Believe it or not, we are well into the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. Our research group is still working on various research products using the vast amount of data that we collected in 2020, and I’ll be writing more about those research projects here in the near future. It’s now spring quarter at Caltech, when I traditionally teach our introduction to elections and campaigns class, Political Science 120. The past few weeks, as I’ve been going back over a lot of research on election administration and technology, teaching it to the students in the class, I’ve also been reflecting quite a bit on ..read more

It’s really exciting to write that our report to the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator (NSF-CA) program, “Election Science: A Proposed NSF Convergence Accelerator” is now available. In this report, we argue that there are fourteen research challenges present critical opportunities for NSF-CA funding. This report was produced with support from the NSF-CA, and my co-authors (or in NSF lingo, co-Principal Investigators, or “PIs”) on the project are Moon Duchin (Tufts University), Gretchen Macht (University of Rhode Island) and Charles Stewart III (MIT). It was a fun and produ ..read more

Yimeng Li, Michelle Hyun, and I just posted a revised version of our paper, “Why Do Election Results Change After Election Day? The “Blue Shift” in California Elections”. In the paper, we focus our attention on data from Orange County, CA, part of our ongoing research on election integrity in California. Orange County is a very good case for research, as we have a wealth of amazing data from OC, we’ve learned a great deal about how elections are run in OC, and of course, because the Orange County Registrar of Voters, Neal Kelley, has been wonderful about working with our research group. Resear ..read more

Yes, it’s happening again. California is very likely to conduct another gubernatorial recall election, most likely sometime in the late summer or early fall. As of media reports yesterday, sufficient signatures have been collected and submitted by those backing the current recall petition to put the recall of Governor Newsom on the ballot later this year. While there is still some chance that the recall election may not happen (for example, if there is some legal or other administrative intervention, though the chances at this point of that occurring seem unlikely), there are a lot of unknowns ..read more

Our Monitoring the Election project has released two briefs, reporting on preliminary results from a national survey of registered voters conducted immediately after the November 3, 2020 Presidential Election. These two briefs provide a glimpse into how the heated rhetoric about election and voter fraud before and during the general election has been received by the American electorate. One of these briefs focuses on the general question of voter confidence in the election. We asked registered voters to answer four questions about their confidence regarding the 2020 presidential election: thei ..read more

It’s a beautiful Election Day, at least here in Southern California! A few quick morning updates. The California Secretary of State’s latest updates (as of 11/1/2020) notes that 11,161,493 vote-by-mail ballots have been returned (with 22,388,716 issued). They are reporting (as of 11/1/2020) 661,265 in-person votes cast. That’s a total of 11,822,758 ballots returned or cast. Note that the final totals on the number of votes cast in the 2016 presidential election statewide was 14,610,509. It’s quite likely that by the time all of the ballots are in that we’ll exceed the total number of ballots ..read more

Charles Stewart III The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in a half dozen battleground states, asking how voters intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves.)  This brief note focuses on Michigan. First, about the intentions themselves.  The table below shows that there was very little movement in reported intentions across the four waves of the surveys.  An ANOVA test fails to reject ..read more

Charles Stewart III   The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in a half dozen battleground states, asking how voters intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves.)  This brief note focuses on Pennsylvania First, as to the intentions themselves.  The table below shows that there was very little movement in reported intentions across the four waves of the surveys.  An ANOVA test fails to reject the ..read more

Charles Stewart III One week to go. The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in a half dozen battleground states, asking how voters intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves.)  This brief note focuses on Arizona. First, as to the intentions themselves.  The table below shows that there was very little movement in reported intentions across the first three waves of the surveys, but in the last one, there is a move ..read more

Charles Stewart III It’s just over a week before the election.  The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in half a dozen battleground states, asking the intention of registered voters about how they intend to cast their ballots.  I have previously published thoughts on North Carolina and Wisconsin, with a bonus posting about Georgia (where we are not surveying, ourselves, but have survey evidence from elsewhere.)  This brief note focuses on Florida. To summarize what follow, if we make reasonable assumptions about turnout and take the survey results as ..read more