How did absentee voting affect the 2020 U.S. election?

Yoder, Jesse; Handan-Nader, Cassandra; Myers, Andrew C.; Nowacki, Tobias; Thompson, Daniel M.; Wu, Jennifer A.; Yorgason, Chenoa; Hall, Andrew B.

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abk1755

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…The techniques proposed in this paper identify all stillpossible winners of a RCV election but do not assign probabilities to their chances of winning. We are considering extending our work with a predictive model of absentee ballots that takes into account the different demographics of voters opting to vote absentee (Plescia, Sevi, and Blais 2021;Yoder et al 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Possible Winners in Ranked Choice Voting Elections with Outstanding Ballots

Jelvani

Marian

2022

HCOMP

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Several election districts in the US have recently moved to ranked-choice voting (RCV) to decide the results of local elections. RCV allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds, eliminating one candidate at a time. RCV ensures fairer elections and has been shown to increase elected representation of women and people of color. A main drawback of RCV is that the round-by-round process requires all the ballots to be tallied before the results of an election can be calculated. With increasingly large portions of ballots coming from absentee voters, RCV election outcomes are not always apparent on election night, and can take several weeks to be published, leading to a loss of trust in the electoral process from the public. In this paper, we present an algorithm for efficiently computing possible winners of RCV elections from partially known ballots and evaluate it on data from the recent New York City Primary elections. We show that our techniques allow to significantly narrow down the field of possible election winners, and in some case identify the winner as soon as election night despite a number of yet-unaccounted absentee ballots, providing more transparency in the electoral process.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Possible Winners in Ranked Choice Voting Elections with Outstanding Ballots

Jelvani

Marian

2022

HCOMP

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“…A core finding of this empirical work is that factors that make voting in general, or a specific method of voting in particular, more costly reduce turnout or the use of that method. For example, polling places that are harder to locate (Brady and McNulty 2011) or rules that make mail ballots harder to obtain (Yoder et al, 2021) reduce overall turnout and mail voting respectively. In some cases, interventions that reduce the costs of voting, for example by providing information about how to convert to mail balloting (Monroe and Sylvester 2011), can increase both overall participation and the use of specific means of voting.…”

Section: Theoretical Motivation and Prior Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Health Risks and Voting: Emphasizing Safety Measures Taken to Prevent COVID-19 Does Not Increase Willingness to Vote in Person

Bokemper¹,

Huber

Gerber

2023

American Politics Research

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The COVID-19 pandemic made salient the risks posed by an infectious disease at a polling place. To what degree did such health risks, as with other changes to voting costs, affect the willingness to vote in person? Could highlighting safety measures reduce the association between COVID fears and unwillingness to vote in person? Using both a representative survey of Connecticut voters and a survey experiment, we examine whether concerns about health diminish willingness to vote in person. We find correlational evidence that those who are more worried about COVID-19 are less likely to report they will vote in person, even when considering risk mitigation efforts. We then present causal evidence that mentioning the safety measures being taken does little to offset the negative effect of priming COVID-19 risk on willingness to vote in person. These results contribute to a growing literature that assesses how health risks affect in person voting.

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“…Concerns regarding the safety of having citizens congregate in polling places for extended periods of time led states to make a variety of changes to their election-administration procedures—most notably, allowing more citizens to vote early or by mail with fewer restrictions. Partisan differences in concern about the COVID-19 pandemic ( 35 , 36 ) led more Democratic voters to take advantage of these accommodations, substituting in-person Election Day voting with early or mail-in voting [there is little evidence that the effects of such accommodations extended beyond this form of substitution ( 37 )], with Republican elites claiming that they provided ample new opportunities for voter fraud.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election

Green

Hobbs

McCabe

et al. 2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Following the 2020 general election, Republican elected officials, including then-President Donald Trump, promoted conspiracy theories claiming that Joe Biden’s close victory in Georgia was fraudulent. Such conspiratorial claims could implicate participation in the Georgia Senate runoff election in different ways—signaling that voting doesn’t matter, distracting from ongoing campaigns, stoking political anger at out-partisans, or providing rationalizations for (lack of) enthusiasm for voting during a transfer of power. Here, we evaluate the possibility of any on-average relationship with turnout by combining behavioral measures of engagement with election conspiracies online and administrative data on voter turnout for 40,000 Twitter users registered to vote in Georgia. We find small, limited associations. Liking or sharing messages opposed to conspiracy theories was associated with higher turnout than expected in the runoff election, and those who liked or shared tweets promoting fraud-related conspiracy theories were slightly less likely to vote.

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How did absentee voting affect the 2020 U.S. election?

Abstract: This study finds that no-excuse absentee voting policies did not meaningfully increase turnout in the 2020 U.S. election.

Cited by 21 publications

References 34 publications

Identifying Possible Winners in Ranked Choice Voting Elections with Outstanding Ballots

Identifying Possible Winners in Ranked Choice Voting Elections with Outstanding Ballots

Health Risks and Voting: Emphasizing Safety Measures Taken to Prevent COVID-19 Does Not Increase Willingness to Vote in Person

Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election

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