Voter Participation

Cost of Voting in American States In recent years, American state legislatures have been busy changing state laws to either make it more difficult or easier to cast a vote on Election Day. Scholarly work routinely elaborates on one or more of these changes (Ansolabehere and Konisky 2006; Bentele and O'Brien 2013; Biggers and Hanmer 2015; McGhee et al. 2017), seeking to learn the influence these policy variations have on voter turnout and election outcomes (see also Highton 2004; Hershey 2009). However, since James King (1994), in the early 1990s, developed a cost of registering to vote index for the 50 American states, academics have been less inclined to tackle the creation of a composite score to represent the totality of the time and effort associated with casting a vote in each American state.1

|

Kayla Galloway 11/08/2020 ABC News 7

New York City might elect a truly progressive mayor – thanks to ranked-choice voting

by Katrina Vanden Heuvel 18/6/25 The Guardian

With a week left until New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, one might have thought that the former governor Andrew Cuomo would be measuring the drapes at Gracie Mansion. Real estate developers, corporations like Doordash, a smattering of billionaires and even Billy Joel have shoveled cash into his campaign, with his Super Pac spending more money than any other outside force in the city’s political history. This is on top of his entering the race with major name recognition advantage, amounting to a 20- or 30-point lead as recently as May.

Billionaire-funded group driving effort to erode democracy in key US states

Brendan Fischer 6/23/2023 The Guardian

The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based group affiliated with the alliance of conservative thinktanks called the State Policy Network, has played a key role in recent efforts to raise the threshold for passing citizen ballot initiatives from a simple majority to a supermajority, and to make it harder to place measures on the ballot in the first place.

The Atlantic NOVEMBER 6, 2020 Zeynep Tufekci

"And they have at their disposal certain features that can be mobilized: The Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule."
"Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill."

US election: Do postal ballots lead to voting fraud?

By Reality Check team BBC News July 30th 2020 <embed>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53353404</embed>

But these are rare incidents, and the rate of voting fraud overall in the US is between 0.00004% and 0.0009%, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

A voter fraud database collated by Arizona State University between 2000 and 2012, found 491 cases of postal ballot fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes.

And a Washington Post review of the 2016 election found one proven case of postal voting fraud.

Oregon has held postal elections since 2000 and has only reported 14 fraudulent votes attempted by mail.

There are provisions in place to prevent people from impersonating voters or stealing ballots - such as authorities checking that ballots have come from voters' registered address and requiring signatures on envelopes.