Are Americans confident their ballots are counted?

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Publication Type Working Paper
School or College College of Social & Behavioral Science
Department Political Science
Creator Hall, Thad
Other Author Alvarez, R. Michael; Llewellyn, Morgan
Title Are Americans confident their ballots are counted?
Date 2006-07-20
Description Expanding the large literature which investigates the characteristics of citizen and voter trust in government we analyze the heretofore neglected topic of voter trust in the electoral process. In this paper, we present results from three national surveys in which we asked voters the confidence they have that their vote for president in the 2000 or 2004 election was recorded as intended. We examine voter responses using both descriptive and multivariate analyses to determine the overall level of voter confidence and then analyze the characteristics which influence the likelihood a voter is confident in their ballot being recorded accurately. Our findings show that a significant portion of the U.S. voting population does not possess confidence that their vote will be counted as intended and similar to the literature on trust in government we find political identification significantly impacts a voter's level of confidence. Contrary to the bulk of findings concerning citizen trust, we find demographic variables such as race and education significantly impact the likelihood an individual is confident their vote will be recorded as intended.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Volume 6
First Page 1
Last Page 42
Subject Election reform; Public management; Principal-Agent Theory
Subject LCSH Elections; Voting
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Alvarez, R.M., Hall, T. & Llewellyn, M. (2006). Are Americans Confident Their Ballots Are Counted? Institute of Public & International Affairs, 6, 1-42.
Series Institute of Public and International Affairs Working Papers
Rights Management (c) R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall and Morgan Llewellyn
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 326,754 Bytes
Identifier ir-main,827
ARK ark:/87278/s6wq0mzt
Setname ir_uspace
ID 703483
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6wq0mzt