Research

In an age of heightened mis- and disinformation, both voters and election officials are pressed with disentangling fact from fiction. Disinformation surrounding elections impacts public perceptions of electoral integrity, particularly among minoritized populations. This paper focuses on disabled voters and their experiences in the 2022 midterm elections. The authors conducted a nationally representative survey of 3,038 eligible voters with 999 self-identifying as disabled. The findings reveal voters with disabilities expressed lower confidence in the accuracy of their votes being counted. Voting by mail instilled greater confidence in voters with disabilities with nearly 12 percent more of them opting for this method. Trust levels varied within disability categories with Democratic respondents with disabilities displaying higher trust in election accuracy. These findings shed light on the relationship among disability, trust, and election methods, emphasizing the need for a nuanced look into inclusive electoral practices.

While the contemporary conversation about trust in U.S. elections focuses on mistrust among white conservatives, we ask whether racial and ethnic minority groups also lack confidence in the integrity of the vote count. Is there an enduring gap along ethnoracial lines over trust in elections and, if so, what determines the magnitude of this gap? Grounding our theory in the literature on race and trust in institutions and elections, we outline hypotheses about the mechanisms of mistrust for minority groups. We use an original national survey as well as data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections from 2012 through 2022. We find that Black and Native Americans have lower levels of trust in elections when compared to white Americans. Asian Americans are not statistically unlike whites in their level of trust, and the trust gap that exists for Latines is partially explainable by demographic characteristics such as education and income. We further demonstrate the profound importance of state voting laws: in states that impose high barriers to accessing the ballot, the gap between white and Black Americans’ trust in elections doubles in size, while in states with the most inclusive voting laws, the racial gap in trust disappears.

​

Awarded Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Best Paper, APSA Annual Meeting 2024

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio—the former Afro-Latino leader of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group—positioned himself as a prominent leader of the January 6 insurrection. Our current understanding of Latine politics, and ethnoracial politics more broadly, would call this a striking paradox. Tarrio’s views highlight that Latines’ view of their place in the ethnoracial hierarchy can vary. We argue that an understudied phenomenon, aspirational status, particularly on ethno-cultural and socioeconomic dimensions, can help us understand variation in Latines’ attitudes and behaviors. While some Latines may adopt a minoritized status and align themselves closer to ethnoracial minorities, others may align themselves closer to whites. We explore how these forms of aspirational status, as well as racial resentment, impact Latines’ political attitudes toward the January 6 insurrection. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), we find that Latines who aspire to a higher ethno-cultural status that approximates whiteness, as well as those who aspire to a higher socioeconomic status and who distance themselves from Black Americans, are more likely to be supportive of the insurrection. This paper contributes to the overall understanding of the heterogeneity of Latine political attitudes and illustrates the role of status in shaping political attitudes among Latines.

Racial justice organizations often operate in contentious and volatile environments with intense resource demands. This reality was especially apparent in 2020, when a global pandemic, social uprisings, and a relatively provocative presidential election drastically altered racial justice organizations' capacity to engage with their constituents. This paper details how we, a team of political science researchers, applied civically engaged research (CER) principles in collaboration with two local racial justice organizations to understand the strategic dynamics of social media outreach, particularly during hostile and challenging times. This paper advances collective and practical understandings of how CER can proceed, particularly as researchers navigate complexities such as defining reciprocity and developing partnerships. Further, we present five main lessons learned throughout our CER process. Overall, we highlight how CER can improve collaborations with vulnerable communities navigating challenging political environments and how CER can better inform academic research on the strategic dynamics of social media outreach.

Counting and certifying election results in the United States can take days and even weeks following election day. These delays are often linked to distrust in elections but does delay cause distrust? What can election officials do to counteract distrust if counting most ballots and announcing results cannot occur on election night? Using a preregistered survey experiment of nearly 10,000 Americans, this article shows that informing voters about longer-than-expected vote counting time induces a large, significant decrease in trust in the election. However, viewing a “prebunking” video in advance of being informed of the delay in results more than makes up for the delay-induced decrease in election trust. Our findings have two important implications. First, unexpected delays in calling elections induce distrust even without misinformation from third parties. Second, providing voters with information about vote counting and the legitimate reasons for delays increases trust and mitigates the distrust induced by delays.

How does context influence individuals’ misinformation about socially marginalized groups? Scholarship has long found that one’s geographical and social environment are important determinants for one’s political attitudes. But how these contexts shape individuals’ levels of misinformation about stigmatized groups remains an open and pressing question, especially given the swift rise of misinformation in recent years. Using three original surveys, we find that individuals who report more contact with a diverse group of individuals were significantly less likely to be misinformed. These findings are particularly pronounced among white Americans. Moreover, contrary to the popular belief that where one lives is a strong determinant of racial attitudes, we also find that partisan and racial context did not meaningfully shape misinformation. These findings shed light on the factors that helps us to understand the misinformation that exists about this sizable share of U.S. society.

Might elite cues affect how we vote? Extant literature focuses on effects of elite cues on candidate evaluation or policy preference, but we know little about how they might affect vote method preferences. Drawing on a large survey of validated Florida voters, including those who regularly vote by mail, we find that retrospective and prospective misreporting of vote method prior to the 2020 General Election was driven primarily by support for Trump. The president’s supporters who were most politically aware were most likely to disavow their own voting by mail and misreport their anticipated vote method in the November election. Understanding the effects—and limits—of elite cues on the politicization of self-reported political behavior has important implications for pollsters and campaigns, election administrators, voters, and the broader democratic electoral process.

In the 2020 United States elections, while Democratic candidate Joe Biden won a decisive victory in the Electoral College over incumbent Republican Donald Trump, Republicans fared comparably better in the congressional elections, gaining 13 seats in the House of Representatives. Why did voters move one branch of government, the presidency, into the blue column while at the same time pushing Congress in the red direction? In this essay, we answer this question by analyzing electoral trends over the past decade in American politics, looking not just at the widely reported Electoral College counts and congressional seat totals but at the underlying vote shares in both branches. We explore these vote shares by congressional districts through a series of maps and analyze how these districts shifted from 2016 to 2020 at both levels of government. Our analysis focuses on the fact that the Republican electoral gains in the 2020 House elections only partially counterbalanced the exceptionally strong Democratic performance in 2018, causing us to consider why Republican candidates fared worse than they did in 2016 and why they were not able to recapture control of Congress. We find that in 2020, it was in key suburban areas and districts with diverse populations that Donald Trump and especially congressional Republicans performed poorly, leaving control of both branches at least temporarily in Democratic hands.

Early-in-person and vote-by-mail ballots accounted for nearly 70 percent of all ballots cast in Florida in the 2016 General Election. While some counties have made it easier for voters to cast their ballots by mail, other election officials have not. Consequently, there is considerable heterogeneity across the state's sixty-seven counties--which has led to considerable differences in the actual usage of convenience voting. This chapter examines the changes in Florida's voting habits in recent elections towards hightened usage of early-in-person and mail in voting.