This article in today’s Washington Post—headlined “High Turnout, New Procedures May Mean an Election Day Mess”—reminded me of a just-published study by Michael Alvarez, Thad Hall, and Morgan Llewellyn. The title of this post is the title of their article.
In 2005 and 2006 surveys, they asked respondents, “How confident are you that your ballot in the November of 2004 presidential contest between George Bush and John Kerry was counted as you intended?” Below is the percentage of whites and blacks who said “very confident.”
There is obviously a large racial gap. Blacks are much less confident than whites.
Another noteworthy finding: among whites, Republicans are about 25 points more likely than Democrats to be “very confident,” controlling for other factors.
A third finding: those who vote in-person with a paper ballot are more confident than those voting by an other means (absentee, electronic machines, level, punch cards, etc.).
Find the article here. As for the Washington Post piece, perhaps the most important message is this one:
In Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco, registrar Stephen Weir said he too learned from the primary. A fold in the absentee ballots forced him to spend nearly two weeks ironing, by hand, about 16,000 ballots to make them flat enough to feed into vote-counting machines.
“There were two lessons learned,” he said. “Dump the fold. And the silk setting worked great.”
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That’s amusing. I’m from Contra Costa County, and I seem to vaguely remember the ballots being folded.
I’m a permanent absentee though, so who knows what happens to those ballots.
There’s no wonder there is racial gap with this. When blacks (mostly Democratic) have to go through poll-watchers (assumed to be Republican) to vote, it’s easier to understand why they believe some shenanigans will harm their vote.
This is not surprising. Given that we hear about all sorts of “dirty tricks” the Republican party is using (such as using foreclosure data to purge voter rolls in Michigan) it’s no wonder that there are racial and partisan splits on confidence.
I still don’t get why we let parties continue to have so much influence in election management. That’s not the standard we apply to other countries when monitoring their elections. Perhaps we should admit that our system is corrupt and invite the UN in to watch?
I’ve never quite known what to make of this finding.
On the one hand: shades of bitterness from 2000/2004. Understandable, and, as superdude notes, not surprising.
On the other hand, I’m always put into the frame of mind that we’re back onto a fundamental question of efficacy, and that feeling one’s vote count might have a lot to do with that. In fact, I think the really interesting question is what would these numbers look like if the electoral situation were reversed? Same participants with their psychological/political alignments, but different political outcome. I don’t know the answer, but it seems an interesting question.
Good point, Matt. Efficacy probably matters, perhaps heightened by the various media reports I noted.
There was intense disappointment after the 2004 election among Democrats, who, perhaps overly optimistically, thought they couldn’t lose, given Bush’s problems. The stakes seemed even higher, as Democrats expected to “right the wrong” of the 2000 election.
It’s perhaps easier to rationalize a tough loss than to admit one was beaten fair-and-square.
At any rate, it’s a good empirical question.
Having not read the paper, I’d think that an important variable here would be some measure of the jurisdiction. I did a survey of Illinois counties in which I tried to gauge compliance with state and national law just with respect to scrubbing voting lists, registering voters, etc. One of the more striking findings was that not all elected officials had the same understanding of the law’s requirements.
More important than this example, though, is that the professionalism and political context of counties ought to have a lot to do with people’s perceptions of the process by which they cast a ballot. And, these are surprisingly understudied variables once you discount the growing literature on ballot technology.
Frankly, I don’t think it matters one iota whether they count my ballot, because for every thinking voter there are 10 or 100 “marching morons” who believe whatever hooey they are fed on TV.
So the election will be decided by George Soros and Ted Turner, unless Ross Perot spends more money.
Democracy has become irrelevant.
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