FALL 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 1  |  | Study looks at how election administration affects voter confidence
BY RACHEL WENGER-PELOSI, '00
he 2000 presidential election had Americans sitting on the edge of their sofas until the wee hours of the morning. A television graphic of the United States flickered red and blue, with the exception of the state of Florida, which at some news stations blinked undecidedly and at others appeared void of color.
It was on this evening, and in the following days, that the electorate learned of the “hanging chad.” The chad, or the dangling paper produced when a ballot is punched incompletely, reportedly contributed to the election debacle. In the razor-close race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the hanging or dimpled chads on ballots were scrutinized.
In the wake of that election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, a comprehensive law enacted to guide states’ election reform efforts. The act inspired a massive movement to replace punch-card and lever voting machines with electronic ones. Punch cards were the most widespread method of voting in 2000, while electronic voting machines were rare at that time.
“The nation wanted to reform the way elections were conducted, to increase or at least maintain voter confidence that votes would be counted accurately. The 2000 election eroded that confidence,” says Dr. Ryan L. Claassen, assistant professor of political science. “People think, ‘If they can’t count ballots accurately enough to figure out who won, why should I bother participating?’ That was the main impetus behind the voting reform.”
Six years later, punch-card voting had been all but erased from the electoral map. In 2006, Ohio voters cast ballots using touch-screen devices, a method instituted by many states to eliminate the possibility of hanging chads. Little was known about how voters would respond to the new technology.
As problems encountered during the 2000 election shook the nation’s confidence in its electoral system, and with reforms designed to bolster voter confidence, Claassen and his colleagues undertook a study to look at ways in which the objective conditions in polling places and citizens’ experiences shape their overall confidence in the electoral system.
These and other questions are explored in “At Your Service: Voter Evaluations of Poll Worker Performance,” a study to be published in a 2008 issue of American Politics Research, co-authored by Claassen, along with David B. Magleby, Quin Monson and Kelly D. Patterson, all from Brigham Young University. The article describes the results of an exit poll sponsored by BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, as well as polls conducted locally by students from Kent State and the University of Akron.
“As political scientists, we usually ask broad questions about why people do or do not vote,” says Claassen. “In this study, the question was narrow. We focused on a policy-centric aspect of the way elections are run, looking at election administration, including the role of poll workers who are basically volunteers and who serve as ‘street-level bureaucrats.’"
One hundred precincts in Franklin and Summit counties in Ohio and 104 locations statewide in Utah (BYU) were randomly selected for study. The 50 locations in Summit County were split, with 25 each assigned to Kent State and University of Akron students. Polling locations in Franklin County were assigned to researchers at Ohio State University.
n Election Day 2006, students asked voters exiting polls to fill out a survey and respond to such questions as, “How confident are you that your vote will be counted accurately?” and “How would you compare the (new) voting system to the system that had been used previously at your polling place?”
In some instances, poll workers were concerned about the exercise and asked students to leave the premises, even though exit polling is allowed by state law.
“Which goes to show how much power volunteer poll workers have,” Claassen says. “More importantly, they can accept your ID or not accept your ID; they can give you a ballot or not give you a ballot; and they can allow you to do a provisional ballot if an error was made. Poll workers are surprisingly powerful in the way an election unfolds.”
The research uncovered that voter confidence in the two Ohio counties was highly similar, suggesting that even though different types of voting machinery were used —touch-screen or optical-scan methods — this difference was not strongly related to voters’ confidence that their vote would be counted accurately, says Claassen.
On the other hand, poll workers appear to play a more central role shaping voters’ confidence than the type of voting machine used.
Based on earlier studies supporting that notion, the Claassen survey included a series of questions designed to study the determinants of the public’s reaction to poll workers. If poll workers are an important part of predicting confidence, what factors affect positive versus negative interactions?
In general, when voters feel good about their interactions with poll workers, they feel better about their voting experience and more confident about the electoral system, the study says.
The group was pleased to find that demographics weren’t a major factor in the way voters reacted to poll workers. Although age was a significant predictor, with older people responding more positively to poll workers than younger people, race, for example, wasn’t significant, nor was income or education.
“In general, poll workers are treating people in a similar fashion, which is good news,” he says.
On average, poll workers are older people, and this shared demographic could explain the results; or, it is possible that poll workers treated older people differently from young people, Claassen says. Another explanation could be that older people are likely to have voted many times. They need the poll worker less because they are familiar with the process, as opposed to a young person who is voting for the first time.
Another finding was that the longer a voter waits in line to cast a ballot, the less happy he or she is with the poll worker.
“This is not an entirely surprising finding, but is one that has policy implications. There are things that boards of elections can do to reduce waiting time. These, in turn, can affect reactions to poll workers, which can cause voters to feel more or less confident about their votes being counted accurately,” Claassen says.
n addition to the exit poll research, graduate students went to polling locations to gather objective measures of physical conditions. Results revealed that almost none of the physical conditions of a polling place affected how voters felt about their experience.
Claassen says this feedback is striking because research shows that when a consumer goes into a store to buy something, for example, every physical aspect of the location has a bearing on feelings about customer service. Smell, appearance and the layout of the store impact customer service ratings, he says.
In terms of voting, the physical aspects of poll locations had no impact, even though the locations where people cast their ballots vary widely, from churches to schools and community centers, or even in garages, he says.
“People are pretty tolerant of physical condition variations when voting,” Claassen says. “The interaction is different in that if you are going to the store to buy a lawnmower, you feel like the store owes you an experience. But if you are going out to do your civic duty, you feel less like someone owes you. Instead, you are a participant.”
For more information, visit www.kent.edu/magazine.
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