Election-Campaign Law

Voter Confidence 2: By Mode and By Vote Choice

By Paul Gronke

I wrote a few days ago about some data we collected as part of the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), testing assumptions about “voter confidence,” a survey respondent’s perception about whether their vote will be counted accurately or not.

We wanted to test for two other patterns that have been reported in past work by Alvarez, Hall, and Llewellyn. First, are their mode effects–do voters who cast ballots at the precinct place express higher levels of confidence than those who cast a by-mail ballot or early ballot? Second, are voters who cast a ballot for the loser (in this case, John McCain) more suspicious about the validity of the count?

As shown in the graphic below, we were able to replicate “loser’s regret”: McCain voters were substantially less confident than were Obama voters. However, we found no statistically significant decline in voter confidence among those who cast an absentee ballot (although the level who express “great deal” does drop). Now that I look at this figure, I realize that I need to re-run the statistics lumping together early in person and precinct place voters. More in a few minutes …

Full post as published by Election Updates on April 21, 2009 (boomark / email).