Voter Rolls Research Articles

Political Polarization Affects Households' Financial Decisions: Evidence from Home Sales

ABSTRACTPolitical identity and partisanship are salient features of today's society. Using deeds records and voter rolls, we show that current residents are more likely to sell their homes when opposite‐party neighbors move in nearby than when unaffiliated or same‐party neighbors do. This is especially true when the new neighbors are politically active, consistent with an animosity between parties mechanism. We conclude that affective polarization is not limited to purely political settings and affects one of the household's most important financial decisions, their home transactions.

Review: In Pursuit of Utopia: Los Angeles in the Great Depression, by Errol Wayne Stevens

Historians of Los Angeles and Southern California have long observed that the region was an extraordinary place during the 1920s and 1930s. The region’s population and economy grew at a phenomenal rate. Evangelists called new arrivals to megachurches created by Hollywood set designers. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans flocked to annual picnics in Long Beach to celebrate their midwestern roots. Hucksters sold stocks for sham companies on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. As the Depression took hold and regional economic prospects spiraled downward, seemingly equally strange proposals and movements to solve the economic crisis and its corollary human suffering emerged and gained popularity, from the Ham and Eggs pension movement to Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign.In this carefully researched and thoughtfully written book, Errol Stevens asks the familiar question of why Los Angeles saw so many radical movements take hold in the 1930s. Over ten readable chapters, he rejects the common argument that Angelenos, many of them new migrants from the Midwest, naively fell for the impractical schemes of radicals and con artists. Instead, Stevens argues that Southern Californians, many of them desperate for feasible solutions to their abysmal economic situations, were willing to consider creative, even unusual, social and economic proposals to address personal and regional economic woes.As Stevens narrates, these programs and proposals varied widely. They included widespread agricultural self-help cooperatives that grew and distributed foodstuffs to thousands of members and those in need from Compton to El Monte. The Communist Party built a dedicated membership from its headquarters in Boyle Heights and in defiance of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad.” Members of the newly formed Utopian Society advocated for a radical rethinking of the nation’s economic structure, a transformation that they believed could come about without revolution and would restore a solid middle class. Physician Francis E. Townsend proposed a wildly popular program of universal lifetime pensions of $150 a month for those over sixty or unemployed with the one stipulation that the money be spent in its entirety by the end of each month in order to stimulate the economy and end the Depression. At the urging of some prominent California Democrats, Sinclair, a longtime socialist, changed his party affiliation and announced his campaign for governor. His campaign, known as End Poverty in California (EPIC), organized over two thousand clubs across the state and helped add 350,000 new registered Democrats to the state’s voter rolls. Sinclair enjoyed tremendous popularity but state conservatives waged “one of the dirtiest campaigns in California history” against him and his Republican opponent won (p. 168).Ultimately, In Pursuit of Utopia explores why California’s “aging, churchgoing, largely conservative, midwestern” population flocked to “movements that advocated programs that would change the very nature of the capitalist system” (p. 197). Stevens finds that the region’s older midwestern transplant population turned to long-established midwestern agricultural traditions of communalism to make ends meet. They also responded to the real threats of homelessness and starvation, a complete absence of a federal social safety net, and the refusal of local officials to provide adequate relief by supporting novel and innovative proposals. As Stevens observes, “thousands of Southern Californians rushed to support these movements because there were no alternatives…in retrospect, it is clear that they were not pursuing utopia, just trying to survive” (p. 200).A historian and an archivist, Stevens spent the final two decades of his career as the director of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University. While there, he also administered the Center for the Study of Los Angeles Research Collection. His training as an archivist is evident in this deeply researched and carefully sourced book. Sadly, the community of Los Angeles archivists and historians lost Stevens in 2020, but his contributions to the field live on in this finely researched and written book and in his stewardship of regional archival materials.

Are Voter Rolls Suitable Sampling Frames for Household Surveys? Evidence from India

We examine the use of publicly available voter rolls for household survey sampling as an alternative to household listings or field-based sampling methods. Using voter rolls for sampling can save most of the cost of constructing a sampling frame relative to a household listing, but there is limited evidence about their accuracy and completeness. We conducted a household listing in 13 polling stations in India comprising 2,416 households across four states and compared the listing to voter rolls for the same polling stations. We show that voter rolls include 91% of the households found in the household listing. We conduct simulations to show that sampling from voter rolls produces estimates of household-level economic variables with minimal bias. These results suggest that voter rolls may be suitable for constructing household sampling frames, particularly in rural India.

Electoral Double-Bind: How Electoral Environments Affect Racial and Ethnic Youth Voting Behavior

AbstractPrevious research on the voting propensity of young Americans has largely treated the effects of state electoral laws as homogenous, despite today’s youth belonging to the most racially and ethnically diverse age cohort to date. Research has documented differences in participatory resources across racial, ethnic, and age groups, with recent work also suggesting differences in racial and ethnic identity influences across age groups. These factors may lead to significant differences in voter turnout under different state electoral environments. Using the Current Population Survey (2000–2016), national voter rolls (2012), and the Cost of Voting Index, this study investigates how the intersectionality of age and racial/ethnic identification affect voting decisions across state electoral environments. Whether comparing young voters across racial/ethnic identifications or comparing young voters to their older racial/ethnic counterparts, results strongly support the assertion that young voters are affected to differing degrees by increased costs to vote along racial/ethnic lines.

Making Unequal Democracy Work? The Effects of Income on Voter Turnout in Northern Italy

AbstractIn many democracies, voter turnout is higher among the rich than the poor. But do changes in income lead to changes in electoral participation? We address this question with unique administrative data matching a decade of individual tax records with voter rolls in a large municipality in northern Italy. We document several important findings. First, levels of income and turnout both dropped disproportionately among relatively poor citizens following the Great Recession. Second, we show that within‐individual changes in income have an effect on participation, which is modest on average due to diminishing returns, but can be consequential among the poor. Third, we find that declining turnout of voters facing economic insecurity has exacerbated the income skew in participation, suggesting that income inequality and turnout inequality may reinforce each other. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, set in a context with strong civic traditions and low barriers to voting.

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

AbstractThis essay discusses the important contributions of three new works on Indian citizenship by Ornit Shani, Uditi Sen, and Oliver Godsmark. Their books discuss the territorial partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the framing and inauguration of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the preparation of voter rolls and the first democratic elections, and linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1956, alongside questions of refugee rehabilitation, counterinsurgency measures and rising ethnonationalisms. The emphasis is not only on the legal regimes of national citizenship, but also how it is unevenly mapped and experienced. This emphasis on territoriality is an invitation to ask questions about continuity and change in the transition from empires to nation-states, as well as invented pasts and imagined futures that transcend national borders set up after the end of colonial rule.

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

The racial burden of voter list maintenance errors: Evidence from Wisconsin's supplemental movers poll books.

Administrative records are increasingly used to identify registered voters who may have moved, with potential movers then sent postcards asking them to confirm their address of registration. It is important to understand how often these registrants did not move, and how often such an error is not corrected by the postcard confirmation process, because uncorrected errors make it more difficult for a registrant to subsequently vote. While federal privacy protections generally prevent researchers from observing the data necessary to estimate these quantities, we are able to study this process in Wisconsin because special poll books, available via public records requests, listed those registrants who were identified as potential movers and did not respond to a subsequent postcard. At least 4% of these registrants cast a ballot at their address of registration, with minority registrants twice as likely as white registrants to do so.

Physical activity and vascular cognitive health: Who may benefit most?

AbstractBackgroundThe majority of people with dementia in the population have mixed neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular pathology. Stroke and dementia share many risk factors, and both have potential to impair function and quality of life. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of vascular brain and cognitive health should integrate stroke and dementia. The association of physical activity (PA) with lower dementia risk suggests PA is a promising strategy to reduce stroke and dementia, and it is critical to understand who may benefit most.MethodsWithin a population‐based cohort study, with up to 10 years of follow‐up, we indexed PA by cumulative weekly minutes walked for exercise. We used survival analysis classification and regression trees (CART) to test which sub‐groups are at greatest risk for a composite outcome of stroke/dementia and to determine optimal PA cutoffs associated with no stroke/dementia in sub‐groups of interest.ResultsOf 1,982 participants recruited from voter rolls, 1,624 were free from stroke and dementia at baseline and had follow‐up visits. 62% were female, 5% Black, 42% had > high school education, 21% were APOE4+, and 65% were hypertensive at baseline. During 9,354 person‐years of follow‐up, N=133 developed stroke/dementia. The median cumulative walking time was 60.0 minutes. Among those with high PA, a group aged 82‐94 + APOE4+ had the highest risk (relative hazard ratio(RHR) of 6.4). In those with low PA, a group aged 82‐99+≥HS education+Black had the greatest risk of dementia/stroke (RHR=4.1). When examining thresholds in women, those APOE4‐, and those with hypertension (HTN), the optimal cutpoint was around 40‐50 minutes across a mean follow‐up time of nearly 6 years. Thresholds could not be determined for men, APOE4+, and those without HTN, likely due to smaller within strata sample sizes; however, the overall population cutpoint of 160 minutes suggests that thresholds in men, APOE4+, and those without HTN may be higher.ConclusionsOur results add evidence that PA can reduce risk of stroke and dementia. Women, those who are APOE4‐, and those with HTN may need fewer minutes of PA than the overall population in order to benefit. These findings are relevant from a personalized medicine perspective.

Foreword: The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Court

Foreword: The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Court

Who Is Left Out? The Process of Validating Voter Registration Applications

Whose voter registration requires further verification and why? And why are some prospective registrants left out from voter records? These questions can uncover challenges in the voter registration process, and potential implementation issues with federal and state law. In this article, I analyze “on hold” voter registration applications processed between November 2007 and September 2008 in Florida’s Hillsborough and Miami-Dade Counties. I evaluate why individuals were left out of the voter rolls, by matching their records to snapshots of the counties’ voter records from December 2008. I find that “on hold” applicants face persistent challenges in successfully registering to vote, particularly depending on when they attempt to register and what type of information they omit from a voter registration application.

What Are Friends for? The Effect of Geographic Proximity on Primary Turnout in Gubernatorial Elections

“Friends and neighbors” voting is the tendency of candidates to earn a higher than expected share of the vote in their home counties and states. This hometown effect has been witnessed across an array of elected offices and time periods, prompting researchers to examine how local candidates impact voters’ turnout decisions and electoral choices. This paper focuses on the effect of hometown candidates on turnout using voter rolls and histories from Ohio and Georgia during the 2018 gubernatorial primary elections. These administrative data allow us to observe the decisions of all registered voters in both of these contests along with, importantly, their prior turnout history. We find a consistent relationship between the presence of a hometown candidate and turnout decisions; however, this effect is conditional on voters’ previous vote histories in primaries. The effect is strongest among those who occasionally vote in elections, smaller for those who habitually vote, and negligible for those who have never participated before. These results contribute to our understanding of how the presence of local candidates translates into support for their campaigns, and provide evidence that the size of this effect is not the same for all voters.

“Our Voter Rolls Are Cleaner Than Yours”: Balancing Access and Integrity in Voter List Maintenance

Accurate voter lists facilitate access to the electoral process, indicate efficient voter list maintenance, and reinforce electoral integrity. Errors in voter records often result from variation in practices that are difficult to avoid given the decentralized structure of election administration in the United States. In many states, localities lack capacity to efficiently complete voter list maintenance, especially when pressured to keep “clean” voter rolls. I argue that local challenges remain when maintaining voters’ registration and voting history information, which undermines the quality of voter lists and the integrity of the electoral process. I analyze Mississippi’s Statewide Election Management System (SEMS) records and find that voter registration and voting history errors are linked to the county’s active and inactive registered voter rates and demographic characteristics. These findings confirm that local variation in voter list maintenance can impact voters depending on their voter registration status and can result in premature voter list removal.

“No Man Can Be the Judge of His Own Cause”: Applying the Principles of Due Process to Our Elections

The chief election official of a state has broad authority to decide who gets to vote based on policies that regulate voter registration applications, absentee ballots, and state voter rolls. They ...

Biometric Elections in Poor Countries: Wasteful or a Worthwhile Investment?

Elections have emerged as a leading area for the application of biometric technology in developing countries, despite its high costs and uncertainty over its effectiveness. One-off voter registrations, as practiced in many countries and supported by donors, also often leave nothing behind in terms of permanent, sustainable, identification assets. Why then do donors support such programs? The paper considers the costs and benefits of technology, where the latter involves its potential to reduce the probability of seriously disputed elections that escalate into violence. Based on the limited data available, it finds that a reduction in the probability of post-election violence by only a few percentage points could offset the cost of the technology. However, this is possible only in particular situations where political parties value the legitimacy conferred by elections that are sufficiently credible to provide an acceptable basis for governing, but where democracy is not yet well-institutionalized. One priority is therefore to screen potential cases carefully. Another step towards using technology more effectively would be to build on the powerful momentum created by voter registration drives to strengthen permanent identity assets such as civil registration and national ID programs, so that they can provide a more sustainable foundation for subsequent voter rolls. This is possible with careful planning but may require some reconsideration of institutional mandates.

Migration as an opportunity to register changing partisan loyalty in the United States

AbstractWe explore the connection between residential migration choices and political party identification by movers who change their political party registration. We find that an impressive number of migrants choose neighbourhoods that favor their new party of registration. The association between the party change of the migrant and the balance of local partisanship in their new neighborhood cannot be accounted for by a process of neighbourhood socialisation because the move is too recent for socialisation pressures to have operated. It is more likely that the migrant's political transition occurred well before the relocation and shaped the destination search. Relocation offered an opportunity to mark a previously transformed partisan preference on the voter rolls. In this sense, partisan identification is stable, but observing any large subset of migrants may make it appear unhinged, as this group collectively takes its opportunity to officially disclose their change in political party loyalty when they have a chance to relocate and must reregister.

Does threatening their franchise make registered voters more likely to participate? Evidence from an aborted voter purge

AbstractPrior research predicts that election administration changes that increase voting costs should decrease participation, but it fails to consider that some interpret those changes as attacking their franchise. Drawing on psychological reactance theory, this study tests whether such perceived attacks might instead activate those citizens. It leverages the State of Florida’s multi-stage effort in 2012 to purge suspected non-citizens from its voter rolls, comparing the voting rates of suspected non-citizens whose registration was and was not formally challenged by the state. Within-registrant difference-in-difference and matching analyses estimate a positive, significant participatory effect of being challenged, particularly for Hispanics (the vast majority of the sample). Placebo tests show that those challenged were no more likely than those not challenged to vote in previous elections.

Enrolling India

Enrolling India Sumit Ganguly (bio) How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise. By Ornit Shani. New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2018. 284 pp In 1947, when India emerged as an independent state from the collapse of the British Indian Empire, it had few of the socioeconomic attributes usually seen as conducive to liberal democracy. Life expectancy at birth was 32 years, the overall literacy rate was 12 percent, and per capita GDP was about US$60. Nor had the British done much to promote democratic institutions. Faced with intensifying nationalist demands, they had grudgingly introduced democratic reforms. Yet even under the 1935 Government of India Act, voting was limited to just 12 percent of the adult population. Despite these odds, India successfully transitioned to democracy, holding the world's largest free and fair election within five years of gaining independence. How did India's nationalist leaders overcome these hurdles? Ornit Shani's new book explores the means by which a group of administrators, constitutional lawyers, and politicians created India's democratic edifice. These people staffed or assisted in the work of the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS), a critical postindependence body that oversaw the preparation of India's first draft electoral roll based on universal suffrage. The preparations that unfolded from 1947 to 1950 occurred as India confronted such fundamental tasks as how to define the criteria for citizenship and where to draw the borders of the state—when "'who is an Indian' was in question, and 'where is India' was in flux" (p. 129). [End Page 171] Despite considerable scholarship on the evolution and consolidation of India's democracy, there has been until now no notable work on the monumental task that led to the forging of India's democratic constitution and the conduct of its first democratic election. Shani's contribution is not simply a tour d'horizon of the subject, but a veritable tour de force. It must be underscored that this book is the result of painstaking archival work conducted at both the national and state levels in India. Shani draws on the more than 1,600 documents that she uncovered in the basement records room of the Election Commission of India. Together, these papers reveal the people and the decisions that shaped the preparation of the rolls. The CAS was a nonpartisan executive arm of the Constituent Assembly (1946–50)—the indirectly elected constitution-drafting body that, as the heart of an interim government tasked with making a number of fateful decisions, became in effect independent India's first national legislature. Situating her study within the pertinent secondary and theoretical literature, Shani meticulously reconstructs how the CAS worked with a range of entities to prepare the first national election, held from October 1951 to February 1952. The CAS faced formidable challenges. It had to determine who qualified for citizenship and thus could vote. This was a herculean effort, for nearly twenty-million people had been displaced at the time of independence and partition. The CAS coordinated with civic organizations and state and provincial administrators to ensure that as many people as possible could be added to the electoral rolls. In a deeply conservative society, it had to surmount difficulties such as opposition to registering women as voters. The CAS staff, to its great credit, adopted the most inclusive approach it could to extending the franchise. Shani discusses how the CAS dealt with state administrators who were loath to grant citizenship to individuals who had recently relocated from other states. The CAS determined that while states had authority to confer citizenship, they could not act in ways that contravened the rights guaranteed to all Indians under the emergent constitution. This inclusive outlook influenced local administrators. For example, in Bombay (now Mumbai), city officials estimated that as many as a hundred-thousand people lacked any fixed residence. Yet the CAS agreed with these officials that lacking a permanent "sleeping place" should and need not mean having no right to vote (209). A nascent free press bolstered the CAS's efforts. Newspapers and CAS "press notes" were key in spreading the word about the creation of the new voter rolls. Press coverage made the...

The Only Woman in the Room: The Norma Paulus Story by Norma Paulus, with Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher

134 OHQ vol. 119, no. 1 THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM: THE NORMA PAULUS STORY by Norma Paulus with Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. 224 pages. $24.95, paper. In the 1980s and 1990s, Norma Paulus was one of the most well-known politicians in Oregon. And she was by far the most prominent woman among the moderate-to-liberal Republicans who once dominated statewide elected office. Her career spanned the glory years of such GOP stars as Gov. Tom McCall and Sen. Mark Hatfield as well as the later ascendancy of the Republican right. After serving two terms as secretary of state, she lost a hard-fought race for governor in 1986 (which also marked the beginning of the so-far-unbroken Democratic control of that office). Paulus was later elected superintendent of public instruction. But in 1995, a far more conservative Gordon Smith trounced her in a Republican primary for a special U.S. Senate election. It was clear that the GOP had passed her by. Gradually, mention of her faded from political articles discussing the evolution of the Oregon Republican. This new “sort-of” autobiography promises to help preserve the Paulus name. After recording several oral histories with the Oregon Historical Society, Paulus hired veteran political writer Russell Sadler in 2010 to help her write the story of her life. That venture faltered two years later as her “energy and memory were both waning,” according to Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher, the two writers who took up the project and produced what they call an “affectionate portrait” of Paulus (p. 11). The resulting book skips lightly over much of the politics swirling around her career. There is little attempt to explain why and how a progressive form of Republicanism was so successful in Oregon. The chapter on her loss to Democrat Neil Goldschmidt was also surprisingly brief. Wells and Amacher paint a vivid picture of her political successes and of her striking liberalism on issues ranging from the environment to women’s rights. It is difficult in today’s political climate to imagine someone with Paulus’s views finding a home in the GOP. “The Republicans were the ones that were exciting,” the authors quote Paulus recalling of her first ventures into campaign work in the 1960s. “They were the good thinkers, the moderates. They were the ones who wanted to be in government for all the right reasons” (p. 53). Paulus was elected to the state House in 1970 and soon became a noted participant in the decade’s major environmental battles, particularly the passage in 1973 of Oregon’s landmark statewide land-use planning controls. She was also heavily involved in the state’s approval of the Equal Rights Amendment (which failed to gain enough support nationally to become part of the U.S. Constitution) and in a slew of bills that helped bring gender quality to Oregon’s laws. Starting in 1977, Paulus began the first of two terms as secretary of state. It was in that job that she perhaps had the most impact on Oregon. Wells and Amacher describe how Paulus held the first vote-by-mail elections in Oregon and how she helped modernize the state’s somnambulant audit system. Among other targets, her auditors went after questionable bidding practices by timber companies operating in state lands. She was never more in the public eye than in 1984, when she tangled with the Rajneeshee community in central Oregon. The group was accused of massive voter registration fraud in their drive to gain political power in Wasco County (opponents were also accused of trying to pad the voter rolls). Paulus responded by sending a corps of volunteer attorneys into the county to vet the new registrants. This is all useful material to anyone interested in Oregon political history. While it is written in the third person, the Paulus book is reminiscent of autobiographies of two other pioneering women in Oregon politics — Barbara Roberts, the state’s first woman governor, and Betty Roberts, the state’s first woman Supreme Court justice. Wells and Amacher succeed in presenting a detailed view...

Family Structure and the Turnout Gender Gap: Evidence from Italy

We study the effects of changes in household structure–marriage, divorce, widowhood, and the presence of children of different ages–on individual-level voter turnout. To this end, we assemble a unique voter-level panel dataset spanning four elections in a large Italian municipality. The data merge information from administrative voter rolls, the civil register, and income tax files. Differences-in-differences estimates accounting for voter fixed effects reveal sizable effects of marital status and children on voter participation. Impact estimates are significantly different across genders and are not explained by socio-economic characteristics. To show that changes in voter participation do not predate changes in family structure, we use an event-study approach that is rare in micro-econometric studies of voter turnout. Lastly, we explore possible mechanisms using pooled cross-sectional data from the Italian National Election Studies and the ISTAT Aspects of Daily Life surveys. Our results shed new light on the importance of life-course transitions and their gender-heterogeneous effects as key drivers of voter turnout.