Voting Technology Project | A joint project of Caltech and MIT

About the Voting Technology Project

Submitted by admin on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 13:41.

Established by Caltech President David Baltimore and MIT President Charles Vest in December 2000 to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election. Since establishment, members of the VTP have studied all aspects of the election process, both in the United States and abroad. VTP faculty, research affiliates, and students have written many working papers, published scores of academic articles and books, and worked on a great array of specific projects.

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The Quality of Voter Registration Records: A State-by-State Analysis

Submitted by gbain on Tue, 07/20/2010 - 08:09.

in

Featured Content

Date Published:

07/14/2010

Author(s):

Steve Ansolabehere, Harvard University

Eitan Hersh, Harvard University

Voter registration systems in the United States have long been viewed as the area of election administration most in need of improvement. Problems in this system create barriers to voting for many Americans, but they also make it dicult for administrators to communicate with voters, identify voters at the polls, and audit elections after the fact. Improving the system rst requires knowing the landscape and magnitude of potential problems. This report presents the rst comprehensive, nation-wide analysis of the quality of information stored on voter registration lists.

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Making Outsiders' Votes Count: Detecting Electoral Fraud through a Natural Experiment

Submitted by gbain on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 11:02.

Working Paper No.:

12

Date Published:

05/25/2010

Author(s):

Kentaro Fukumoto, Gakushuin University

Yusaku Horicuchi, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University

In Japan, there is a popular belief that candidates and their supporters mobilize voters outside the district: they ask outsiders to bring their registered address to the district and to vote for the candidates, even though those "new" voters may continue to live at their original address. We call this under-investigated type of electoral fraud "pre-electoral residential registration" and detect it by taking advantage of a natural experimental setting in Japanese municipal elections.

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