Voting Technology, Vote-by-Mail, and Residual Votes in California, 1990–2010

• Author: Dustin Beckett,Charles Stewart,R. Michael Alvarez
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912912467085
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• Date: 01 September 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

66(3) 658 –670

© 2011 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912912467085

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Regular Article

A decade ago, the nation became aware that voting

machines are not simply 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., R. C.

Sinclair et al. 2000; Smith 2002; Wand et al. 2001).

The Florida fiasco resulted in a strong public demand

for improved voting technology. This demand was made

explicit by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002,

which mandated retirement of older voting technologies

and resulted in billions of state and federal dollars being

spent to retire old voting machines. The fiasco also led to

a flurry of new research into the causes of “lost votes”

due to voting technologies.1 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 over- or

undervote for a particular election.)

Yet despite all of this research, at least two significant

questions remain unanswered. First, despite the fact that

American elections are noted for their long ballots, how

voting technology affects residual votes for elections fur-

ther down the ballot, such as for state and local offices or

ballot measures, is still unknown. Second, at the same

time that states and local jurisdictions across the country

have retired their antiquated voting technologies, many

of the same states and localities have seen a surge in vot-

ing by mail, either by liberalizing absentee ballot laws or

mandating vote-by-mail altogether. How this transforma-

tion has affected residual vote rates remains unknown.

The purpose of this paper is to use recent elections in

California as a laboratory to help address these two ques-

tions: (1) whether changes in voting technologies have

the same effects in reducing lost votes in elections other

than for president and (2) whether the rise of voting by

mail has reinforced federal voting technology policy by

lowering the number of lost votes in elections. The

answer to the first question is a qualified “yes.” The

answer to the second question is a qualified “no.”

California provides an apt laboratory for answering

these questions because of its size, length of ballot, use of

various voting technologies, and because of the impor-

tance of its ballot measures. Studying how voting tech-

nologies affect lost votes down the ballot is difficult in

nationwide research because states are highly variable

both in the number of offices that are up for election,

including those on the statewide ballot, and in specifying

the order in which offices appear on the ballot. The num-

ber of statewide offices in California is exceptional,

which allows us to study the down-ballot effects with

some precision. In addition, the general structure of the

ballot is fixed across the state, allowing for local offices

to be sandwiched between the statewide elections at the

top and ballot measures toward the bottom of the ballot.2

Moreover, because of the significant independent

authority of the constitutional officers who are on the

467085PRQXXX10.1177/10659129124670

85Political Research QuarterlyAlvarez et al.

1California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

2Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

Corresponding Author:

R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology, DHSS 228-77,

1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.

Email: rma@hss.caltech.edu

Voting Technology, Vote-by-Mail, and

Residual Votes in California, 1990–2010

R. Michael Alvarez1, Dustin Beckett1, and Charles Stewart, III2

Abstract

We examine 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. In California’s presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of

optical scanning enjoyed a significant improvement in the residual vote rate. We also conduct the first analysis of the

effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the election, increased use of the mail to cast ballots

is robustly associated with a significant rise in the residual vote rate.

Keywords

voting technologies, vote-by-mail, residual votes