Attitudes toward Voting Technology, 2012–2019

Charles Stewart and James Dunham

Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2020, vol. 1, issue 2, 159-187

Abstract: The use of computers to record and tabulate votes has been increasingly controversial since the passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002. This paper traces that controversy, exploring whether the elite debate about technology has affected popular attitudes. The empirical focus here is public opinion about voting technologies from 2012 to 2019. We find a consistent status-quo bias in attitudes about computer equipment — users of direct-recording electronic devices (DREs) tend to favor DREs and users of opscans tend to favor opscans. On top of this bias, DREs have tended to be regarded as superior to both opscans and hand-counted paper over the time covered in the paper, although this advantage has recently declined. The decline in the relative preference for DREs had been greatest among survey respondents who pay the greatest attention to news and public affairs.

Keywords: Elections; voting machines; election security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/112.00000011 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlpip:113.00000011

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().