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Answers David Lublin's critique of a paper on majority-minority voting district in the United States. Debate over race and redistricting; Latino voters and minority representation; Substantive representation; Equal opportunity and the election of minorities; State-level analysis; current black equal opportunity.

In recent years, several writers have identified marital status as a potentially important line of political cleavage, observing that singles are more likely to vote: Democratic than married voters are. Changes in both the structure of American families and in the salience of "family politics" in the policy arena suggest increased attention to the political consequences of marital status and family life-style. This paper contributes to advancing theory concerning the relationship between family life and politics, and empirically evaluating several competing hypotheses concerning the so-called marriage gap in the 1972 through 1988 presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the application of cumulative voting in Texas, where four out of five cumulative voting systems in the U.S. are located. Cumulative voting in a multi-seat election allows voters to express the intensity of their preference by casting more than one vote for their preferred candidate. A major criticism of cumulative voting has been its alleged complexity. Cumulative voting expands the range of options that voters have in casting their votes, but its critics allege that this will be a source of voter confusion. The ballot in each of the Texas elections studied was a straightforward paper ballot on which each candidate's name was preceded by a number of boxes equal to the number of votes that could be cast. Cumulative voting was being used for the first time in eight of the jurisdictions studied, and it is possible that the voters in these jurisdiction were less likely to understand the option to cumulate than would be voters in jurisdictions in which the system had been used previously.

In this article, the author comments on the researcher Charles S. Bullock's remarks over his research paper "Multivariate Methods in the Analysis of Racially Polarized Voting: Pitfalls in the Use of Social Science by the Courts." The author says that Bullock omits from his discussion the key legal argument for why it is sensible to focus on bivariate rather than multivariate analysis of voting patterns in cases involving challenges brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In amending Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, U.S. Congress sought to return to an effects-based standard of vote dilution. In the Supreme Court's operationalization of that standard in Thornburg the first question to be answered re bloc voting is whether or not voting under the challenged at-large plan is such that "members of different races vote in bloc for different candidates. Moreover, the author is not aware of any case decided since Thornburg in which multivariate methods have been accepted in preference to bivariate ones.

The article focuses on issues related to voter registration and voting in the U.S. Of the decisions the potential voter must make, one may indeed be whether to participate in the presidential election. More often, however, the potential voter must decide whether to vote in mayoral, city council, or other local elections. Though these latter races are far more common than the selection of a president, the great bulk of electoral research has used presidential elections as the focal point. And this overemphasis is substantially magnified in voting behavior texts, which consistently disregard elections below the national level. This lack of attention to local elections would not constitute a serious problem if it could be convincingly demonstrated that one can generalize from the national to the local level. There are strong reason to believe that the findings of national studies are often inapplicable to local voting behavior. This paper focuses on one area of significant difference between national and municipal voting, the influence of registration on turnout.

The Electoral College is a uniquely American political institution, yet its impact on both the power of the American states and the relative power of citizens living in different states is not well understood. Game theorists have broached the state power problem exclusively in terms of the size of each of the states. Empirical investigators have been less systematic, basing their analyses solely on which states have been close in a single election. In this paper we present a model of state power which combines the idea of the pivotal player from game theory with an empirical model of state voting. In doing so we provide a theoretically derived and empirically meaningful assessment of state power in presidential elections. We then trace the implications of the power of the states for the relative power of individual voters, finding large disparities between voters from different states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the effect of candidate demographic characteristics on voting behavior in the United States. Operation of candidate gender as a social information cue; Electoral performance of women candidates relative to liberals and conservatives.

This paper examines the level of protest activity by the unemployed in the United States between 1890 and 1940 as a test of the value of a political process model for explaining social movement activity. Data on protest events and elite attitudes towards the unemployed were collected from newspaper articles. Voting behavior was used as an indicator of contested elections and unemployment levels were reflected by available indicators. Consistent with previous research on lower- and working-class mobilization, a change in the political environment was key to the extensive protest by the unemployed in the 1930s. Toward the end of the 1920s, and especially in the early 1930s, elites were no longer simply making public statements about the problem of unemployment, but were also discussing the need for aid programs. In the context of this new political environment elections were once again contested in the 1930s, and extensive protest began in 1930, even before unemployment hit its high point in 1933. Thus, it was not simply deprivation, but the changed political environment which legitimized the issue of unemployment and created prospects for reform, which in turn helped produce the massive protest of the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a methodology for consistently estimating the relative weights in senator utility functions, despite the fact that senator ideologies are unobserved. The empirical results suggest that voter preferences are assigned only one quarter of the weight in senator utility functions. The national ‘party line’ also has some influence, but the senator's own ideology is the primary determinant of roll-call voting patterns. These results cast doubt on the empirical relevance of the median voter theorem. Estimation of the model requires only roll-call voting data, making it widely applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model of the political economy of tax-setting in a multijurisdictional world, where voters' chokes and incumbent behavior are determined simultaneously. Voters are assumed to make comparisons between jurisdictions to overcome political agency problems. This forces incumbents into a (yardstick) competition in which they care about what other incumbents are doing. We provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence using U.S. state data from 1960 to 1988. The results are encouraging to the view that vote-seeking and tax-setting are tied together through the nexus of yardstick competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interprets historical change in the U.S. Congress in terms of the simplest principal-agent model and demonstrates that profound changes in congressional voting patterns over the course of the twentieth century can be traced mainly to corresponding changes in the economic interests of their constituents. Economists and political scientists have adduced a variety of explanations for why congressmen might rationally choose not to vote consistently for the interests of a majority of constituents. One fact dominates the twentieth-century American economic history which is relevant to this paper, states and regions have become economically more homogeneous.

The article discusses the economic implications of the voting cycle in the U.S. The most familiar example of cycling is perhaps the outcome of a divide-the-dollar game under majority rule. Checking for the presence of cycling is easier in the European countries since they generally have a parliamentary system in which the executive is formed out of a parliamentary majority. The cycling-redistribution hypothesis is more difficult to test on the national level in the U.S. because of the separation of executive and legislative branches. Changes in control of the U.S. House and Senate need not correspond to changes in the party of the president, and vice versa. If cycling were complete, each election would witness the defeat of the incumbent. A strong form of the cycling hypothesis implies that the fraction of elections for which the winning gubernatorial candidate belongs to a different party than the previous winner approaches 1.0. Mancur Olson has argued that differences in growth rates across countries can be explained by differences in the degree of entrenchment of interest groups. The more entrenched interest groups are, the greater the emphasis on zero-sum redistributional issues to the detriment of positive sum issues like growth.

Presents a study which discussed the economic and ideological factors in Congressional voting in the 1980 election in the U.S. General theory which economists generally use to study political phenomena; Basic model used to study Congressional voting; Reason for the changes that occurred in the 1980 election.

Reveals the preferences of consumer-voters and the supply response of local governments in the U.S. Overview of the Tiebout model or the median voter model; List of the normative properties of the lobbying model; Description of data used to test the model; Effects of citizen lobbying efforts on the decision of municipal officials.

The article focuses on a microanalysis of voting on a local school election in the U.S. In recent years, empirical studies of local school finance have relied to a large extent on the median voter and related models, tested with data aggregated to the precinct, school district, or local level. While there are advantages to using aggregated data, the limited availability of data on the distribution of income, property tax payments and other variables, as well as the possibility of bias associated with the grouping of households into aggregated units, suggest some important disadvantages. The paper attempts to analyze the demand for local public education using individual household data obtained through a survey of voters in two local school elections in a Detroit suburb. In one section a model of voting in a school election is presented. The model assumes that individual voters determine their desired level of educational expenditures per pupil by maximizing a utility function subject to a budget constraint. In the second section, the model variables and estimates of the model parameters are presented and discussed. In the third section, the outcome of the two local elections is analyzed.

Presents a study on whether voting participation for third parties in presidential elections can be explained by a rational voter model. Definition of voting participation rate; Information on the empirical model used in the study; Effect of unemployment on voting; Implications of the rational model to thir party voting; Conclusions.

In 23 American states, citizens can initiate and approve laws by popular vote; in the other 27 states, laws can be proposed only by elected representatives. This paper compares the fiscal behavior of state and local governments over the last 30 years under these two institutional arrangements. The main finding is that spending is significantly lower, on the order of 4 percent, in states with voter initiatives than in pure representative states. It is also found that local spending is higher and state spending is lower in initiative states. On the revenue side, initiative states rely less on broad-based taxes and more on charges tied to services. Taken together, the evidence indicates that the initiative leads to a reduction in the overall size of the government sector and suggests that it causes a decline in the level of redistributional activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probes the process by which the foreign policy orientation of weak nations comes to reflect the preferences of more powerful nations. Two general conceptions of the nature of this process are identified. The most common view, that of the bargaining model, regards the policymaking process of weak states as relatively autonomous though influenced by reward/punishment actions of a more powerful nation which condition the weaker partner. By contrast, the dependency model stresses the long-term character of the influence and the indirect path by which it occurs. It regards the decisionmaking process as imbedded in a social/political structure which is itself distorted by the dependency relationship. Both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal analysis relying upon UN voting data and measures of the relations between the United States and 88 less-developed nations indicate that the explanatory power of the bargaining model is relatively limited and that the dependency model is a more appropriate conception. Though cross-sectionally, both reward behavior (various forms of aid) and dependency-indicating transactions (e.g. treaties, trade, arms sales, IGO memberships, consultations, etc.) exhibit correlations with voting behavior, those of the latter are generally considerably stronger. Further, longitudinal analysis exposes much greater stability in voting behavior over time—and much less correlation with aid-giving—than one would expect if bargaining were present. This stable pro-American behavior is precisely that which would be predicted by a theory resting upon long-term distortions implicit in an enduring and penetrating structural relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the appropriateness of the median voter hypothesis within an agenda control framework where the alternative to a proposed expenditure level is the existing level. Evidence from New York State school districts suggests that within this institutional setting the actual level of public service provision does not differ significantly from the median voter's preferred level. The evidence also suggests that demand function parameter estimates for educational expenditures are not sensitive to the assumption that the public service output level corresponds to the median voter's private equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the explicit, real time dynamic processes in which cooperation emerges in a class of binary decision mechanisms, each of which determines funding for a public project. This class includes the Voluntary Contribution and the Majority Voting mechanisms. The population is subject to "turnover" so that new individuals enter society with possibly different beliefs about the future evolution of societal behavior than their predecessors. Individuals in this society maximize their discounted expected utilities. Due to the frequent turnover, however, these expectations may not be mutually consistent. Nevertheless, we find, for each mechanism, the nonempty set of the parameters for which the behavior pattern starting from states with nonprovision is absorbed into states with full provision with probability one. Moreover, for a sufficiently large population, outcomes with full provision are absorbing states if and only if certain types of voting mechanisms are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research considers whether there is evidence of legislators' issue avoidance, or un- willingness to reveal one's position. It links, for the first time, two important areas of inquiry: legislative decision making and issue avoidance. The data describe senatorial behavior over eighteen years, involving approximately 200,000 individual voting decisions. During that time, senators were polled by CQ after each missed roll call, and asked to indicate their positions. Issue avoidance is a subset of the nonresponses to that poll. A conceptual model of voting and position taking is presented, incorporating both behaviors and intentions. It defines two kinds of issue avoidance: "proactive," deliberate avoidance at the time of the roll call, and "reactive," avoidance decided on after votes missed inadvertently. Application of the model permits inferences about intent. Proactive avoidance accounts for 12% of nonvoting during the terms' first five years. It also represents 40% of failures to reveal positions. As much as another 19% of nonvoting results in reactive avoidance. A sixth-year increase in issue avoidance is indicated, although not conclusively. The findings strongly suggest that models of legislative voting should he amended to account for both proactive and reactive avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the structure of the legislative process influences the sources of information that state legislators use to make law. A micro- and macro-level model of law making is developed which identifies three macro-level subprocesses: the development of legislation, persuasion, and the voting decision. These subprocesses are distinguished by differing needs and opportunities for a legislator to search for information. Legislators are hypothesized to use information from different sources in these different subprocesses. This hypothesis is confirmed by examination of the written information used by members of the Massachusetts, Oregon, and Indiana houses of representatives in their 1989 regular sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain better the linkages between constituency opinion and the voting records of senators. A hybrid explanation--the modified two-constituency thesis--is presented here, and the analyses provide evidence in support of the explanation. Senators' voting scores are most strongly related to the weighted position of their party's constituents. The extent to which senators' voting scores diverge from the preferences of constituents of their own party depends on the weighted positions of independents and constituents of the other party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the literature on campaigns and elections for the United States Senate by disaggregating the process that leads to the casting of votes on election day. The empirical analysis utilizes a data set on contests for Senate seats involving incumbents and challengers between 1974 and 1988. The emphases of the research are on predicting the political quality of the chalIenges, the fund-raising effort of both candidates, and the number of votes received by each candidate on election day, Special attention is paid to the role that expectations pIay in the dynamics of Senate elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The level of competition in House elections has been shown to result primarily from the quality of the challenger. In this paper. I demonstrate that the same dynamic functions in Senate elections. The quality of Senate challengers varies, and the higher the quality of a challenger the more votes he or she receives and the more likely the challenger is to defeat an incumbent. Higher quality challengers are more likely to run in states where the pool of such candidates is large; their appearance in a contest is not due to any personal or political characteristics of the incumbent. Challenger quality matters, in part, because higher levels translate into more campaign money, but quality also indicates other skills that produce additional votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the factors that influence whether a member of the United States House of Representatives runs for the Senate, including personal circumstances, the opportunity structure, and political factors. It concludes that many specific conditions do have an influence on the desire of a House member to exercise progressive ambition, but that the process of decision making is fluid and individualistic. Potential candidates not only are influenced by conditions, but have the ability to act so as to promote opportunity for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe patterns of party voting, party cohesion and party strength in the U.S. Senate from 1877 through 1986, and repIicate, for the Senate, earlier explanatory models developed for the House of Representatives. We then refine and extend these models to correct for autocorrelation and measurement problems in the replicated analysis. The new analysis demonstrates that cohesion and strength for the two parties in the Senate are driven by different forces. For Democrats, cohesion and strength have been a function of the size of the Southern Democratic contingent. For Republicans, cohesion and strength are a product of membership turnover and presidential partisanship. Finally, we note the close correspondence between the overall patterns of party voting in the Senate and the House and discuss potential causes and implications of this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the model of congressional elections proposed by Jacobson and Kernel! has been the subject of some controversy, to date there has been no attempt to investigate one of their central claims: that potential candidates decide whether to run in the spring of the election year. This paper uses previously unanalyzed data from the Federal Election Commission to test this claim. The results suggest that most serious candidates do indeed decide by the spring, but that in 1982 and 1984 over half of serious nonincumbent candidates made their candidacy decisions before March of the election year. This suggests that models of congressional elections may have to incorporate even earlier measures of economic conditions and presidential popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an examination of the relationship between congressional structure and the phenomenon of informal groups, with emphasis upon the relevance of that relationship to the representation of constituent interests. Informal congressional groups expand the opportunity for members and for Congress collectively to be responsive to constituents. Group membership penetrates the boundaries of committees, subcommittees, parties, and occasionally, the chamber, ameliorating many of the structural constraints on effective representation. Groups play a role in collecting needed information, in placing issues on the legislative agenda and stimulating their consideration, and in mobilizing voting coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the decline of party voting in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1968 is analyzed. The levels of party voting (by Congress) are fitted to a regression line, with the results showing a high period of party voting (1890-1910), an intermediate period (1911-1940), and a low period (1941-1968). A model is developed to measure the effects on party voting of external variables-party homogeneity, party conflict, presidential partisanship, and turnover; and internal variables-centralized leadership and mucus strength. Both types of variables are shown to have some effect, but external-and particularly electoral-variables are more important. Since these variables are culled from contemporary research, the results demonstrate that contemporary hypotheses and findings regarding legislative parties are generalizable over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the voting behavior of freshmen Congressmen of the United States. The writers on Congress have commented on the special position occupied by the freshman Senator or Representative. The freshman Congressman, they suggest, is baffled and handicapped by the rules of procedure, more subject to the social lobby, forbidden by powerful custom from speaking freely, easily controllable through party discipline by the apportionment of committee assignments, and so forth. There have been suggestions that the first-term Representative may be more subject to party discipline, but no systematic analysis has been employed to verify or disprove the proposition. That some practicing politicians believe such a difference does exist. This paper is an attempt to determine whether freshman status had a significant influence upon voting in the House of Representatives on major policy questions during the Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Congresses.

In his article "Efficiency Aspects of Local School Finance," Barlow (1970) attempts to compare empirically an actual level of schooling with the optimal one. His basic premise is that individuals (or households) are private maximizers in their voting behavior. A household will vote in favor of a higher tax if its valuation of the extra return exceeds the tax increase on it. Barlow's work, in my view, is an important contribution to positive political economy, particularly in providing actual measurements in an area where measurement is scarce and difficult. The objective of this paper is to examine critically and then to modify, within the framework and data employed by Barlow, one of the crucial assumptions; this leads to a reversal of most of his major results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has three related purposes: 1) to summarize the general characteristics of Open Market Committee voting over the decade from 1955-1964. 2) to illustrate in one area of economic decision-making some useful concepts and techniques from political science, and 3) to explore various hypotheses to explain these voting characteristics, especially the very high rate of unanimity in decisions.
Perhaps the most significant conclusion that may be drawn from the 1955-64 Open Market Committee voting records is that the committee is not nearly so monolithic as is sometimes asserted.[25] On the other hand, the wide range of voting outcomes in the nonunanimous decisions suggests that neither are there very rigid coalitional alignments, except of a sort inconsequential to the determination of outcomes.[26] If the committee is neither a monolith nor a set of stable factions, then its actions may be explicable only with the aid of a fairly complex model. The overwhelming tendency of economists has probably been to regard the entire committee as a behavioral unit which is consistently myopic and inflation-phobic and which somehow systematically makes questionable decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the first proportional representation election in Cincinnati, Ohio. In November, 1925 the City of Cincinnati elected a city council of nine members through the use of proportional representation. The Hare plan of single transferable vote was used and the entire city constituted a single election district. In this respect, the vote in Cincinnati was notable as it occurred in the largest district in U.S. employing this method. In Cleveland, the only other large American city voting in this manner, four election areas have been established. This type of election is frankly an experiment. Just now, a movement for a wider adoption of the plan seems to be in the ascendancy in U.S. Its success or failure in Ohio should have an important bearing on this issue. For this reason, an analysis of the result of the first vote in Cincinnati may be timely. The idea of a council truly representative is new; people's experience has been with government by majority.

The article attempts to assess response error in vote reports in the 1964 election study carried out by the Survey Research Center (SRC) of the University of Michigan, by comparing estimates of voter turnout and partisan division of the vote with Census Bureau data and official voting tallies. The article is concern with the validity of a survey datum falling under the heading of private business. In the election studies conducted by the University of Michigan SRC, a consistent pattern has emerged in the sample estimates of voter turnout and the partisan division of the vote. Estimates of turnout have consistently exceeded the population figures by about 12 to 13 percent. The consistency, as well as the magnitude, of the overreport suggests that the sample-population differences are not due solely to sampling error. The discrepancy between the official estimate of turnout and the SRC estimate for the 1964 election is not greatly different from that observed in previous studies. In the 1964 study, 77.7 percent of the respondents reported a vote for President whereas 62.8 percent is of the official turnout calculated on the population of civilians of voting age. This is a difference of nearly 15 percent, slightly greater than the 12 to 13 percent observed in previous studies.

This article contains a compilation, topically arranged, of poll results in the U.S., released by the American Institute of Public Opinion, Fortune, British Institute of Public Opinion, Canadian Institute of Public Opinion, Australian Public Opinion Poll, National Opinion Research Center, and by the Office of Public Opinion Research. Questions covered the period from June 1944 through August 1944. Date lines after each question indicate the date of release and not necessarily the date on which questions were asked. In considering these poll data, the reader should bear in mind certain salient points of reference set forth in the March 1940 issue of the periodical "Public Opinion Quarterly." The poll results include a variety of questions related to socio-economic conditions of the nation. Stress was made on the factors that may influence voting patterns. The poll was pan-U.S. and included Canada and Australia among other nations. There was an overwhelming response to the poll survey.

This article presents information on the concerns of the U.S. Congress for the voting machines. These concerns have fueled movements to pass legislation in many states and in the U.S. Congress that would require a paper recording of every vote. However, early experiments indicate that the Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, designed to do this for direct recording electronic voting machines adds complexity to the tasks that voters, poll workers, and officials perform--increasing confusion and even possibilities for error. Proving program correctness is theoretically unsolvable. Testing large circuits or programs is accomplished by testing them in pieces and for all possible input scenarios. New methodologies for improving code quality, such as extreme programming in which small teams work intensively on component modules, institutionalize good practices of incremental testing. In addition, this technique inherently reduces the ability of any one person to have access to the entire code.

Canonical rational choice models of voter preferences assume that voters select candidates whose policy positions most closely match their own. Yet, much of the electorate often appears to prioritize identity variables (e.g., social categories, group membership) over policy considerations. Here, we report an empirical test of policy-identity interactions using surveys of likely voters conducted in the 24 hours before the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2018 United States senatorial elections. Each respondent indicated not only their policy preferences but also key social group identities and how those identities would be reinforced by voting. We observed striking evidence for a competition between policy and social group identification: For voters who exhibited the maximal effects of identity, policy positions were essentially irrelevant to their candidate preferences. These results account for dissociations between voters' stated policy preferences and their voting behavior, while linking empirical observations of political behavior to new models derived from psychology and neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When did ideology become the major fault line of the California Supreme Court? To answer this question, we use a two-parameter item response theory (IRT) model to identify voting patterns in non-unanimous decisions by California Supreme Court justices from 1910 to 2011. The model shows that voting on the court became polarized on recognizably partisan lines beginning in the mid-1900s. Justices usually did not vote in a pattern that matched their political reputations and party affiliation during the first half of the century. This began to change in the 1950s. After 1959 the dominant voting pattern is partisan and closely aligns with each justice's political reputation. Our findings after 1959 largely confirm the conventional wisdom that voting on the modern court is on political lines. But our findings call into question the usual characterization of the Lucas court (1987-1996) as a moderately conservative court. Our model shows that the conservatives dominated the Lucas court to the same degree the liberals dominated the Traynor court (1964-1970). More broadly, this Article confirms that an important development occurred in American law at the turn of the half-century. A previous study used the same model to identify voting patterns on the New York Court of Appeals from 1900 to 1941 and to investigate whether those voting patterns were best explained by the justices' political reputations. That study found consistently patterned voting for most of the 40 years. But the dominant dimension of disagreement on the court for much of the period was not political in the usual sense of that term. Our finding that the dominant voting pattern on the California Supreme Court was non-political in the first half of the 1900s parallels the New York study's findings for the period before 1941. Carrying the voting pattern analysis forward in time, this Article finds that in the mid-1900s the dominant voting pattern became aligned with the justices' political reputations due to a change in the voting pattern in criminal law and tort cases that dominated the court's docket. Together, these two studies provide empirical evidence that judicial decision-making changed in the United States in the mid-1900s as judges divided into ideological camps on a broad swath of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical evolution of technology used in voting. In colonial New England people voted by dropping beans into jars. U.S. Presidential elections during the early 18th century used ballots prepared by partisans and the balloting was not private, defects remedied in 1888 by the introduction of the Australian ballot. Mechanical voting machines appeared near the turn of the 20th century, and punched-card systems debuted in the 1960s. By 2000 computerized systems had gained some currency. History shows that few technologies have been immune to either malfunctions or suspicions of fraud.

Background: Librarians teach evidence-based medicine (EBM) and information-seeking principles in undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate medical education. These curricula are informed by medical education standards, medical education competencies, information literacy frameworks, and background literature on EBM and teaching. As this multidimensional body of knowledge evolves, librarians must adapt their teaching and involvement with medical education. Identifying explicit connections between the information literacy discipline and the field of medical education requires ongoing attention to multiple guideposts but offers the potential to leverage information literacy skills in the larger health sciences education sphere. Methods: A subgroup of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries Competency-Based Medical Education Task Force cross-referenced medical education documents (Core Entrustable Professional Activities and 2017--2018 Liaison Committee on Medical Education Functions and Structures of a Medical School) with the Association of College & Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education using nominal group technique. Results: In addition to serving as a vocabulary, the map can also be used to identify gaps between and opportunities for enhancing the scholarly expectations of undergraduate and graduate medical education standards and the building blocks of information literacy education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]