WHAT IS THE PROBABILITY YOUR VOTE WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event. We computed these probabilities a week before the 2008 presidential election, using state‐by‐state election forecasts based on the latest polls. The states where a single vote was most likely to matter are New Mexico, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, where your vote had an approximate 1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome. On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election. (JEL H0)     

Identifying the barriers and challenges to voting by residents in nursing homes and assisted living settings

To ascertain the need for and to inform development of guidelines for voting in long-term care settings, we conducted a telephone survey of Philadelphia nursing (n = 31) and assisted living (n = 20) settings following the 2003 election. Substantial variability existed in procedures used for registration and voting, in staff attitudes, and in the estimated proportion of residents who voted (29%+/-28, range 0-100%). Residents who wanted to vote were unable to do so at nearly one-third of sites, largely due to procedural problems. Nearly two-thirds of facilities indicated they assessed residents' voting capacity before the election. However, methods differed and may have disenfranchised residents who were actually competent to vote. Current procedures in many facilities fail to protect voting rights. These data suggest that rights might be better protected if election officials took charge of registration, filing absentee ballot requests, ballot completion, and trained LTC facility staff on voters' rights and reasonable accommodations.     

Pre-election polling and third party candidates

I analyze voters’ incentives in responding to pre-election polls with a third party candidate. Third party supporters normally have an incentive to vote strategically in the election by voting for one of the major candidates. But these voters would vote third party if the third party candidate is doing surprisingly well in the polls. Because voters are more likely to vote third party if the third party candidate is doing well in polls, voters who like the third party candidate best have an incentive to claim they will vote third party in the polls so that more voters will ultimately vote third party in the election. The differing incentives faced during polls and elections accounts for why third party candidates do better in polls than in elections.     

The effect of voting procedures on union representation elections: The multi-union case

Public choice theorists have shown that choice of voting procedures may affect the outcome when more than two alternatives are on a ballot. The run-off election and the two-part ballot are two alternatives used in representation elections involving more than one union. A comparison of these alternatives under various voting strategies shows that the run-off election used by the NLRB results in fewer union wins if workers vote sincerely or if they engage in strategic behavior. The run-off procedure results in more union wins if workers seek to avoid their least-favored option or if they follow a second-best strategy.     

The Strong No Show Paradoxes are a common flaw in Condorcet voting correspondences

The No Show Paradox (there is a voter who would rather not vote) is known to affect every Condorcet voting function. This paper analyses two strong versions of this paradox in the context of Condorcet voting correspondences. The first says that there is a voter whose favorite candidate loses the election if she votes honestly, but gets elected if she abstains. The second says that there is a voter whose least preferred candidate gets elected if she votes honestly, but loses the election if she abstains. All Condorcet correspondences satisfying some weak domination properties are shown to be affected by these strong forms of the paradox. On the other hand, with the exception of the Simpson-Cramer Minmax and the Young rule, all the Condorcet correspondences that (to the best of our knowledge) are proposed in the literature suffer from these two paradoxes. Received: 30 November 1999/Accepted: 27 March 2000     

Voting rules and election outcomes: When does the true majority win?

Majority-in-unit (MIU) and method of majority decision (MMD) voting rules are investigated to determine their impact on the outcome of union elections. A theoretical foundation is established to explain why voters may rationally choose not to vote in these settings. Numerical simulations are employed to compute the probability that the population majority wins the election. The results for these two methods are compared to see which one is most likely to award the election to the true population majority.     

Voting in professional associations: The case of the American sociological association revisited

Who votes in ASA elections? This article examines data on voter turnout from two recent presidential contests of the American Sociological Association in an analysis of the determinants of election participation. Extending the 1981 Ridgeway and Moore study of voting dynamics in the ASA, we hypothesize that intraorganizational networks and particular demongraphic characteristics link ASA members to the discipline in a manner analogous to the way such factors operate in the national electorate. On the basis of data compiled from 1985 and 1986 ASA election returns, we find that network factors are the most salient determinants of voting behavior. We conclude that those organizational ties that effectively link members, however directly or indirectly, to the larger Association are the most predictive of propensity to vote.     

Unions,PAC contributions,and the NAFTA vote

Political action committees (PACs), especially those controlled by organized labor and business, have been shown to affect Congressional voting. We explore how PACs influenced the House of Representatives’ vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA vote is analyzed because organized labor strongly opposed the treaty while business generally supported it and because of the straight-forward voting generated by its fast-track status. Probit analysis of a unique, unpublished data set containing information about PAC and non-PAC contributions to the 1992 House election campaigns demonstrates that Representatives who depended largely on labor PACs tended to oppose NAFTA, while Representatives who derived a large proportion of their campaign contributions from business PACs tended to favor its passage.     

Unionism and voter turnout

Conventional wisdom suggests that union members and their families are more politically active, and more likely to vote, than nonmembers. This study presents, to our knowledge, the first systematic empirical examination of that conventional wisdom. Results suggest that union members are more likely than nonmembers to vote in a general election, and that union campaign efforts increase voter turnout generally. There is no evidence, however, that union family members are more likely to vote than nonmembers, or that union status affects an individual’s likelihood of voting in a primary election. The authors wish to thank Robert Perloff, Donna Sockell, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This study was partially supported by a Columbia University Graduate School of Business Faculty Research Fellowship and a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business.     

Do Absentee Voters Differ from Polling Place Voters?: New Evidence from California

In the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election 2,775,785absentee ballots were cast, representing about 30 percent ofall voters statewide. Given the number of absentee ballots andthe increasing propensity for voters in California and elsewhereto choose this voting method, we some basic questions: Who areabsentee voters, and are they different from polling place voters?To answer these questions, we fielded a statewide survey ofabsentee voters in the days before the October 7 recall election,asking respondents why they voted absentee, their partisan andideological preferences, demographic characteristics, and otherrelevant questions. We find that absentee voters do not differsignificantly from the overall state electorate in terms oftheir vote preferences, despite being older and better educated.For example, 56 percent of absentee voters in our survey voted"yes" on the recall, compared with 55 percent for the entirestate, according to official returns. Further, absentee votersfavored Arnold Schwarzenegger over Cruz Bustamante by a considerablemargin, similar to the overall election results. We found partyregistration among absentee voters to be nearly identical tostatewide partisan registration.     

When winning is the only thing: pure strategy Nash equilibria in a three-candidate spatial voting model

It is well known that there are no pure strategy Nash equilibria (PSNE) in the standard three-candidate spatial voting model when candidates maximize their share of the vote. When all that matters to the candidates is winning the election, however, we show that PSNE do exist. We provide a complete characterization of such equilibria and then extend our results to elections with an arbitrary number of candidates.     

Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysisof voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election.Twenty-two percent of voters picked "moral values" from a listof "issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, morethan selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpretedthis single data point to conclude that moral values are anascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christiangroups with turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeatin 2000 into his three million–vote margin of victoryin 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values arecritical in informing political judgments, they represent personalcharacteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far morethan any discrete political issue. First by conflating moralsand values and then by further conflating characteristics andissues, the exit poll’s "issues" list distorted our understandingof the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flawsin the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s "most importantissue" question and explore the presumed rising electoral importanceof moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelminglyselected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moralvalues item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed asa discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that itsimportance to voters has not grown over time; and that whencontrolled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues listin predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll dataalso show that the voting behavior of conservative Christiansis relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarilyresponsible for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.     

Democratically Elected Aristocracies

The article suggests a formal model of a two-tier voting procedure, which unlike traditional voting systems does not presuppose that every vote counts the same. In deciding a particular issue voters are called in the first round to assign categories of their fellow-citizens with differential voting power (or weights) according to the special position or concern individuals are perceived to have with regard to that issue. In the second stage, voters vote on the issue itself according to their substantive view and their votes are counted in the light of the differential weights assigned in the first round. We analyze formal and philosophical reasons that support the model.     

Inefficient committees: small elections with three alternatives

We consider small committees which have to elect one of three alternatives using the simple plurality rule. Committee members have common, state-dependent preferences and receive imprecise private signals about the state of nature prior to the election. We are interested in whether the committee decision is efficient, that is whether the probability with which the committee elects the correct alternative is higher than the probability with which one single individual alone—on behalf of the others—would. It has been shown that there exists a unique efficient equilibrium in elections with two alternatives. We show that this result does not extend to elections with more alternatives. Multiple equilibria may exist for the same committee, and there may be both efficient and inefficient ones. Informative voting may or may not be an equilibrium. Also contrary to two-alternative elections, there exist responsive equilibria in which voters vote ‘against’ their signal. As a consequence, only two alternatives receive positive expected vote shares and the outcome is inefficient.     

Policy convergence under approval and plurality voting: the role of policy commitment

Proponents of Approval Voting argue that this electoral rule leads to more centrist outcomes compared to Plurality Voting. This claim has been substantiated by scholarly work using spatial models of political competition. We revisit this issue in the context of a model of political competition in which (1) candidates are policy-motivated; (2) candidacy decisions are endogenous; and (3) candidates can credibly commit to implementing any policy. Under these assumptions we find the opposite to be true – Plurality Voting yields convergence to the median voter’s ideal policy but Approval Voting may not. We argue that this result is driven by the differential incentives for candidate entry under the two voting rules. Our results suggest that whether Approval Voting yields more centrist outcomes vis-á-vis Plurality Voting depends on the possibility of policy commitment on the part of the candidates. In an election held under PV each citizen is given one vote he can cast for one (and only one) candidate, and the candidate who gets the most votes wins the election.     

LITTLE WHITE LIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCE MODELS CORRELATED RESPONSE ERRORS IN A PANEL STUDY OF VOTING

One interpretation for the common survey finding that the backgroundcharacteristics of vote overreporters resemble those of actualvoters is that misreporters usually vote. This hypothesis—thatmisreporters regularly voted in earlier elections—is testedwith data from the 1972–74–76 Michigan ElectionPanel. It receives no support: the 1972 and 1974 validated turnoutof the 1976 misreporters was very low. Moreover, misreportingwas a fairly stable respondent characteristic: misreportingabout an election in one interview was correlated with misreportingabout the remaining elections in each of the other two interviews.A comparison of regressions predicting turnout using the validatedreports versus the self-reports shows that the respondent errorscan distort conclusions about the correlates of voting. Forexample, controlling for three other variables, education wasrelated to self-reported voting but not to validated voting.Here, as well as in surveys of other socially desirable or undesirableissues, respondent self-reports may bias survey data in favorof commonsense models of the world.     

A law of large numbers for weighted plurality

Consider an election between $k$ candidates in which each voter votes randomly (but not necessarily independently) for a single candidate, and suppose that there is a single candidate that every voter prefers (in the sense that each voter is more likely to vote for this special candidate than any other candidate). Suppose we have a voting rule that takes all of the votes and produces a single outcome and suppose that each individual voter has little effect on the outcome of the voting rule. If the voting rule is a weighted plurality, then we show that with high probability, the preferred candidate will win the election. Conversely, we show that this statement fails for all other reasonable voting rules. This result is an extension of one by Häggström, Kalai and Mossel, who proved the above in the case $k=2$ .     

Voting to belong: the inevitability of systemic Islamophobia

In this article, I connect Muslim American voting practices to the ‘good Muslim’ trope. Tracing participation of members of Islamic Representative Organizations (IRO’s) in election cycles from 2000 to 2016, I argue that elections have been a site for Muslim Americans to negotiate a sense of belonging in the U.S. My research reveals deep cynicism about the transformative potential of elections and a sense that systemic Islamophobia (i.e. militarism and surveillance) were perceived as inevitable. IRO members opted instead to vote as a way to articulate the presence of Muslims in the U.S.; for instance, Muslims ought to ‘make a statement’ by voting against Donald Trump or for the first woman candidate. In this way, voting can be understood as an articulation of a ‘good Muslim’ subjectivity through which IRO members seek legitimacy within, rather than a dismantling of, an Islamophobic milieu.     

Ballot Design and Unrecorded Votes on Paper-Based Ballots

The 2000 presidential election focused attention on the problemof unrecorded votes, in which a person casts a ballot but failsto record a valid vote for a particular contest. Although muchrecent research has evaluated voting technologies and theireffects on unrecorded votes, there has been little researchon the effects of ballot design. We argue that the same theoriesused to design and evaluate self-administered surveys can beused to analyze ballot features. We collect and code paper-basedballots used in the 2002 general election from 250 countiesin 5 states. We code the ballots in terms of several graphicdesign elements, including the content and location of ballotinstructions and the layout of candidate names and office titles.Our analysis suggests that several ballot features are associatedwith unrecorded votes (both overvotes and undervotes) in thegubernatorial contests. We also find that ballot design featuresexacerbate the racial disparity in unrecorded votes. Ballotdesign can be an important factor in determining whether votersare able to cast a ballot accurately, which can influence thelegitimacy of elections.     

Race,Religiosity, and the Women's Vote

Abstract

Much of our popular political discourse focuses on the Democratic character of the women's vote, but there is, in fact, considerable diversity among female voters. Important sectors of the female electorate have political concerns that are at odds with the Democratic Party, though they hold these preferences less strongly than do men. This article focuses on these differences between women and links them to electoral behavior in the 1996 presidential election. I argue that women, like men, cast their vote with the party that best represents their interests, as they understand them. African American women overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party in 1996, which is consistent with theories of racial group interests, but white women diverge politically.

The main finding of this research is that religious values play a central role in white women's voting behavior, even after taking into account ideological and partisan predispositions. We see this result, I argue, because religious and secular women correctly identify the Republican Party as the repository of social conservatism and the Democratic Party as embracing social liberalism.