Suchergebnisse

Ballot roll-off is an issue that continues to plague American society, leaving thousands of ballots incomplete every election cycle. In my research, I investigate what influences the likelihood of voters rolling off on three ballot measures in the 2020 Mississippi elections. I hypothesize that educational attainment and newspaper coverage in voters' counties will have an impact on ballot roll-off. I observe previous research on the influences of ballot roll-off, and I combine the data I collected for voter turnout in Mississippi in 2020 and newspaper coverage of ballot measures from six sources to evaluate the influence of each of these factors individually and as variables in a regression analysis. My research finds that educational attainment is a better predictor of ballot roll-off than newspaper coverage. In my discussion and conclusion, I examine what these results mean for roll-off on ballot measures in Mississippi and the possible limitations of my research.

Traditionally, the NLRB has not supported mail ballot elections for a number of reasons. As noted in Aspirus Keweenaw, 370 NLRB No. 45 (2020), manual elections provide for an added layer of security as an NLRB agent is physically present to monitor and enforce rules to ensure a fair election. They also encourage greater voter participation, with the NLRB recently finding that voter participation increases 20–30% in manual elections as compared to mail ballot elections.

This article examines the extent to which a change in the information environment affected opinion of a recent gun safety ballot initiative in Washington. Through content analysis of newspaper stories and documentation of expenditures of competing interests, the authors are able to detect a discernable shift in the information environment during the final weeks of the campaign. Support for the initiative dropped appreciably concurrent with this shift. The authors are able to show that the altered information context (a) generated the greatest change among the most politically aware respondents and (b) sustained this effect within specific partisan classifications. Although previous research investigates analogous behavioral dynamics in a variety of political settings, this analysis differs in application to ballot initiative campaigns. The authors discuss the implications of their findings in terms of direct democracy campaigns and conclude that influence of competing interests are central to the nature and outcome of the election.