Latest Research from the VTP

Ballot reform is an important part of the American political process. During
the 1800’s, ballots changed drastically. At the beginning of the century, voters
wrote the names of the candidates for whom they wished to vote on a piece of paper
and put that piece of paper into the ballot box. Legislation followed that allowed
voters to cast professionally printed ballots, which opened the door to political
parties providing their supporters with pre-printed ballots to cast. Towards the close
of the century, the Australian ballot, also known as the secret ballot, was introduced

American elections are conducted using a hodge-podge of different voting technologies: paper ballots, lever machines, punch cards, optically scanned ballots, and electronic machines. And the technologies we use change frequently. Over the last two decades, counties have moved away from paper ballots and lever machines and toward optically scanned ballots and electronic machines. The changes have not occurred from a concerted initiative, but from local experimentation. Some local governments have even opted to go back to the older methods of paper and levers.

We present a “modular voting architecture” in which “vote generation” is performed
separately from “vote casting.”

Does ballot design “matter”? Does the design of ballots influence how voters cast their ballots, and thereby affect the outcome of an election? Anecdotal evidence indicates that ballot design may be a very important factor in American elections. Probably the most well-known ballot design question is the now infamous “butterfly” ballot design, from the 2000 Florida election.

In this study we examine over- and undervotes from the November 2000 General Election in Los Angeles County. Los Angeles County is the nation's largest election jurisdiction and it used a punchcard voting system in that election. We use precincts as our unit of analysis and merge the 2000 election data with census data and voter registration data; our dataset allows us to examine all of the countywide races in 2000 (including candidate and ballot measures).