitations of democratic competition as a counterweight to elite efforts to sow electoral distrust, there are significant “winner's effects” on both but substantially smaller impact on beliefs about illicit voting, a difference that is especially large among strong Republican partisans.

Lost in the Mail? Vote be Mail and Voter Confidence

Recently, the use of vote-by-mail has been increasing in popularity, with Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii moving exclusively to mail-based election systems. While election reformers tout the various benefits of this change, what impact does mail voting have on voter confidence? I seek to answer this by by leveraging the implementation of postal voting in Washington and Colorado through the use of the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE) dataset, along with difference-in-differences design, genetic matching, Mahalanobis distance matching, and ordinal logistic regression analysis. In doing so, I demonstrate that the implementation of vote by mail causes a significant decrease in voter confidence in both states. However, this decrease appears to be temporary, disappearing after only single election cycle. These results shed light on the potential impact of recent expansions of convenience voting in the United States, while also furthering the debate around perceptions of electoral integrity in democratic systems.

НЕКОТОРЫЕ ПОДХОДЫ К ИССЛЕДОВАНИЮ ПОНЯТИЙ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЙ ИМИДЖ И СЕТЕВОЙ ИМИДЖ

The article discusses various approaches to the study of political and network image. With the advent of modern election campaigns, it has become clear that image is an inevitable part of a successful campaign. The political image as an object of research began to appear in political science, sociological and communication studies since the 50s of the twentieth century. The political image in modern conditions is becoming such an important factor, politicians who seek to gain power or keep it must be reckoned with it. In modern socio-political conditions and the reduction of ideological differences between political parties and their leaders, their image, through which their authority is reflected, is becoming an increasingly important factor determining the difference between candidates and political parties. For the modern voter, the political image becomes more important than the ideological positions of the candidate and the party. If political parties concentrate on the “average” voter and do not show serious ideological differences, differences in election programs, the image of a political leader becomes the most important factor. Voter confidence depends on image. It is important to determine the audience for whom the political image is being created. A traditional audience is one that has long followed a particular political unit or politics as a whole. The success of the political image and the candidate depends on strategic research, which, among other things, shows what the image of the candidates should be like in these elections. The political image should be aimed at creating voters' confidence in the political leader and developing confidence in the competence of the politician, in his ability to solve pressing problems of society. The political image serves simple purposes - to “win the hearts of citizens” and mobilize their electoral support. But it is not enough to form the image of the candidate, it must be conveyed to the voter without distortion. The modern world has long entered the digital age, where information is distributed through electronic media at a very high speed. Internet technologies for the formation of a political image are beginning to become increasingly important. In the last decade, this issue has become urgent.

How Will Illinois’ Push for Mail-In Balloting Affect Voter Confidence in the November 2020 Election?  

How Will Illinois’ Push for Mail-In Balloting Affect Voter Confidence in the November 2020 Election?  

Waiting to vote: the effect of administrative irregularities at polling locations and voter confidence

ABSTRACTWhen citizens experience an irregularity while voting, their confidence in elections is diminished, and they are more likely to perceive the results of the election as illegitimate. Although there are many irregularities that a voter may experience, this article evaluates the consequence of extensive wait times to vote on citizen confidence in the United States. Utilizing the 2008–2016 Survey on the Performance of American Elections (SPAE) the analysis finds that wait times have a negative effect on confidence as do challenges with the voting equipment and voter registration. The effect of negative experiences extends beyond lowered confidence that a voter’s ballot is counted as intended to lower confidence that ballots at the local, state, and national level are counted as intended by voters as well. While extended wait times have a limited effect, negatively effecting the confidence in a voter’s personal ballot and ballots across the local jurisdiction, negative experiences with registration or ballots and voting equipment affect evaluations of confidence at the personal level and across the local jurisdiction, state, and nation.

State online voting and registration lookup tools: Participation, confidence, and ballot disposition

ABSTRACTState online voting and registration lookup tools that allow voters to check their voter registration status, confirm their polling location, review a sample ballot, and check the status of an absentee or provisional ballot reduce the cost of information acquisition and service completion while providing voters with the information necessary to participate in the democratic process. The analysis evaluates the relationship between state voting and registration online lookup tools and voter turnout, voter confidence, and the disposition of provisional ballots. Findings suggest that voting and registration lookup tools are related to voter turnout and rejected provisional ballots.

О некоторых вопросах роспуска законодательных органов субъектов Российской Федерации

The article examines the issues of dissolution of the legislative body of the subject of the Federation. Attention is drawn to the fact that the institution of dissolution is an institution of constitutional law, and when the legislative body is dissolved, it is not responsible to the body or official who decided to dissolve it, but to the population, its voters. On the basis of the study it is concluded that it is necessary to Supplement the list of grounds for early termination of the powers of the regional Parliament, as a measure of constitutional and legal responsibility, by including such grounds as the loss of voter confidence. The question of the need to empower the population of the subject of the Russian Federation with the right to decide in a referendum on the dissolution of the legislative (representative) body of state power of the subject of the Russian Federation.

Attitudes toward Voting Technology, 2012–2018

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, computer experience, and beliefs about computer privacy. There is a consistent status quo bias in attitudes about computer equipment — users of DREs tend to favor DREs and users of opscans tend to favor opscans. On top of this bias, DREs have tended to be regarded as superior to both opscans and hand-counted paper over the time covered in the paper, although this advantage has also declined. Computer anxiety plays a consistent role in predicting preferences disfavoring computer-based equipment. The role of computer self-efficacy, computer experience, and beliefs about computer privacy play a less consistent role. The analysis in this paper points out the importance of prior experience in determining preferences for voting technologies, but also an important role that is played by affective responses to computers in general.

Descriptive Representation in Election Administration: Poll Workers and Voter Confidence

Abstract Citizen confidence in elections remains a salient topic when discussing democracy and representation. While scholars have argued that voter experiences affect satisfaction, confidence, and...

“It’s Largely a Rigged System”: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016

The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to counter Trump’s claims. Second, literature on voter confidence has established a “winner effect”—voters who cast ballots for winners are more likely than voters on the losing side to believe their vote was counted correctly. Thus, voters were exposed to two theoretically opposite effects. In this paper, we find that the “winner” effect mitigates the effects from strong pre-election cues from elites. We also show the effect of pre-election attention to the rigging issue, find a symmetry of the election outcome effect for winners and losers, and reconsider our explanations of the winner effect. Finally, we go beyond the existing studies of the winner effect to consider the kind of citizens who are most susceptible to that effect.

Do private donations depress electoral turnout? An empirical investigation of voter participation

This paper assesses the hypothesis that the increasing reliance of political parties and candidates on certain types of private donations could be one of the key factors behind declining voter turnout, even in established and consolidated democratic regimes. To disentangle this relationship, it highlights seven institutional arrangements that are likely to limit the extent to which private actors can make political contributions. The empirical analysis demonstrates that, while certain regulations indeed lead to higher voter participation, the relationship is nuanced. For example, bans to corporate donations improve turnout only when they prevent companies with government ties from donating money. In addition, what seems to bolster voter participation greatly is limiting the amount a private donor can contribute, as well as requiring parties and candidates to reveal the identity of their donors. The analysis also demonstrates that voter confidence in the government is one plausible causal mechanism linking finance regulations and turnout. Depending on the particular regulation adopted, turnout can be boosted between 3.4 and 8.6 percent.

Does fraud trump partisanship? The impact of contentious elections on voter confidence

ABSTRACTFraudulent elections can reduce citizen trust in elections and other political institutions. But what about the impact of contentious elections that resolve successfully, leading to democratizing change? Do national movements toward democracy trump individual experiences with electoral manipulation? Using public opinion survey data collected before and after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, we evaluate changes in voter confidence in electoral practices, political institutions, and democracy. Although national trends show increased voter confidence overall, subnational variation suggests pervasive partisan differences in opinions about election quality and institutional confidence. Remarkably, we find that direct exposure to fraud matters far less than anticipated; voters who were personally exposed to fraud felt no more or less confident than their co-partisans. We show that partisanship and the national electoral context may interact in ways that complicate the effects of democratizing elections, suggesting important avenues for future research.

Women, Political Participation, and the Arab Spring: Political Awareness and Participation in Democratizing Tunisia

ABSTRACTThis research examines the constraints to female political participation in democratizing Tunisia. Analyzing data from the Voter Registration & Voter Confidence Assessment in Tunisia Survey conducted by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in March 2011 shows stark differences between men and women in their levels of political awareness, which causes a barrier to female political participation. Substantiated by a battery of tests, this gap is primarily structured by differences in university-level education and income levels. Contributing factors to explain the gap are differences in the degree of female public presence in urban settings, as opposed to rural areas, and a lack of access to information about politics. Policy recommendations to reduce this gap are creating educational funds for women and increasing the accessibility of political information outside of the capital.

Party responsiveness and voter confidence in Australia

ABSTRACTNumerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. This article presents the results of a study investigating whether the responsiveness of Australian parties to what their voters want drives this lack of confidence. It analyses two aspects of party responsiveness: programmatic responsiveness in electoral manifestos and perceived responsiveness that centres on Australian voters’ assessment of how well their parties meet their demands. The analysis finds that programmatic responsiveness has no significant influence. Instead, how Australians perceive their parties to be responsive has a modest effect on their confidence in those parties. The study suggests that, however, it is incumbency which has the most powerful effect on voter confidence.

Where Oil is King

The rise of local bans on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” by local governments has sparked a recent backlash in carbon-producing states. In 2015, Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina passed laws that forbid any city, town, or other municipal body from banning fracking or passing certain regulations on the practice, by popular vote or otherwise. Other states are likely to follow suit. This Article is the first to propose that cities and towns in those states could incorporate and enforce existing state environmental laws. By doing so, those municipalities may be able to ensure compliance with those environmental regulations by oil and gas companies and minimize some of the environmental harms associated with fracking, even when they cannot enact outright bans on the practice. Further, this Article explains why the incorporation and enforcement of state environmental laws by cities and towns — and particularly cities and towns in states that have taken away local power to enact fracking bans — should not be expressly or impliedly preempted by those laws. Indeed, taking this approach would also further important policy goals inherent in federalism and help restore voter confidence in the democratic process.

Voter Confidence: How to Measure It and How It Differs from Government Support

Abstract Voters are often trusting of elections, but distrustful of government. We test whether voter confidence represents a different measure of system support from trust in government and external efficacy. Theoretically, we describe the inherent differences in these measures as one reason to suspect they are so. Empirically, we consider frequency distributions, crosstabs, exploratory factor analysis, reliability tests, and regression analysis to determine the independent validity of each system support measure. We find strong theoretical and empirical evidence to support that voter confidence is different from other system support measures previously studied and examined. As such, it is an important new area of scholarship.

Electronic Voting and Perceptions of Election Fraud and Fairness

AbstractThis paper contributes to a growing body of research on voting technology and voter confidence, which generally concludes that voters are less confident in technology—particularly in developed democracies. Using a unique survey experiment, this paper demonstrates that far fewer individuals are concerned about election fraud involving electronic voting, compared with other potential forms of election fraud such as registering ineligible voters or voter suppression. Other interesting findings emerge from the data: Older individuals are more concerned about fraud with electronic voting but the effects of age appear to be conditioned on political polarization. This paper advances our understanding of the impact of voting technology on electoral confidence, and raises important substantive and methodological questions about priming.

Foreign Election Observers in Africa: Towards an Obligations-Based Approach

This article reflects on efforts by African countries to employ election observation assessments through domestic and international observers based on the obligation to comply with public international law. There are mixed feelings among voters, politicians and civil society organisations about the objectivity of election observation reports. This paper argues that basing election observation reports on legal commitments from public international law using the obligations-based approach articulated by the Cater Centre may enhance objectivity. The study is a content analysis of the obligations-based approach and observation reports made in selected African countries. Results indicate contradictions on findings of the same election by different international observers. An integrated obligations-approach framework on election observation should be developed by the African Union, and other international bodies in Africa. This may strengthen voter confidence and improve electoral democracy in the continent. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s1p272