Convenience Voting

A number of recent studies examine how confident voters are that their ballots are counted as
intended in U.S. federal elections from 2000 to 2004. One consistent finding of these studies is
that, relative to Democrats, Republican voters tend to be more confident that their ballots are
counted correctly. However, it is also the case that in terms of the national outcomes of the 2000
and 2004 elections, Republicans were victorious. Additionally, research suggests that in the
2004 election voters who cast a paper ballot are more confident relative to those who vote using

Several countries have conducted Internet voting trials in binding public elections over the past decade, including Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These trials have been conducted at the local and regional levels of government, targeting specific populations of voters. However, Estonia—a former Soviet republic and now a full member of the European Union—has advanced the farthest in deploying Internet voting. Since 2000, Estonia has conducted two national elections in which all voters could use Internet voting.

We introduce the notion of preliminary voting, or pre-voting, wherein a voter deposits—perhaps over the Internet—a preliminary vote or prevote with election authorities at some time before the close of elections. Prevotes are not official votes, and need not be kept private; indeed, election officials might, as a matter of announced policy, publish the list of received prevotes together with the names of the voters submitting such prevotes.

Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. While there has been some research focused on who votes by absentee ballot, little research has considered another important question about absentee voting: Which absentee ballots are counted, and which are not? Research following the 2000 presidential election has studied the problem of uncounted ballots for precinct voters, but not for absentee voters.