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The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 arose during the presidential primary process and spring elections for states across the U.S. One of the consequences of the pandemic on election administration was th...

The use of vote by mail was an important topic during the 2020 election cycle. This election coincided with the most significant public health crisis in the United States in a century, combined wit...

It has long been noted that electing members of the U.S. House of Representatives in single-member, mutually exclusive districts often leads to discrepancies between the partisanship of the elector...

Using data from a variety of public opinion sources, we explore changes in trust in the vote count. A historic gap in confidence between Democrats and Republicans has grown, caused by two reasons: (1) an unusually big increase in Democratic confidence coupled with a modest decrease in Republican confidence and (2) a pre-election trust gap that already placed Democrats more confident than Republicans. Looking at confidence that votes in one’s state were counted as intended, there is a sharp discontinuity in Republican responses at the 50% point in Trump two-party vote share. In addition, Republicans in states Trump lost were much less confident when more votes were cast by mail.

Recently, the use of vote-by-mail has been increasing in popularity, with Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii moving exclusively to mail-based election systems. While election reformers tout the various benefits of this change, what impact does mail voting have on voter confidence? I seek to answer this by by leveraging the implementation of postal voting in Washington and Colorado through the use of the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE) dataset, along with difference-in-differences design, genetic matching, Mahalanobis distance matching, and ordinal logistic regression analysis. In doing so, I demonstrate that the implementation of vote by mail causes a significant decrease in voter confidence in both states. However, this decrease appears to be temporary, disappearing after only single election cycle. These results shed light on the potential impact of recent expansions of convenience voting in the United States, while also furthering the debate around perceptions of electoral integrity in democratic systems.

In the 2018 election, the Democratic Party rode a midterm wave to win a majority in the US House of Representatives. Throughout the campaign and its aftermath, a great deal of attention has been paid to the effects of gerrymandering, sorting, and district boundaries on the outcome of House races. We assess the impact of current district boundaries on electoral outcomes, using actual election results from 2018 alongside those generated by a simulation technique that relies upon advanced geographic information systems (GIS) and principles of graph theory. We find that redistricting practices in Republican-drawn states were at least partially effective in stemming the blue wave, allowing them to hold more seats than we would otherwise expect. Finally, we demonstrate that the insulating properties of Republican redistricting efforts also impacted the makeup of state legislatures, which could impact House redistricting in 2020.

In the 2016 U.S. General Election, agents of the Russian Federation attempted to influence the election through a multi-faceted campaign, which included the spread of of fake news as well as cyber attacks on campaigns, individuals, and even electoral infrastructure. Elite reaction was swift. Unlike on most issues, however, elites in the Republican Party remain divided. Leveraging this rare and enduring intra-party disagreement in today's age of polarized parties, we are able to begin to understand how people react to conflicting elite cues that are free from usual partisan considerations. This enables us to present a theory of elite-led opinion formation that includes intra-party polarization, expanding on the current literature. We theorize that in a scenario where there is a divided party and a unified party, those who identify with the unified party will form crystallized opinions that are reflective of those held by party elites. Members of the divided party will have perceive conflicting elite cues, and form opinions that are more malleable and susceptible to change from future elite cues. We test this theory by examining the impact of salience of Russian hacking as well as different levels in elite cohesion on belief that Russian hacking actually took place heading into the 2018 election. This is carried out through a two-pronged approach, leveraging a nationally-representative online survey (N=1000) and two survey experiments. We find that different levels of elite agreement on Russian hacking, rather than the information about Russian hacking itself, caused respondents to update their perceptions of Russian hacking. This finding is particularly strong for the Republican subsample in our experiment. We also find strong evidence that supporters of Trump are resistant to information, going as far as to demonstrate the opposite effect when presented with information that directly contradicts the President's position. Furthermore, we find similar results regarding elite influence on opinion for trade policy, a much less salient issue in comparison to Russian hacking. In doing so, we not only provide new evidence on the impact of disourse around Russian hacking, but add to a growing literature on elite discourse to include intra-party discourse and attachment to groups of the elites within a single party.