Residual Votes in California , 1990 – 2010

This paper examines how the growth in vote-by-mail and changes in voting technologies led to changes in the residual vote rate in California from 1990 to 2010. We find that in California’s presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of optical scanning enjoyed a significant improvement in the residual vote rate. However, these findings do not always translate to other races. For instance, find that the InkaVote system in Los Angeles has been a mixed success, performing very well in presidential and gubernatorial races, fairly well for ballot propositions, and poorly in Senate races. We also conduct the first analysis of the effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the race, increased use of the mails to cast ballots is robustly associated with a rise in the residual vote rate. The effect is so strong that the rise of voting by mail in California has mostly wiped out all the reductions in residual votes that were due to improved voting technologies since the early 1990s. * This research was conducted with financial support from the James Irvine Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The views, opinions and estimates expressed in this paper are those of the authors. Voting Technology, Vote-by-Mail, and Residual Votes in California, 1990–2010 R. Michael Alvarez Dustin Beckett (California Institute of Technology) Charles Stewart III (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Draft of May 5, 2011 A decade ago, the nation became aware that voting machines are not simple ciphers through which voters cast their ballots. Palm Beach County, Florida provided the best illustration of how machine malfunction — exemplified by “hanging” and “pregnant” chad — and poor ballot design — exemplified by the “butterfly ballot” — could result in a vote being miscounted, if counted at all (e.g., Sinclair et al. 2000; Smith 2002; Wand et al. 2001). The Florida fiasco resulted in a strong public demand for improved voting technology, and led to a flurry of new research into the causes of “lost votes” due to voting technologies. Within political science, this research has focused on explaining the residual vote rate in presidential elections as a function of the type of voting technology used by voters. (The residual vote rate is the percentage of ballots cast that either contain an overor undervote for a particular race.) Making this research particularly important was the simultaneous emergence of public demand for improved voting technology to reduce the residual vote rate. This was made explicit by the Help America Vote Act which mandated retirement of older technologies and resulted in billions of state and federal dollars being spent to retire old voting machines. 1 For example, Alvarez et al. 2005; Ansolabehere 2002; Ansolabehere and Stewart 2005; Stewart 2006; Kimball and Kropf 2008; Sinclair and Alvarez 2004; Tomz and Van Houweling 2003. See Stewart (2011) for a review of research on voting technology in general.