Suchergebnisse

The special Senate election in Oregon, held during January 1996, was the first time in which a federal election was held using a vote-by-mail format. The purpose of this survey was to address most of the relevant issues and concerns involving vote-by-mail elections and to provide an assessment of this electoral method at a crucial time in the political process.

Election administrators & public officials often consider changes in electoral laws, hoping that these changes will increase voter turnout & make the electorate more reflective of the voting-age population. The most recent of these innovations is voting-by-mail (VBM), a procedure by which ballots are sent to an address for every registered voter. Over the last 2 decades, VBM has spread across the US, unaccompanied by much empirical evaluation of its impact on either voter turnout or the stratification of the electorate. In this study, we fill this gap in our knowledge by assessing the impact of VBM in one state, OR. We carry out this assessment at the individual level, using data over a range of elections. We argue that VBM does increase voter turnout in the long run, primarily by making it easier for current voters to continue to participate, rather than by mobilizing nonvoters into the electorate. These effects, however, are not uniform across all groups in the electorate. Although VBM in OR does not exert any influence on the partisan composition of the electorate, VBM increases, rather than diminishes, the resource stratification of the electorate. Contrary to the expectations of many reformers, VBM advantages the resource- rich by keeping them in the electorate, & VBM does little to change the behavior of the resource-poor. In short, VBM increases turnout, but it does so without making the electorate more descriptively representative of the voting-age population. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 35 References. Adapted from the source document.

In the last few years policy innovators have implemented a variety of new voting reforms aimed at increasing the ways voters can cast their ballot and with it voter turnout. While these efforts have largely suggested that the net effect of these reforms has been minimal, scholars have not analyzed the effectiveness of the use of these methods by partisan campaigns to increase targeted turnout or to change the methods voters use to cast their ballot. In collaboration with a state party organization, I examine the effect of a partisan get-out-the-vote effort using an absentee vote-by-mail push. I find that these get-out-the-vote efforts to target voters using absentee ballot request forms are effective at shifting more voters to vote absentee. However, while pushing absentee vote-by-mail balloting may bank votes for a campaign before Election Day, the overall effect of partisan campaigns' use of absentee ballot efforts to increase turnout appears limited.

AbstractObjectiveIn this article,I ask whether the adoption of vote‐by‐mail (VBM) has resulted in the promised cost reductions. Additionally, I examine the overall determinants of election administration expenditures after the implementation of VBM.MethodsUsing Colorado as a case study, I use county level expenditures to determine the effects of institutional change on election administration finance, as well as other institutional and socio‐demographic determinants on costs.ResultsI find that adopting all‐VBM elections significantly reduced expenditures. Additionally, I find that after VBM was implemented, the primary institutional determinants of expenditures are the proportion of mail‐in ballots received, as well as the number of poll‐workers, and early voting sites. Finally, I find that socio‐demographic characteristics are predictive of expenditures for election administration. Counties with higher income spent less per voter in federal elections. Counties with higher proportions of Latinx voting‐aged populations spent less per voter, even when controlling for turnout.ConclusionThe results strongly indicate that moving to all‐VBM elections can help cash‐strapped counties save money. However, conversion to VBM may not guarantee that expenditures will be spent equitably.